The Martha's Vineyard Times
This Was Then: Superintendent of streets
Keeping the streets clean in Vineyard Haven in the early 1940s was no work for slouches.
George Sears and Mike Fontes, Vineyard Haven, circa 1940s. — Courtesy Chris Baer
“You didn’t have tractors, you didn’t have the machinery that you got today,” recalled the late Basil Welch of Vineyard Haven in a 1982 recording. “We had an old 1936 ton-and-a-half dump truck, and we put a plow on it that had to be pumped up and released by hand. We used to go out and plow snow with that thing. You had to put chains on the back wheels, and that was in the days when before you plowed the streets, you shoveled the sidewalks. [The Tisbury Highway Department] used to hire the school kids to shovel the sidewalks away from Main Street, but we used to shovel the sidewalks on Main Street and then plow the snow on Main Street. Then we had to shovel all the snow that was on the street into the trucks and cart it all off by hand. There were no backhoes or tractors to do it like there is today. And the streets were in better shape than they are nowadays, too. They were clean. We used to sand the streets with this ton-and-a-half truck and there were no sand spreaders like they have today, and we used to have two men in the back of that truck with shovels, shoveling sand and spreading it out the back of the trucks.”