“Once you are mayor, you’re mayor for life.”
The woman and two men sitting beside him smiled and nodded knowingly when David L. Phillips said those words Wednesday.
Gracing me with their time on a beautiful pre-summer morning, Phillips and three fellow former Lynn mayors had just spent an hour in Central Square’s new Frederick Douglass Park listening to the four men running for mayor talk about city concerns.
For the former mayors, the earnest talk about development and job creation was bittersweet. The first woman elected to be Lynn’s mayor recalled how her campaign visions collided with the day-in-day-out job of running a city.
“Your grand ideas get interrupted by reality,” said Judith Flanagan Kennedy.
I love digging into history and it was fascinating to sit down with four people who held the same job during different decades. They orchestrated political campaigns, won elections, basked in victory’s bright lights and, as Albert V. DiVirgilio noted, traded their personal lives for the political spotlight.
A shared motivation propelled the four into elections and pushed them to knock on doors and ask for votes, enduring criticism and unwelcomed headlines.
“People run with a love for the city,” said Thomas P. Costin Jr.
He still holds the youngest-mayor record. Elected to the City Council at the age of 21 in 1947, Costin was already a political veteran when he won the 1955 mayoral election.
“I felt I had the pulse of the people,” he said.
A young man in a hurry who would hitch his star to John F. Kennedy and work to assure the latter’s political success, Costin saw the mayorship as an opportunity to build on Lynn’s mid-20th century successes.
Years separated their tenures in office, but Costin and his counterparts easily recall their mayoral challenges and frustrations.
“You never have enough to do what you want to accomplish,” said DiVirgilio, who served as mayor from 1986 to 1992.
Phillips’ mayoral term straddled 1974-75 and he called the decision to dismantle local rent control provisions in a bid to stem an arson wave “a tough, but easy decision.”
But the decision had consequences: A wave of tenant voters defeated Phillips and returned the late Antonio Marino to the mayor’s office.
Flanagan Kennedy saw the bid to replace Pickering Middle School and build another school fail during her second term. She agreed with me Wednesday when I suggested she is the definition of an improbable politician: She pulled off wins that political know-it-alls said simply should not have happened, including her 2009 victory that dispatched the late Edward J. “Chip” Clancy Jr. from the mayor’s office.
Costin, DiVirgilio, Flanagan Kennedy and Phillips reminisced about Clancy, who died June 6 and served as mayor from 2002 into 2010.
“Chip worked for us when he was in law school,” recalled Phillips.
Clancy and the late John C. Mihos, who died in May, shared a Franklin Street law office, and Flanagan Kennedy, who launched her political career as a School Committee member, appreciated Mihos’ ability to condense lengthy committee discussions on complicated school issues into concise legal summaries.
She said Clancy had a well-honed skill every mayor can rely on to survive the daily rigors of running a city and disappointing people who can’t get a mayor to say “yes” to their requests.
“He had a really funny sense of humor,” she said.
Mayoral candidates Darren Cyr, Keith Lee, Jared Nicholson and Michael Satterwhite offered plenty of ideas for making Lynn greater on Wednesday. The best teachers for turning those visions into reality just might have been sitting 10 feet away from them.
