Reliable Market’s shoppers in Oak Bluffs all know Helen Pacheco. The sprightly, bright-eyed, white-haired doyenne of the Circuit Avenue family food store still comes to work daily at age ninety. When she works the register, her trademark white cotton gloves protect her hands. She hasn’t had a vacation for fifty-eight years – and doesn’t plan on taking one either.
“My father had a grocery business, so I think I was meant to stay in it,” Helen says. She grew up with eleven brothers and sisters in a Portuguese-American family from Newport, and met her future husband, Armando “Ed” Pacheco, there.
But Helen waited until age thirty-one to consider marriage to the high-school soccer hero. “My mind wasn’t on it,” she explains. After Ed, a salesman for Coca-Cola, transferred to New Haven, they married there. It was 1945. By 1947, Pacheco elected to go out on his own. He had a New Bedford friend, Irving Kligler, who was moving to Martha’s Vineyard to start a fruit store, and decided to join him there. Helen wanted to know what he had in mind.
“He worked for him [Kligler], then opened this business,” Helen explains. Pacheco promised Helen they would sell out if they got themselves in debt. In fifty-eight years that has never happened.
Helen fell in love with Martha’s Vineyard right away. “You do,” she says. “I feel it’s much like Newport. People are so likeable and friendly; it just keeps you going.”
Reliable has been serving Island customers on Circuit Avenue since 1947 – first from the building where Basics, a clothing store, now makes its home, and at its present location farther down the street since 1960.
“When we came, there were no sidewalks on Circuit Avenue,” Helen says. The Pachecos lived in an apartment over the Edgartown National Bank, when it was on Circuit Avenue, until the family home at 27 Narragansett Avenue was built. Not far from Ocean Park, it’s a five-minute walk to the store.
In the days before giant supermarkets, Oak Bluffs had five other grocery stores, despite a much smaller population – A&P at Pomodoro Pizzeria; First National at Martha’s Vineyard Insurance; Red and White at Benito’s Hair Styling, Pioneer at Glimpse of Tibet, and Central Market at Laughing Bear.
It didn’t take long to start a Pacheco family dynasty on the Vineyard. Bob, with striking dark eyes and hair, was born the same year as the store and now manages it. He’s built a reputation for friendliness, jokes, and excellent cuts of meat.
In 1965, Ed’s death from a brain tumor put Helen in charge. With assistance from Irving Kligler, eighteen-year-old Bob went to meat-cutting school and joined the family business. Helen’s sister Mary Pinto came from Newport, and her brother-in-law Gil, who had built and run the Moby Dick Motel on Route 28, helped out. Reliable continued to thrive as Oak Bluffs’s
grocery chains fell by the wayside.
Next to arrive was Donna Day, Bob’s future wife. A nurse who grew up in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Donna was working in Greenwich, Connecticut, when she came to the Island on a bus tour of New England. She liked the Vineyard so much she came back. Employed at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital doing cardiac care, Donna went into Reliable to buy hamburger, and romance followed her out.
Donna and Bob married in 1973, had Jen in 1974, and Eddie in 1976. In 1983, Donna began working at the store. Now she and Jen, a 1995 graduate of Salve Regina University in Newport, handle Reliable’s bookkeeping, among other duties. Named after his grandfather, Eddie started work in the store at thirteen. In 1998 he earned a degree in business management from Bryant College in Smithfield, Rhode Island, and went to work at Reliable, learning the meat-cutting business from his dad. Like his dad, Eddie married an off-Island girl; Erin Kelly Pacheco teaches at the Oak Bluffs School.
With the birth of Kaitlyn last year, Jen and her husband Geoffrey Freeman, an airport operations supervisor, started the fourth generation of Pachecos on the Island. Freeman was a senior at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School when Jen was a freshman.
Jen has worked at Reliable since she was tall enough to see over the counter. She hung around the store after school, putting away carts, bagging groceries, and going on the payroll at fourteen. When she was in college, Jen would walk into the local grocery and smile. “It reminded me of home,” she says. “I can’t yell at my bosses, and I can’t get fired, but I can’t quit either,” Jen says. Her mom takes care of Kaitlyn three days a week so that Jen can do the bookkeeping or help out at the deli counter.
On Sundays the whole family gets together for dinner. “That’s when we talk about everything,” Jen says. “We stay in our separate areas of the business – that’s what keeps the family harmony. We’re united in the same cause.”
“We’re a close family,” her brother Eddie says. “We’ve been able to run a family business for almost sixty years
now. That takes a lot of sacrifice.” He thinks the store has remained successful because it has always strived to put out the freshest products at the lowest prices possible and does things a bigger store can’t, such as knowing customers’ names and their families.
The generations have learned to work together. “I’m old school, they’re new school,” Bob says about working with his children. “You can’t be afraid to listen to their ideas.” Thanks to their input, Reliable stopped unloading stock by hand and does it in half the time with a freight lift. Jen convinced her dad to put in a scanning system and reconfigure the front of the store for smoother traffic flow.
Bob works in the store from 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., six days a week, with little time to do anything else but eat and sleep. “I like to come in early,” he says. “It’s a quiet time of day and it kind of gives you a good start.”
Despite the hours, he has no plans to retire. At fifty-seven, he says, “I’m much too young. I’m having too much fun here. If you really love what you’re doing, it’s not work. Besides, how am I going to tell my mother I’m retiring?”
