WINDSOR — Fifty years ago this spring, Gov. Deane Davis helped launch the first Green Up Day in Vermont, and the interstates even closed for three hours as volunteers picked up beer cans, cigarette butts, old tires and other debris from the roadsides.
Usually held on the first Saturday in May, Green Up Day as originally planned this year was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, though it is now slated to be held on May 30 instead.
“Green Up Day represents what is so great about Vermont, each of us stepping up to help serve the greater good,” Gov. Phil Scott said at the start of a news conference on Friday that was otherwise devoted to the outbreak. He urged residents some time this month to “take a bag or two with them and help keep the state green in honor of this tradition.”
From the photographs shown here, over the decades it has drawn scores of environmentally conscious volunteers and even filtered into a number of New Hampshire towns in the Upper Valley.
And, at 50, it’s a tradition that is being passed down by generations.
Back in 1994, 12-year-old Nicole Husband dressed up as a soda can to help lead a Green Up Day parade down Main Street in Windsor.
Now a children’s librarian in Montpelier and the mother of two, Nicole Westbom said she does Green Up Day activities with her children, who are homeschooled, and noted that her brother, Zachary Husband, and his family, still play a big role in Windsor cleanup efforts.
“I’m glad that it’s something children are still taking a part of and are active in these days,” Westbom said in a phone interview last week.
Back in May 1987, Peggy Archambault led her four young children on Green Up Day litter patrol along Route 10 in Hanover, where she still lives.
“It was something we did every year. The school usually promoted it,” said Archambault, who noted that some motorists still seem to “think it’s OK to throw or drop things out the window, so we like to keep things cleaned up.”
She also said the annual roadside work was a good way to teach her children about pitching in.
“When you have four kiddos you are always looking for ways to help in the community, so that’s what they did,” she recalled.
In 2011, Valley News photographer Jennifer Hauck caught up with former longtime Hartford Town Manager Ralph Lehman, then in his early 80s, as he shoved bags of trash into the trunk of his car (see photo at vnews.com). The backseat, thanks to his diligent work, was already full.
Lehman, who died in 2016 at age 87, told Hauck he had been picking up trash for more than 40 years for Green Up Day.
And, as always, he had some good advice, too. Lehman said he always used his own car, and not his wife’s, for the job.
Pictures don’t lie — helping out for an hour and collecting trash makes the great outdoors of the Upper Valley look even more beautiful. And it feels good inside, too.
More information on Green Up Day can be found at greenupvermont.org.
John P. Gregg can be reached at jgregg@vnews.com.