By George P. Hassett

The city’s first Italian-American alderman-at-large was the guest at the Aug. 17 contributors meeting for The Somerville News. Vinny LoPresti was an alderman from 1971 until 1975 and garnered the most votes of any at-large candidate in the city’s history, he said.

“Back then you had more people running for office and more people involved,” he said. “These days, I hear, there aren’t even primaries.”

LoPresti was one of 29 candidates in 1971, he said.

LoPresti said he is proud of the time he spent as an elected official and said his greatest accomplishments were getting a string of new schools built and spearheading the city’s first anti-drug program. He helped lead the effort to build schools in Wards 1, 2, 4 and 7, he said.

“When I first became alderman, the schools were deplorable. The roofs leaked. They just had to go,” he said.

A problem community leaders were less likely to address straight on was drug abuse, he said.

“People didn’t want to talk about it. The police thought if we brought it up, it would reflect badly on them, but that is not what it was about. It was a reflection of our entire society not just Somerville,” he said.

Eventually, LoPresti organized the first publicly funded anti-drug program in the city. It consisted of seminars to educate kids on the dangers of drugs and a drop-in center for people struggling with addiction.

To illustrate his point that drugs had reached the city’s youth, LoPresti brought a marijuana cigarette that had been confiscated from a student to a Board of Aldermen meeting.

“I held it up at the meeting to show people that we were dealing with drugs in the community,” he said. “When I was finished, I just left it in there though. I didn’t want to bring it out in the hallway. I could have been arrested myself.”

LoPresti said constituents would sometimes call him with unexpected problems. “There was a woman who asked for my help who said her husband had been beating her up. She said she was too scared to go to the police and needed help from somebody. I wasn’t sure what I could really do but I told her I would help her. So one day I called the guy up and I lied. I told him I was the deputy chief of police and if he kept giving his wife problems he was going to get arrested,” he said.

The unconventional solution worked, he said.

“I saw the woman a few months later and she was thanking me and said I had scared her husband and he had stopped hurting her,” he said.

LoPresti said he has seen the city change dramatically in the three decades since he was an alderman.

“There’s a more professional crowd in the city now, fewer families, fewer children. The silence can be deafening these days,” he said.

And, he said, many people who called the city home for decades have moved to the surrounding suburbs.

‚ÄúI see more Somerville people in Woburn and Stoneham than in Somerville itself these days,‚Äù he said.