Nashua Motor Express family moves on

We kids thought we were pretty clever back in the day of New Hampshire’s seasonal “scenic” and “photoscenic” license plates, especially when we got to show off to the uninitiated among us. For instance, I might point to a car and declare, “He lives somewhere near Concord,” and await the inevitable, “How do you know?” “See the ‘M’ and ‘E’ on his license plate? That means Merrimack County, where Concord is,” I’d proudly submit. The wheels would start to turn. But I’d usually interrupt: “Yep, that’s why we see so many ‘H’s,’ ‘I’s’ and ‘L’s’ around here … get it? Hillsborough County?” But county designations aside, it’s a particular vanity plate that I’ve been thinking a lot about this week, one that is so dyed-in-the-wool Nashua that anyone older than 50 who doesn’t recognize it instantly isn’t a true Nashuan. That would be “NMX,” a loose acronym for the Juris family’s Nashua Motor Express, whose executive and sales cars’ plates all bore the three letters followed by a dash and its own number. The news this week that the venerable trucking firm, equal parts family-run and family-oriented since Greek immigrant Philip Michael began shuttling beef to Boston in 1922, is taking a whole new direction brought to mind not only those classic NMX plates, but also fond memories of one of 20th-century Nashua’s most active and philanthropic families. Nancy and Diana Juris were in grade school when their parents, George and Alpy Juris, moved Nashua Motor Express from Vine Street out to the hinterlands of Nashua – “the Milford Road” – where they put up a brand new building in the midst of chicken coops and henhouses. “There was Charron’s, Berthiaume’s and us,” Nancy Juris, now Nancy Pappo, said of their closest neighbors, both of which were poultry farms. “We had about 3 acres. … It was just a little, two-lane road,” she said of Amherst Street, then alternately called Amherst Road and Milford Road. Pappo, who was 7 when her father opened the new, sprawling facility in spring 1960, remembers skipping through the oak trees that lined Amherst Street to visit kindly Mrs.