Matters of Opinion May 2026: How I became a selectman

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On almost every corner of every street this week, in every town on the Cape, you couldn’t miss the signs of people running for Selectmen. Mostly we don’t have a clue who these folks are…any more than anyone knew me when I ran.

I was a most unlikely candidate to run for Selectman in an old Cape Cod town. A former hippie kid from New York, an anti-war activist from the people’s republic of Cambridge, a writer with a small reputation that came by way of a frankly sexual novel, recently married to a notorious feminist poet.

I had no real reason to run and certainly no prospect of winning.

Why didn’t I have a chance at selectboard?

For one thing I had just moved to town and hardly knew anyone at all. I didn’t have kids in the schools. I didn’t have a real job. I didn’t have a boat or even belong to Alcoholics Anonymous. There was just no way to meet people. At the time I was struggling with my second novel, spending my days alone at the computer and going to the library at night.

But the Selectmen met at the library and one night, wandering into a meeting, I got hooked, I became a regular, because the stories I spent all day making up, just couldn’t compare to what was unfolding in front of my eyes.

What happens at small town selectboard meetings?

There was most the miserable misanthropic hermit in town demanding a guarantee that if she collapsed in her kitchen only chosen members of the rescue squad, whose names she would tape to her door, would be granted permission to resuscitate her.

There was the man indignant about his arrest for shooting his friend in the foot when the friend insisted he didn’t mind being shot. And the mother who refused to come down from a tree on the town green because her children were told by the police not to climb it. I became a regular. You could not make this stuff up.

What is the lure of a fresh young face?

My presence did not go unnoticed. I was considered a fresh young face. The fact that I washed it and shaved it was a big plus, as was the fact that nobody could actually place it. An election was approaching and in due course I was summoned to a meeting of the town’s power brokers, a dozen retired businessmen in their eighties whose politics were so wildly dissimilar that they would never remain in the same room if they weren’t too deaf to hear what each other was saying.

I told them I was flattered but there was no way I could run. I had no organization, no base of support, no grasp of the issues, no vision, and no knowledge of town government.

They said, No problem! Everybody else they had asked refused.

How many candidates run?

I was one of five candidates in a race for two open seats, the serious competition a local Sunday school teacher and a native born oyster man from one of the oldest families in town. My sole advantage was the fact that the town had recently had a huge influx of suburban retirees. Dismissed as wash-ashores, insulted at town meeting, resented by the town folk, they embraced me as a heart-warming reminder of home, the frizzy-haired Jewish kid who smoked pot with their daughters in the basement.

As to the issues, I was advised to avoid them and concentrate on the one strength that differentiated me from the other candidates, an unctuous desperation to be liked.

What do people are about in local elections?

And it turned out, no one actually cared what I thought, only that I shut up and listened to what they thought, a strategy antithetical to the Sunday School teacher’s, who viewed every question as a rare opportunity to converse with someone over ten years-old and whose every answer sounded like a warning that Jesus was watching to see if you washed your hands after using the potty.

The oysterman was armed with statistics about the plague of all the new people who had moved into town, but this only pissed off all the new people who had moved into town, while the attitude of the locals was summed up by one old timer who said, “All that may be, but your family was a bunch of idiots and the apple don’t fall far from the tree.”

In short order I was elected with a large plurality proving that anyone can be elected at any time to any position. Be scared people. Be very, very scared.

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Ira Wood hosts The Lowdown, a weekly interview program on  WOMR-FM  featuring authors, politicians, artists, and scientists, as well as cops, addicts, and fishermen. His guests have included the famous, the infamous, and the eccentric, as well as dedicated men and women who work to make the Cape and the world a better place. He served four terms on the Wellfleet Board of Selectmen.