In appreciation: Robert ‘Bullet’ Sherwood (1946-2019): A man of many talents

You didn’t have to be a Salisbury native to know who Robert “Bullet” Sherwood was. You only had to be paying just a little bit of attention to realize that there was a big, gruff, bearded guy with piercing blue eyes directing traffic at pretty much every car accident or fire in the area and at every marquee event in town, like the Fall Festival for example. 

If you were really paying attention, maybe you also figured out that he was the man who played Santa Claus every year for the children who lined up at The White Hart after the annual lighting of the tree on the Green. 

And maybe you noticed that he was the man who checked your car every summer at the transfer station to make sure you had an up-to-date sticker. Maybe he also advised you, either politely or forcefully, about what items should go in what bin and he’d also tell you, either politely or forcefully, if you were doing something you shouldn’t be doing, such as tossing construction material in the box on a Sunday (when you shouldn’t).

The nicknames

He drove a battered blue pickup truck. He always wore suspenders. Maybe you’d run into him at the Patco filling station in Lakeville early every morning, congregating with a select small group of local guys who were getting their coffee and catching up on the news before going off to work. 

I remember being secretly thrilled when he would acknowledge me at the filling station checkout line, calling me by one of the many nicknames he’d use to address people that he kind of knew but wasn’t sure of their name. I think sometimes he called me Hey Lady, and I’m pretty sure that sometimes he called me Hey Girlie. I kind of liked that one the best. 

Being acknowledged by Bullet meant, to me, that I’d been accepted as a local. And that I hadn’t committed any egregious transgressions that might have made Bullet put me on his mental list of people who didn’t deserve a friendly hello and who maybe got a nickname.

The genesis of his own nickname seems to be in dispute. There’s one account on Facebook indicating that Bullet was a slow runner while playing baseball; the nickname was meant to be ironic. I asked him about a year ago where the name came from and I didn’t write it down at the time (that’s a lesson to always write down important information right away). He confirmed that the handle came from a baseball game; and that it had something to do with his speed. That’s all I can remember. Other stories say he was super fast; there are also versions that say he threw a really fast ball. Who knows.

The defender

His nickname for one of my reporters was Bean Pole. Affectionately. Cordelia Schiller was my summer intern years ago, and I shared her one year with the Salisbury youth jobs program. They assigned her to the transfer station, where she painted (freehand, while lying on a foam mattress on the ground) the transfer station mural on the concrete partition as you enter the station. Bullet is on it.

“None of the rest of us is on there,” noted Transfer Station Manager Brian Bartram. He didn’t mind that; it’s just that he knew that Bullet was special to Cordelia (who by the way is now a reporter for The Lakeville Journal).

Bartram had commented, while we were talking about Cordelia, that she and Bullet both were very intelligent and that Bullet used to love to talk to her and share Lore. That was probably a side of Bullet that most people didn’t see.

“He was an incredibly smart man,” Bartram said, “and he had a great memory for numbers, history, details.”

Of Cordelia, who has a waif-like quality, I said I bet she felt very safe around him.

“Oh, I think if anyone had given her a hard time, Bullet would have torn them apart,” Bartram said.

Cordelia agreed wholeheartedly when told that story, and said that she found Bullet “a comforting person to be around.”When she first arrived for her job at the transfer station at the age of about 15, she said, “I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do, and it was my first job. I felt really awkward.”

Bullet decided that she would spend the summer sitting with him in the sticker booth at the entrance to the station, checking to be sure people had their permits. She would go out and paste the sticker to the cars after the proper paperwork was presented. 

As they sat in the booth together, she said, he would talk to her about this and that and always tell her how smart she was and that she would be a great success in life. When she decided she wanted to paint the mural on the concrete barrier, “The first person I told was Bullet. I had done a drawing of his pickup truck, so he went in to Brian and advocated for me and said I was a good artist so he should let me do the mural.

“I didn’t realize it at the time but now I know: I was really lucky it was Bullet I worked with.”

The language barrier

People who encountered  Bullet at the sticker booth learned that he was a guy who had a strong sense of right and wrong and an exceptional ability to get other people to behave in a civil and polite fashion — even when they didn’t want to. 

Several people I spoke to said, “Bullet had no filter.” Which is not actually true; he had a strong filter and he would hold his tongue and be polite until it became necessary.

Bartram and Matt Murtagh, who also works at the transfer station, recalled a time when someone came in without a sticker and was determined to throw out his trash anyway. Bullet kept politely telling the man that he wasn’t allowed to do that without his permit. 

“And the guy kept pushing back at him and then he started to swear,” Bartram said. “And Bullet said to him, ‘Thank you for crossing the language barrier,’ and then he told him what.”

He followed the rules

Kevin Wiggins grew up in Salisbury and described Bullet as someone whose motto was Have fun and let loose, but he was above all “a law-abiding citizen.”

