Puppy Smith Street—home to the Aspen post office, Clark’s Market, a slew of shops and restaurants, and the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies at Hallam Lake—is not named after a pampered pooch. Instead, it honors a beloved city worker who maintained Aspen’s roadways for 37 years.

Fresh off US Army tours in World War II and the Korean War, Harold “Puppy” Smith returned to his hometown of Aspen in 1951, at age 26, as a plow driver for the city’s Street Department. As the department’s sole employee back then, Smith was responsible for clearing streets of snow from midnight until dawn, using a heavy-duty road grader fitted with a monstrous V-shape plow blade in the front and side-mounted “wings” to move snow out of the way. That first winter was brutal: 51 inches of snow fell between Christmas and New Year’s Day, yet Smith quickly became known for plowing right alongside the curb, hand-shoveling outside of residences when necessary.

In 1976, after 25 years supervising the department, Aspen honored Harold “Puppy” Smith’s service to the city by naming a street after him.

He died in 2004 at age 78 while on a hunting trip with friends. In an Aspen Times obituary, his twin sister, Hazel Johnson, recalled that her brother earned his lifelong nickname as little boy learning to swim at a local pond: The doggy paddle was all he could do.