November 3, 2014 — Former Boston mayor Thomas M. Menino, who presided over two decades of transformation in the city he loved, was remembered Monday at his funeral Mass as a man who built bridges and backed the underdog during a life devoted to helping people.
“He hit the neighborhoods, acting on the values that lay deep in his soul. Those values told him to stand up for people, stand up to adversity, stand up for what’s right,” Mayor Martin J. Walsh said at a funeral service at Most Precious Blood church in Hyde Park.
“Tom Menino believed in underdogs. He knew what it was to be underestimated. … From a mile away, he could spot someone who needed a boost. He backed them. And when Tom Menino had your back, that’s all you needed,” Walsh said.
Governor Deval Patrick said Menino was “rightly praised as the urban mechanic,” who paid close attention to details of neighborhood services, but was also a “thinker of big things,” who had wrought major change in the city.
He also spoke about Menino’s “agenda for racial healing” and drive to make Boston a “welcoming place for people of color and immigrants.”
Read the full story at the Boston Globe