Bullet respected the rules. Darin Reid, a past chief of the Lakeville Hose Co. and a town crew stalwart, said of Bullet that, “if he was doing fire police duties, it was black and white. He took every instruction 100 percent. If he was told not to let someone through, because the conditions were unsafe or because we needed to be able to get in there and do our jobs, then no one got through. No matter what: You asked, he did it.”

That required interfacing with people who didn’t always understand why, for example, they might have to take an inconvenient detour.

“Bullet would very politely remind people that they weren’t that important, no matter who they were,” Wiggins said. “He would be nice and polite.” But if you kept insisting after he’d told you what you needed to do, then he’d explain it in no uncertain terms.

“Some people got their feelings hurt, but they got the message. He let them know, quickly: There’s a detour and everyone is taking it. No exceptions.”

People who haven’t lived here long might not understand why Bullet was such an important part of life in Salisbury. They might make the mistake of thinking he was just “a character,” with a distinctive look and a distinctive way of speaking. But those who knew him well and those who worked with him knew that he was a wall between the older, small-town ways and a newer way of life that is, perhaps, more self-involved. 

Bullet didn’t grow up in Salisbury, so it wasn’t as though he was defending the only way of life that he knew. He grew up in Bridgeport, Conn., and came to Salisbury after finishing Catholic school in the big city. 

St. Mary Catholic Church

Elyse Harney recalled that Bullet remained a faithful parishioner of St. Mary Church in Lakeville all his life. 

“St. Mary has been through such turmoil in recent years but Bullet was always faithful and there, no matter what,” she said. 

“He and my husband, John, would always stand at the back of the church and you could hear the two of them laughing together over something or other.

“And whenever I would bring in one of my little grandchildren, no matter where they were in the Mass, Bullet would greet them with his imitation of Donald Duck, which was quite good.”

Bullet did more than just show up on Sunday. He and his sons also did all the exterior maintenance work at the church, Harney said, and that continued no matter who was the head of the church at any given time. 

“It was the church that was important, not just the people. And Bullet was very much a part of that.”

Military service 

He was also an Army veteran, who took part in Memorial Day and Veterans Day ceremonies. His last Memorial Day was this year. He was honored by the town for all his service; after the ceremony was over his car was mobbed by well-wishers. He died, from cancer, a few days later. 

Perhaps it was his religious background that made him so community oriented. Everyone who knew him describes him as infinitely kind and generous to anyone who respected the rules and behaved in a civil manner.

“Bullet would give you the shirt off his back,” Bartram said. “But if you tried to take the shirt off his back, he’d knock you down.”

Perhaps it was his Army training that made him such a stickler for following the rules.

But probably it’s just that he was that kind of guy because, certainly, everyone who described him said he was a man who was 100% percent pure Bullet. 

Kind and generous

Bullet was also, it must be noted, fun and joyful in his way. He was a wonderful Santa Claus, for example, which is not a job for the joyless. Mark Niedhammer, The Lakeville Journal’s classified ads manager, recalled that there was one Christmas when his stepdaughter was sick and couldn’t make it to The White Hart. 

“When Bullet heard that, he came over to the house” so she could tell Santa her holiday wish list, he said.

Above all, when people recall Bullet, they talk about his kindness and his generosity, the “heart of gold” behind a gruff exterior. 

“Bullet lived life his way and there aren’t that many people who do that,” Reid said. “I used to think he was one in a million but now I think he was actually one in a billion. Nobody will ever replace him.”

Bartram agreed, saying, “Anyone can be replaced. But …” He paused. “No.”

We all need to step up

And that’s not just because Bullet was sui generis; it’s because of what Bullet gave to the community and to the people around him, whether he knew them and loved them or not. 

“In the last month or so, we’ve lost Jack Murtagh, Lauren Tyler, George Holst-Grubbe and now Bullet,” Bartram said. “So what are you, the person reading this article, going to do to step up to the plate? We’ve lost four people who’ve done so much for their towns. They set the example. Think about what you can do to make this a better place. 

“People who come here and are transient, who only come for five or 10 years, they don’t get that. It’s not about what services the town can provide for you; you have to think about what you can do to help.

“Bullet is a giant loss. He joins the giant loss we’ve already had in the last month or so. Now people need to figure out what they can do. Join the garden club. Be a volunteer with the ambulance squad or the hose company. What can you do to make things better in our area?”

If nothing else, perhaps we can all try a little harder to follow the rules. Be kind. Help others. Don’t argue with the fire police, don’t try and break the rules at the transfer station. Bullet won’t be there any longer to help you do the right thing; strive to do it on your own. 

Curtis Rand, the first selectman of Salisbury, pointed out that Bullet didn’t just do the right thing; he also showed others the way, most of all his own family.

“Bullet Sherwood was a one-of-a-kind, loyal, true and unreconstructed man who extended his generous spirit to countless people from all walks of life,” Rand said. “He will be sorely missed but his family will fill these big shoes as they have already been doing.”

Let’s all help.