Thomas M. Menino, Boston’s longest serving mayor, has died at age 71
Thomas Michael Menino, who insisted a mayor doesn’t need a grand vision to lead, then went on to shepherd
Boston’s economy and shape the skyline and the very identity of the city he loved through an unprecedented
five consecutive terms in City Hall, died Thursday. He was 71 and was diagnosed with advanced cancer not long
after leaving office at the beginning of this year.
“Visionaries don’t get things done,” he once said, crisply separating himself from politicians who gaze at distant
horizons and imagine what might be. Leaving to others the lofty rhetoric of Boston as the Athens of America, he
took a decidedly ground-level view of the city on a hill, earning himself a nickname for his intense focus on the
nuts and bolts of everyday life: the urban mechanic.
“At just after 9 a.m. this morning the Honorable Thomas M. Menino passed into eternal rest after a courageous
battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his devoted wife Angela, loving family and friends,” Menino spokeswoman
Dot Joyce said in a statement
In March 2014, Menino announced that he had been diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer of unknown
primary origin that had spread to his liver and lymph nodes, and was beginning intensive chemotherapy treatment.
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