“Take care of the people.”
That was Tom Menino’s advice to his successor in their final conversation before the late mayor’s death last week, Mayor Marty Walsh said at Menino’s funeral Mass yesterday. Proof that Menino followed his own advice to the letter was visible from City Hall to Grove Hall to Hyde Park, in the faces of grateful Bostonians who lined the streets to bid him farewell after two decades of service — two decades in which he took care of them.
Because after all that’s really what it means to be an “urban mechanic” — fixing potholes and getting the streets plowed is about taking care of people, whose quality of life can be measured by such things.
But taking care of people also means ensuring that the city they call home will always live up to its potential, and that was Tom Menino’s mission, too.
Perhaps no one should be surprised that after 20 years in office — and that astonishing estimate that at least half the residents of this city had met him personally — the stories would be personal. That when a reporter offered a microphone to one man along the procession route yesterday, he would share the moving tale of spending three years on the street, and of the mayor who “picked me up.”
The final rites for Menino were, fittingly, as he directed them (down to the almost cheeky choice of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” outside the church). They revealed what the mayor rarely advertised: He was a man of abiding faith, his dog-eared prayer book a symbol of his devotion.
Yes, the vice president was there. Dignitaries of all stripes sat elbow to elbow. Big Papi and Pedro Martinez and Bill Russell joined the mourners. But perhaps the most moving tribute came not from the big-timers. It came from Menino’s two young granddaughters who spoke of life with their beloved “Papa.”
“I was almost positive that Bostonians would have to throw him over their shoulder,” admitted Samantha Menino, “and drag him out of City Hall.”
Was there a Bostonian who didn’t think the same?
On his final day in office not even a year ago Menino implored his fellow Bostonians to live the way he had clearly tried to live — not just as a public servant but as a father and grandfather and as a person of faith.
“Be as good to each other as you have been to me,” he said.
That sentiment was printed in the program at his funeral Mass. It should be on a billboard in every neighborhood of this city he loved so well.