Where is mayor menino from

Menino worked hard to get trees planted, potholes filled, garbage cleared and street lights fixed. As a national leader, Menino served as President of the US Conference of Mayors, making affordable housing his top priority.

He co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which has grown to encompass more than 1, mayors across the country in the call for common sense gun reforms. In spite of his national profile, his City came first. Unlike many politicians, Mayor Menino did not enter City Hall with an eye to higher office.

He did exactly the job he loved for the city he loved. He was proud to be a public servant and we were proud to have him as our Mayor. Mayor Menino passed away in October of after a courageous battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife, Angela, two children, and six grandchildren.

Robert Brown joined the Menino family to announce the creation of the Thomas M. 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. Working for Metropolitan Life, meanwhile, meant he had a respectable job when he met Angela Faletra as they played tennis on adjoining courts in Hyde Park one day and her errant shots kept angling his way.

Their first date was that night. No, I reply. They married in , a few years after that first meeting. Menino added in the same interview. She could have a driver, and somebody to clean the house. As his emissary of sorts, she served on several boards while advocating for children and the elderly, women, and the homeless, and she helped keep Mr. Menino grounded in who he was and where he was from.

Not long before Angela met Mr. Menino, he found himself drawn to John F. In the early s, Mr. Menino met Joseph Timilty, who wanted to be a city councilor. Menino worked to help elect Timilty, who repaid the favor when the future mayor lost his job at Metropolitan Life while trying to organize a union.

Meanwhile, Mr. Menino recalled. The political training proved invaluable as Mr. Years later, when Mr. Menino was mayor, Timilty was convicted of conspiracy to commit fraud and sentenced to four months in federal prison.

Announcing his candidacy while standing in the backyard of his childhood home on Hyde Park Avenue, he ran in the district covering Hyde Park and slices of other neighborhoods. Rarely did Mr. Menino consider stepping away from city politics. In , he flirted with a run for Suffolk County sheriff, but decided against it, and in , he announced a bid for the soon-to-be vacant 11th Congressional District seat, only to see it evaporate in redistricting. During those years he also picked up a new, valuable mentor in Gerard Doherty, who had chaired the Democratic State Committee and was a longtime Kennedy campaign operative.

It was Doherty who told Mr. Menino he needed a college degree if he wanted to be mayor, so he enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Boston at the same time his daughter, Susan, was at the Amherst campus.

That set the stage for his ascension to acting mayor when Flynn left to be ambassador to the Vatican. Once elected, he proceeded to shape the look and feel of Boston as perhaps no other mayor had in the past.

His intimacy with the city ranged from obscure budget details to the placement of fire hydrants, so developers knew the success of high-profile proposals for highly visible projects often hinged on pleasing Mr. Menino said as he looked at the architectural drawings. Linde and his architect tried again, bringing a set of miniature proposed roofs to City Hall and setting each one atop the model of their planned tower. At different points, Mr.

Try negotiating with a union whose members die for you. Chief executives of major cities often want to leave behind a defining development. For Kevin White, it was Quincy Market. Other challenges also proved vexing. And while graduation rates increased incrementally, that was enough to draw praise. Menino was more successful presiding over what became known as the Boston Miracle. In his early years as mayor, police stepped up outreach to neighborhood groups and church leaders to try to quell gang violence.

Homicides plummeted from 98 in , when Mr. Menino became acting mayor, to 31 in Violent crime rose again, but not to the levels of the late s and early s, and by the end of his tenure the number of homicides dropped four consecutive years, to 40 in Several years ago, he also joined with then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York to cochair Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a nonprofit coalition that pushed for more gun controls.

As years passed, Mr. Menino consolidated power, becoming a strong political boss not to be crossed during his second decade in office. Still, programs that spoke to core beliefs forged early in his leadership remained in place.

Finding summer work for youth — the initiative that helped lift his first mayoral bid — became an annual preoccupation as he tripled the number of participating private employers to Last year we did 10, 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. And how do you improve all of their lives, not some of their lives.

His name is indelibly etched in the city's history.