When I heard last Friday that Buddy Perkel had died, my heart sank. I thought about the day we first met, nearly 30 years ago.
Teresa and I had just bought our house in Wellfleet. Buddy pulled up in his little roadster and appeared at the front door. “Hello, I’m Buddy Perkel,” he said in his New York accent. “My wife, Marla, and I live down the road. Who are you and what are you doing here?”
He was that rare character who combined genuine curiosity, openness, and good humor with a defiant impatience to get the real story. We saw that again and again over the years in his public service on the Outer Cape and in his dealings with this newspaper. Conversations with Buddy and his occasional letters were always like that first meeting: no time wasted in formalities — just get straight to the point.
Chris Lucy talks about being appointed to the zoning board of appeals in Truro and being instructed by Buddy, who was then the chair, on the board’s role in listening to the applicants who came before it with requests for permits and variances. “He explained it not so much legally but humanly,” said Lucy, “that every applicant should feel they were heard.”
Once the facts were on the table, though, Buddy could be stern and unforgiving. He had no patience for obfuscation or hypocrisy, and he did not mince words.
His last letter to the editor in the Independent, published in July 2023, was about the Rule of Holes: “If you find yourself in an embarrassing hole, stop digging,” he wrote — and it was aimed squarely at the Truro Select Board and town counsel, whose legal advice on the board’s investigation of an anonymous complaint Buddy dismissed as “nonsense.”
We were certainly not immune to his critical assessments. Buddy was outraged by the mismanagement of Wellfleet’s finances that was covered up by the administration and the town’s auditors for at least a year and perhaps much longer and was finally exposed by this newspaper in 2021. He insisted that the town should pursue a malpractice claim against the auditors and that the district attorney should be investigating possible crimes. He didn’t think the Independent’s editor was taking the situation seriously enough, and he said so in a May 2022 letter.
“One must remember that sometimes very good people do very bad things,” he wrote. Perhaps he was thinking of his days as a lawyer rooting out corruption in the New York City Police Dept.
In an op-ed titled “What Wellfleet Deserved,” published just one year ago, Buddy condemned the select board for being “singularly passive” in addressing the financial mess. Sadly, no one has yet stepped up to name the real causes of Wellfleet’s government sickness and root them out. As a result, the revolving door at town hall continues to spin.
As town meeting and town election season proceeds in this frigid spring, I hope people will be hearing Buddy’s words in their minds: “What are you doing here?”
