City mentioned on ABC drama

Every once in awhile, Nashua serves as a reference point or even a setting in television shows and movies.

It happened again recently on the ABC-TV show “Combat Hospital.”

The show depicts life at a military hospital in Afghanistan. And according to Nashua resident Brenda Brown, on Tuesday night, a fictional Afghan interpreter talked about all the places in the world he would like to visit.

Tops on the character’s list, Brown said, was Nashua. He met, online, a girl from there.

Brown wondered why “they chose Nashua, NH, of all the places in the world?” she wrote in an email. “That was cool to hear that.”

Others had the same feeling hearing Matt Damon’s character in “Good Will Hunting” tell his friend and therapist, played by Robin Williams, where he wanted to lead a second life.

“I wanna move up to Nashua. Get a nice little spread. Get some sheep and tend to them,” the titular character Will Hunting said.

Characters on the celebrated TV series “The West Wing” mentioned and visited Nashua and its surrounding towns several times for presidential primaries.

In fact, a turning point in future President Jed Bartlet’s first campaign is a talk he had with several voters at a VFW hall in Nashua. (It wasn’t either one of the city’s two VFW posts, on Quincy Street and Daniel Webster Highway, but just a sound set in California.)

Shown in flashback scenes after Bartlet had been elected, he speaks truthfully to a dairy farmer about the New England Dairy Farming Compact.

Bartlet admits to the farmer that he “had screwed him” by vetoing the compact when he served as New Hampshire governor.

Unfortunately, the farmer didn’t mention where he toiled the land. Was it Litchfield?

Sporting advertising

Have the city’s buses caught your eye?

The city has long placed advertisements on its bus fleet. But over the past month, ads promoting the grand opening of Dick’s Sporting Goods at the Pheasant Lane Mall have enhanced the look of several buses.

The bold green and white ads give the buses a fresh look, by most objective measures.

Four buses have a full “wrap” design around the back, and three buses feature side “wraps” of the ad according to city Transportation Department Manager Mark Sousa.

Dick’s Sporting Goods had a $5,900 contract for a month, leading into its Aug. 5 store opening and for several weeks after, Sousa said. The city receives 70 percent of the revenue, and its ad agency gets a 30 percent cut, he said.

Sousa hopes the success of the Dick’s ads spurs similar promotions on the buses.

Another mall exit

Speaking of malls, area planners have received grant money that will finance a study on a potential ramp on Exit 36 of Route 3 southbound in Tyngsborough, Mass.

Such an exit would allow New Hampshire commuters to avoid traveling Spit Brook Road and Daniel Webster Highway if they want to directly access the Pheasant Lane Mall and other businesses in that end of south Nashua and Tyngsborough.

The study comes as a result of the U.S. Department of Transportation recently awarding several grants to New Hampshire highway projects.

Nashua Regional Planning Commission will receive $195,000 to study the development of the southbound exit, according to U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s office.

Making room for graves

Edgewood Cemetery underwent a transformation this past week.

About 25,000 square feet of trees and other landscape were cleared to accommodate future plots, said the cemetery’s superintendent Jeff Snow.

Work started Aug. 12 and had mostly wrapped up by Thursday, Snow said. “All the trees are gone, and the dirt, too,” he said. All that had remained that afternoon was one tree that needed removal by a bucket truck, and the bare ground needed to be graded, he said.

The cemetery hasn’t yet determined how many graves will be added with the open space, Snow said.

Edgewood, located off Amherst Street, is Nashua’s second largest, city-owned cemetery at 32 acres. Woodlawn Cemetery, on Kinsley Street, is the largest at 40 acres.

The city owns four other non-sectarian cemeteries: Evergreen, Gilson, Hillside and Old South.

Open the doors

As the $1 million restoration of the Hunt Building continues, an effort is under way to raise money for work that couldn’t be financed by the city.

The Friends of the Hunt Memorial Building have embarked on a $50,000 fundraising campaign to restore the oak doors at the front of the building.

The carved doors sit between the foyer and lobby. During the 1970s, when the Hunt Building was a school district office – one of the many uses of the building during the past 109 years – and the doors were not preserved, according to the organization.

Half of each door was repositioned to be outdoors in the elements, with the other halves inside the foyer. A modern set of glass doors was installed between the old doors.

The architect, Cram and Ferguson, wants to restore the old entrance and the full use of the oak doors.

City officials have said that architectural costs had to belatedly come out of the $1 million set aside for the Hunt’s restoration, so the door work had to be chopped off the to-do list. The Friends of the Hunt Memorial Building have thus embarked on the fundraising campaign.

To help, Amherst artist Joyce Kingman will sell prints of her “Winter Holiday Stroll” watercolor that features the Hunt Building, with a portion of the proceeds going to the doors fund.

For more information, call the Friends of the Hunt Memorial Building at 883-8093.

Meeting time

It’s another week and another round of public meetings in the city of Nashua.

For a full list, check out this column online at NashuaTelegraph.com

Nashua … From the Inside was compiled by staff writer Albert McKeon.