John Daigle’s from Aroostook County where some of his family worked in the paper mills, some in the woods. When work dried up, his folks moved to Augusta where his father found jobs in construction. They moved a lot, from Farmington to Berwick to Southwest Harbor. They landed in Waldoboro when John was 15. In John’s family, if you were big enough to be a kid, you were big enough to work. So at 16, John applied for a summer job at the Public Works Department which led to another part-time job plowing roads in the winter. He stayed on, full-time when high school ended. After 45 years, John has worked every job in the department. For the last 30, John has served as Waldoboro’s Public Works Director, a department responsible for Waldoboro’s roads, parks, and transfer station. But it’s a young person’s job, he says, and lately he’s been thinking about retiring. At home, with his wife by his side, he keeps bees. He finds it calming with the knowledge that if you treat the bees well, they will provide for you.
A great day is after a big snowstorm when the sun comes up and there’s snow everywhere. It’s when you don’t have any breakdowns. When the boys are on their A-game. When everything is clicking together so that, when they’re finished and the trucks are coming in one after another, it’s so smooth you can almost set your clock by them. When everything goes good, the job is easy.
We have a saying in Public Works: “We’re not that bright because we treat everybody the same, no matter who you are.” Whether you’re a Selectman or Town Manager or any other politician, we treat everybody the same. If we plow somebody in and pack them with a wall of snow, we go in and make an opening for them. Waldoboro is pretty good this way. Yup. The food bank up here – we plow the road beside it, and we maintain the road beside it. If somebody’s gone off on the road but they’re not hurt with no damage to the vehicle, we’ll turn around and pull them out. Waldoboro is a full-service town. A lot of other towns aren’t. We stop if somebody needs a boost. We replace a lot of the mailboxes we hit. We don’t replace them all, but we do some. Most places don’t replace any.
People think we have special trucks. We don’t. We’ve just learned how to drive in any weather — we go slow and keep it on the road. Years ago, when I was starting, people bought snow tires. And people expected to slow down. Now, everybody’s in a hurry. We’ll see cars passing us as we’re going along, plowing and sanding, and then, a little bit up the road, they’re off the road. People forget. This is Maine.
Had one of our drivers coming on Depot Street. He backed up on Route 1 and was ready to turn back in. So he dropped his plow and started off. Well, there was this lady who tried to sneak in. But he didn’t know that. He was went along and dropped his wing. Needless to say, it landed on top of her car hood. Well, those trucks make a lot of noise. But he kept hearing something beep. So he stopped and got out to see what was up. He’d been dragging her car along the road all along. And she’d been blowing her horn and everything else. He picked up his wing and checked to see if she was okay. “If you hadn’t tried to go by me, this wouldn’t have happened,” he told her. Well, she was pretty upset so he told her to follow him up to the Depot. So she did. And when she saw me, ohhh. She lit up one side of me and down the other. And that driver, he made sure he kept on plowing, yup.
Dirt roads used to be a wicked problem. Especially in mud season when the temperatures come up real quick so the top part of the road is thawed but underneath it’s frozen, and the mud just keeps getting thicker and thicker. Sometimes it was so bad we couldn’t get a truck or ambulance through. So, many years ago we started rebuilding the dirt roads, and we’ve done most now. Widened some. Trimmed trees, too.
Right now, we’re doing spring clean-up so we’re doing the sweeping. Getting ready for painting lines. The boys have been ditching, checking culverts. We’re starting on grading roads. Fixing equipment. Then there’s the basic mowing. Summer, we will be cutting trees back and hot topping. Cutting the shoulders and putting in new culverts. And when it’s done, the boys can turn around and say, “I did that.” It’s pretty rewarding. That’s why I think morale is good.
This is a job for anyone who likes to do mechanic work, likes to weld, likes to get dirty, likes to run equipment, and likes to learn. I really push the learning. I have a young fellow, been here for 22 years. Well, one day I had a sander that needed to have the rust cut off and be re-planed. It was a welding job. He said he didn’t know how to weld. I said, “Well, I’ll show you, but then you got to do it.” He really caught on. Now he’s a better welder than I am, and I’m a certified welder.
I got one guy who’s a really good mechanic. Another is a carpenter because we do carpentry work sometimes. Each one of the guys brings something to the table. I like that. We do everything in-house. If we need something, they’ll build it. One year they made a power broom – a broom that goes in front of the one-ton. Nowadays you can buy them. Back then, they didn’t exist. So, we built ours. I told the boys, “You guys should have patented it. Yup.”
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