The following November Menino beat out a field of eight candidates to win election to a four-year term. It was the first of what would become a record-setting five terms. He never lost an election, running five times as city councilor, five times as mayor.
Former state Rep. Charlotte Golar Richie met Menino before she became an elected official and left the State House to join Menino's cabinet as chief of housing and neighborhood development. Golar Richie says his leadership, even though it came years after the start of the city's school busing crisis, broke ground.
And he, I thought, did a lot to make this a more open place. Councilor Charles Yancey, representing the 4th District of Mattapan and parts of Dorchester, was often on the receiving end of Menino's sharp tongue. But he says 90 percent of the time he and Menino agreed on issues.
He deserves credit for that. But we know that that's not always true," said Boston businessman Jack Connors. Because if there was success, then Tom Menino wanted to be sure that the folks who didn't have a voice shared in that success. Connors credits Menino for inspiring and for helping him create Camp Harborview, a summer camp for city kids on Long Island in Boston Harbor. Menino's last few years in office were marked by illness.
He was hospitalized more than a dozen times over two decades, starting in and There were severed tendons in his knees, a broken foot, an upper respiratory infection, a compression fracture suffered in his spine while he was hospitalized, a diagnosis of diabetes. He announced in March that he would not run for a sixth term. A month later, he twisted his ankle and fell, breaking his right leg. In February of this year — just over a month after leaving office — he was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer that had spread to his liver and lymph nodes.
He went on a book tour promoting his autobiography, "Mayor for a New America. In it, he writes with pride about the evolution of Boston, saying it was "broken up" racially when he assumed office, but has become a "much more inclusive city. On Oct. But whatever I did I thought was the right thing for the young people, for the adults, for the business community. Menino, who often was famously tongue-tied and prone to malapropisms.
Menino told the Globe in July Who have they helped? See more photos of former Mayor Menino. He handily defeated state Representative James T. Brett in November, ending a run of Irish-American mayors that stretched back decades. Menino received Though hard fought, the campaign was largely amicable, and after it was over, the candidates preserved a strong relationship.
As he easily was reelected four times, Mr. Menino kept up a punishing pace, rising early to crisscross the city. Kevin H. White, the four-term mayor who preceded Flynn, pioneered little city halls in outer neighborhoods. At times, Mr. Menino seemed to embody them. White and Flynn both yearned for the national stature of higher offices. For Mr. Menino, being mayor was a calling of the highest order. On that November morning after he was first elected, the difference from the day before was apparent.
And everyone around him quickly learned that no cog in the vast machinery of city government was too small to escape his attention.
En route to the office each day he called subordinates to report on what needed fixing or sprucing up: a pothole here, a broken street light there, an abandoned car that needed towing, a neighborhood park in need of mowing. Except for his ever-present finely tailored suits, Mr. Menino told the Globe in July , in his fifth-floor City Hall office.
This job, my legacy, is about the people. For two decades, until his final December in office, Mr. Menino spent Christmas Eve touring the streets of the Bowdoin-Geneva neighborhood, initially on foot and later by SUV when his health declined. They always held providing support and assistance for people in need as a priority. Some criticized Mr. Graduation rates remained comparatively flat through much of his tenure, only rising in recent years, and city schools also experienced persistent racial achievement gaps.
Still, he appointed two longstanding Boston public schools superintendents, providing much needed stability for a system that was shaken by the busing crisis and an extended period of short-term superintendents. Beginning in , Thomas Payzant served nearly 11 years. Carol Johnson was in the job six years until retiring last year.
No stranger to the academic challenges children face, Mr. Menino was a C student at St. Only after being elected to the City Council in did Mr. He graduated at 45, through a program that gave him a chunk of credits for serving as a city councilor. Born Dec.
Menino wrote. It was his way of showing respect. That was my first lesson in politics. The Meninos lived on the first floor of a two-family house on Hyde Park Avenue and his paternal grandparents, immigrants from a village in southern Italy, lived upstairs.
The family owned an apartment building next door, where new immigrants cycled through every few years until they saved enough for a place of their own. Fluent in Italian, Mr. Share your memories of Tom Menino, or messages for his family.
Teachers tended to ignore those not at the top of the class. That indifference stayed with him, and once he was mayor, Mr. Menino insisted on handing out awards to more than just the students who fared best on tests, though he conceded that his early parochial school education had at least one advantage.
In his memoir, Mr. I hung his portrait behind my desk at City Hall. A plain-spoken man of the people. The public library was his college. The public itself was Mr.
He once estimated that he owned about ties, 75 to 80 shirts, numerous suits, and several blazers. Thomas Michael Menino was born on Dec. A former insurance salesman, he caught the political bug while working as a legislative aide to state Sen. Joseph Timilty. He first earned elective office as a district city councilor in Menino became the council's president in and was automatically elevated to mayor when then-mayor Raymond Flynn was named U.
While that prompted some to initially chide Menino as an "accidental mayor," he quickly proved his own political mettle, winning a four-year term later that year. He never sought nor showed interest in running for higher office. Mayor, it seemed, was the only political job to which he aspired. Menino was admitted to the hospital several times while in office. In , he underwent surgery to remove a rare sarcoma on his back. The following year, his doctors confirmed he had been diagnosed with Crohn's disease, a type of inflammatory bowel disease.
He spent six weeks in the hospital in for a series of ailments, including a respiratory infection. While he was in the hospital, he suffered a compression fracture in his spine and was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.
In May , he was back in the hospital for surgery for an enlarged prostate. Menino left City Hall on his final day in office Jan. Later, he tweeted: "Thank you Boston. It has been the honor and thrill of a lifetime to be your Mayor.
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