Inside and Out Content Block 7

Chick’s Market was the place people came for “a smile and a story” and the best grinders in town. As mayor of Winooski from 1963 to 1969, Edmund G. “Chick” Dupont juggled customer and constituent care from behind the cash register. 

Chick was honest, pragmatic, and charismatic, qualities that served him well as a businessman and politician. Constrained by long hours at the market, he conducted city and Democratic Party business from the store.

All day, he listened to the questions and concerns of his constituent customers. His politics, rooted in traditional French Canadian values of family, church, and community, emphasized public participation and transparency in government.  

Sewer and street projects, fire protection, health insurance for city employees—Chick tended to the typical business of small city government. In his last term as mayor in the late 1960s, he was instrumental in the inclusion of Winooski in the Model Cities Program, which funneled federal funds to the city for social programs and renewal of deteriorating neighborhood buildings and infrastructure.