Read Online Mayor for a New America by Thomas M. Menino - Free Book Online

be dictating who the next mayor is going to be. . . .’ ‘Well, can you say something like, the city is in good hands?’ So I said, ‘Sure, I can say that.’ Of course that’s the front page headline, with a picture of Tommy Menino. They asked me if I could hug him [for the photo]. So I did.”
    The ask to say something positive—I knew about that. But nobody cleared the hug with me.
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I often wish God had given me the silver tongue of Mario Cuomo, the looks of Bill Clinton, and the golf swing of Jack Nicklaus. But he didn’t. He did give me a big heart, a gift for numbers, and a love for the city of Boston.
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—speaking at a candidates’ forum in 1993
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    The first poll appeared on my second day in office. It killed the joy. With eight weeks to go before the September preliminary, I trailed the front-runner by 10 points. She was my council colleague Rosaria Salerno, a former Benedictine nun and a staunch progressive channeling “Year of the Woman” energy with her campaign slogan, “Not One of the Boys.”
    In what was now a seven-candidate race, she had a big lead. But the votes weren’t there to elect her in a two-person race. In city elections, held in off years, half those who vote in presidential election years don’t show up. The missing were Rosaria’s voters—young, single, well educated, progressive, gay—living in the low-voting wards of Allston, Mission Hill, the Fenway, the Back Bay, and the South End. In city elections the votes were in South Boston, West Roxbury, Dorchester, and Hyde Park. The candidate opposing her in the final would clean up in those neighborhoods, which don’t vote on ideology—“progressive” or “conservative”—but on the delivery of city services like police, fire, trash collection, and the like. Those were my issues. I wanted to be that candidate.
    The acting mayor needed to start acting like a mayor. Days after taking over, I reprogrammed $500,000 from the city’s reserve fund to put kids to work in summer jobs. “It gets you up early in the morning,” I told them, “and when you get home at night you’re too tired to get into trouble on the streets.” It was the beginning of something big.
    Every year, starting in January, I’d appeal to the civic spirit of executives from the banks, the tech firms, the hospitals, and the insurance companies. With your help, I’d say, we can make this a safe summer in Boston. Hire as many kids as you can. Give them a break . . . We started with one hundred businesses and institutions, and ended with three hundred, including major employers like John Hancock, State Street Bank, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
    The city did its part, too. Every year I’d set aside several million dollars to pay kids $8 an hour to clean up parks and tourist sites like the Freedom Trail. Ten thousand kids every summer—that was the goal. In tight years, budget watchdogs complained that the city couldn’t afford to hire several thousand kids, and I’d respond, “This isn’t about today. This is about tomorrow,” and the city hired the kids. Over twenty years I pulled together $150 million in city, state, and federal money to fund more than 200,000 summer jobs.
    All the kids got experience earning—and managing—their own money. Those who showed up and did the work got a good reference from their supervisors. Some kids learned the lesson I took away from my summer job at Bird & Sons. I shared it with Shirley Leung, a business columnist at the
Globe
, for a piece she wrote about the Mayor’s Summer Jobs program: “You have to work hard to make . . . money. You have to get dirty.” A lucky few were offered full-time jobs after they graduated from high school. Leung interviewed a young woman named Icandace Woods, who turned a city-arranged summer internship