He was a man of few words, but when he was honored with a surprise party in 1991 after half a century in the Oak Bluffs fire department, more than thirty of them as fire chief, Nelson Amaral told the gathering of some two hundred well-wishers at Anthony’s Restaurant: “You sure know how to get a guy. I’m at a loss for words. It has been fifty great years. I have loved every minute of it. I just wish I had fifty more to give.”

Mr. Amaral died this week at the age of eighty-six and flags were lowered to half-mast in the town where he was born and lived and fought fires for more than five decades, beginning at the age of fourteen.

Along the way he had some wild rides. There was the 1965 fire at the landmark Ocean View Hotel on East Chop on a bitterly cold January day, when a hundred men battled the blaze all night, the nozzles to their fire hoses freezing up.

There was the fire at David Vincent’s fish market on the pier, also in the 1960s, when Mr. Amaral protected the closely-built waterfront using a technique he had introduced, the so-called water curtain, where a broad spray is used between buildings to keep a fire from spreading. The technique is now a standard firefighting practice.

And there was the famous day in 1981 when the ferry Islander hit some rocks at extreme low tide off Oak Bluffs and was taking on water. It was Mr. Amaral’s fire department that set up an elaborate pump system to keep the Islander afloat for two days while the gash in her hull was repaired.

Nelson Amaral is gone now, but we can remember him every time we drive by the Wing Road fire station that is named for him, a fitting tribute to the chief who devoted his life to protecting the town he loved and loved him back.