Profile The People's Mayor

CAMBRIDGE Mayor Al Vellucci has proposed more imaginative legislation for overhauling Harvard than any student radical. In 1956, he drafted a bill to make Harvard secede from the nation and to crown Nathan Pusey as King. As a City Councillor in the early 1960's, he got the Council to pass a bill to take Straus, Lehman, and Massachusetts Halls by eminent domain, in order to widen Harvard Square streets. He also sponsored a bill to turn Harvard Yard into a bus and taxi terminal, a suggestion which lost by a four-to-five vote. Vellucci said he would compromise for the fifth crucial vote by calling the site the John Harvard Bus and Taxi Terminal. His single resolution which received much enthusiastic student support would have made the Lampoon building a public urinal.

At times, Vellucci's ideas have more shades of ultra-conservatism than of humor. This Fall, he proposed that Cambridge pay $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of major drug suppliers and $1000 for similar dope on street pushers. "We're going back to the early 1800's, when bounties were placed on people breaking the law," he declared at a press conference. "We're going to create an army of bounty hunters." Less well known is the fact that when the bill was first brought before the Council for discussion, Vellucci himself referred it to committee.

WHEN I approached Vellucci for a personal interview shortly after his Council episode, I ended up with an invitation to dinner at his house and a three-and-one-half hour car tour of Cambridge. After feeding me plenty of Italian macaroni and meatballs, we began our ride by crisscrossing the streets of East Cambridge, Vellucci's home territory. He drives a Chevrolet himself, instead of using a chauffeured Cadillac which the City traditionally provides its mayors. As we drove around with WRKO playing softly in the background, Vellucci explained two differences between East Cambridge and Harvard Square. First, the East Cambridge neighborhood is tight-knit: it is not unusual for next-door neighbors to be blood relatives. Second, perhaps because of the close family units, the East Cambridge neighborhood is quiet, with few people in the street. "Kids stay inside doing their homework and the father sits at the head of the table like a boss in command," Vellucci said. "The only pot these kids fool around with is a pot of spaghetti."

As we continued riding around, Vellucci unfolded as a multi-dimensional man, instead of being simply the Councillor who fantasizes about castrating John Harvard. In 1910, five years before Vellucci was born, his parents immigrated to East Cambridge from Italy. His father worked in the Squire Meat Company's factory. "We lived in a company row house and bought at the company store," he said. Vellucci is very sensitive about the lack of formal education he has had. "I went to the Thorndike-Wellington grammar school through seventh grade, PERIOD! You got a big period there?

"As a little kid, I used to sell newspapers around East Cambridge-the Daily Record -and met a lot of politicians. I always wanted to be somebody. I always wanted to do something," he said. At age 14, Vellucci began working for the Harvard Square office of Western Union, delivering telegrams throughout the Harvard community. At age 16, he went into the coal delivery business and, in two years, built up a fleet of coal trucks. In 1933, the Depression and the general conversion from coal to oil forced Vellucci out of business. Then 18 years later, he began working for the Federal government's surplus food program in East and North Cambridge. "That's when I started to learn about poor people," Vellucci said. "Their problems, their heartaches, the agony the poor go through. I set up free soup kitchens for poor strikers and became well known."

When the U. S. entered World War II, Vellucci went to work for the Watertown Arsenal. In 1944, the Army drafted him but separated him a year later because he had five children (he now has eight). Vellucci returned home and opened an Italian restaurant on Warren Street in East Cambridge. In 1950, Vellucci began working for the Department of Corporations and Taxation, helping people to complete their tax returns. It's a job which he still holds 371/2 hours each week, in addition to filling the Cambridge mayoralty, a post that pays $7500 annually.

Vellucci's political career dates back to his 21st birthday, when he ran as an independent Democrat against a slate for the Democratic City Committee. He knocked an incumbent off the slate and won a seat, which entitled him to be a delegate to that year's Democratic State Convention. There followed a long gap in his political career, which reopened in 1950 with his election to the Cambridge School Committee. He served on the Committee four years and then ran for the City Council, where he has served for 16 years. The nine-man Council elects a mayor from its own membership; this is Vellucci's first two-year term as mayor.

HE PICTURES himself as a dedicated man fighting hard for his constituents. Vellucci has open office hours in City Hall every Monday afternoon, before the weekly Council meetings on Monday nights. Because of his work for laborers, the United Packing House Workers of America made Vellucci its only honorary life member. He showed me a recently awarded plack from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and listed many other awards he has won. "The only thing I don't have is an honorary degree from Harvard University," he said. "Harvard University only recognizes outstanding individuals throughout the world in the arts, science, culture, and education. They don't recognize people in their own community who are doing things. Why isn't a guy who is working hard in Cambridge as important as a guy from Belgium?"

The Mayor admitted that many of his proposals are preposterous, but he said that their intent is serious. "What I'm trying to do is to arouse the people to the problems in the cities. SDS is opposed to Harvard expansion-I'm opposed to Harvard expansion. They want the University to get involved in the community-I've advocated that for 25 years." As we drove around M. I. T., Vellucci said, "My war on Harvard to pave the Yard and turn it into a parking lot produced THIS"-and he smiled proudly as he pointed to one of M. I. T.'s three mammoth parking lots. He reminded me that M. I. T. has built three parking lots in the time it took Harvard to construct one.

Vellucci said that he intended his bounty-oriented drug proposal as nothing more than a mechanism to get City departments and citizens to think more carefully about the drug problem in Cambridge. For this purpose, he was not reluctant to take on the image of a conservative. "I don't have to hold Dr. Pusey's hand, and I don't have to represent the professors, because they vote for the intellectuals-for the Galbraiths and the Schlesingers. I will cater to the constituency that I represent, and that's the working class of Cambridge," he said. "It wasn't the working class of Cambridge that created the drug problem. It was the upper middle class. It [this proposal] also spells votes in the ballot box on election day."

"I campaign on a slogan 'the people's councillor,'" Vellucci said. "I never voted against a housing project. I fought to bring the milk price down to one cent per bottle." In 1964, "we destroyed the urban renewal program. Six million dollars went down the drain because we opposed the Federal bulldozer. With the same breath, we proposed a resolution to create the Wellington-Harrison Citizens Committee," to give the local residents the opportunity to plan urban renewal projects. One fight Vellucci did lose, however, was to keep NASA out of Cambridge. The prediction he made about NASA in 1963 has come true: "I said in a 1963 Time magazine article that we would go to the moon before NASA was completed, and that the government would have no more need for NASA in Cambridge. It drove out 93 small industries."

In the immediate future, Vellucci plans to press his proposal for Cambridge to build a track or a football field on the land between the North part of the Yard and the Science Center now under construction. He said that, in the past, Harvard has refused to allow Cambridge school children to use Harvard athletic facilities for part of the day. Vellucci suggested that if Harvard is too cramped to let Cambridge use its athletic facilities, the University should at least offer its planning and architectural assistance to the City. "I can make them hop," Vellucci said. "I'm going to keep pushing until Harvard comes down to compromise."