Our Story

The Curley family has been plumbing the MetroWest area for more than a century.

It started in 1920, when Richard Jr.’s grandfather founded R.J. Curley Plumbing. Richard Sr. and his two older brothers ran that business together for years, and by the 1960s it was one of the biggest plumbing outfits around — there are pictures of fifteen to twenty Curley trucks lined up in a row.

But Richard Sr. had a dream of his own. For years, he dreamed of a “Shop on Wheels” — a truck stocked and set up like a workshop, so the work could be done right there at the house. Then one day he found it: a 1977 leftover sitting on a lot, a “white elephant” that no one else would touch.

It wasn’t an ordinary truck. It was one of eleven ever built, made to order for the Frye Boot Company. Those trucks were rolling showrooms — they’d drive right into a factory, and workers would step into the back to try on work boots. The back was fitted with leather couches, and the shelves that lined the walls were built to hold boots, not tools.

Richard Sr. looked at a boot showroom with leather couches and shelves full of work boots, and saw a plumbing shop on wheels.

So he went to his brothers and told them about it. They thought he was crazy to even look at it. But he’d made up his mind. As he saw it, the family business had too many people who wanted to run things and not enough who wanted to do the work. He wanted to build something of his own.

So, in 1980, he did.

He tore out the couches and kept the shelves, and turned that boot truck into the original Shop on Wheels — twenty-one feet deep behind the driver’s seat, when a normal box truck runs fourteen to eighteen. It carried twenty-foot lengths of pipe with room to spare, and in the back he built a workshop with a drill press, a grinder, and a vise on a workbench.

Everyone wanted to see that truck. The calls came in faster than Richard Sr. ever expected, and before long the business was running twelve to fourteen hours a day.

From the very first day, the business had a steady hand running it from behind a desk. Richard Sr.’s wife, Charleen, answered the phones, dispatched every call, and handled all of the office work. She was the reason the whole operation ran as smoothly as it did, day in and day out.

If you called the business during any of those busy years, ninety-five times out of a hundred, it was Charleen you talked to — not the guy with the wrench. She never held a plumber’s license, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t a plumber in her own way. After forty years on the other end of that phone, she knew plumbing inside and out. She could listen to a homeowner describe a problem, tell them honestly whether it was an emergency or something that could wait, and give them sound advice before a truck ever left the shop.

She was the voice of the business. Long before there was an app or an online form, there was Charleen — answering the phone, keeping the schedule straight, and making people feel looked after from the very first call. She did it while the trucks were out working twelve and fourteen hours a day, and she kept doing it for decades, until just a few years ago, well into her eighties.

Their son Richard — Richard T. Curley, Jr. — was fourteen when it all began. He spent his afternoons after school, his weekends, and every summer vacation learning the trade, staying on as his father’s apprentice until he graduated in 1984.

Around 1982, his older brother Craig joined the business too, coming in alongside a couple of other apprentices. With Craig on board, the company was able to put four trucks on the road.

After Richard finished school in 1984, he went to work with Craig. He wishes it could have been longer.

Richard couldn’t have asked for two better teachers. His dad was a warehouse of information — more than sixty years in the plumbing trade, and if there was a problem Richard couldn’t figure out, his father had the answer. Craig was gifted in his own way. He was a top-notch plumber who could do both service work and roughing, but roughing is where he truly excelled. When he roughed a house, he could measure a length of pipe by eye — he barely ever reached for a tape measure.

His father always said that if Craig were still alive, he and Richard would have been “a force to contend with” — both of them jacks of all trades who could put their hand to any job.

The family planned for Craig to carry the business forward. He spent months studying for his Massachusetts master plumber’s license, with the idea that he would one day take over for his father. His last big job was roughing in a seven-and-a-half-bathroom house — and he did it all in about three days. For two weeks before the results came, he checked the mailbox every day at lunchtime, waiting for the letter.

In 1988, Craig was killed, struck by a car. He was twenty-nine. The letter — the one telling him he’d passed his master’s test — was sitting in the mailbox that very day. He never got to read it.

After that, Richard Jr. had to go back to that seven-and-a-half-bathroom house and do the finish work — installing every fixture himself. It was the hardest job he ever did. Today that same care goes into every kitchen and bathroom job.

The company went back to one truck — the Shop on Wheels that had started it all.

Richard Sr. kept working too. He worked out in the field until he was seventy-two. In those final years on the road, he rode in the passenger seat as his son’s “apprentice” — the man who’d taught Richard Jr. everything, riding along and helping out whenever he could.

After that, Richard Sr. moved into the office, where he stayed involved in the business well into his later years. He lived to eighty-nine.

Richard Jr. was still an apprentice when Craig died. So he did double schooling — driving into Boston twice a week to earn his journeyman’s license, and returning a few years later for his master’s license. He worked his way up the hard way, not because it was handed to him, but because there was no one else to carry the name forward.

Charleen stayed on the phones through all of it, answering calls until just a few years ago.

Today, Richard T. Curley, Jr. runs the business his father started. The name on the truck is still the same. The promise is still the same: show up when you say you will, do the job right, and be straight about the price — from water heater installation to boiler repair, it’s the same promise his father made.

That’s the story behind Richard T. Curley Plumbing & Heating. Not a franchise. Not a call center. A family — and a name — that has been serving Hudson, Sudbury, Marlborough, and the surrounding MetroWest towns since 1980.