The Chamber would like to extend our heartfelt thoughts and prayers to the family and loved ones of John Sullivan. The following is an obituary which sums up his service to the Town of Winchester. He will be missed.
John served as the Moderator of the Winchester Town Meeting for 37 years. To describe his service to the Town, however, by reference to the offices he held or the terms he served is to both understate the degree of his commitment to Winchester and to miss the essential meaning and purpose of his service.
John was raised in Winchester and lived here for almost the entirety of his life. From a very early age he began his pursuit of electoral politics, eventually ending up as Town Moderator.
At age 54, he stepped down from a prominent business position to return to law school and eventually take up residence in a law office with Pat Hall above Bruegger’s Bagels. At that time, the town faced enormous challenges in aging infrastructure insufficient to constrain repeated flooding, school buildings that were quickly outliving their expected lives, a booming school population and an intractable electorate that repeatedly refused to support necessary tax overrides. John, a few decades in, was at the height of his Moderator powers. John’s control over town affairs was aided by a keen intelligence, a vast personal knowledge of the town and its inhabitants and an unmatched skill at getting things done locally. All of those skills and attributes were used in furtherance of his primary core value and mission, a love of Winchester and its residents. He did not moderate the Town Meeting, he governed the Town. There were no meetings that he missed, events that he skipped, people that he did not take the time to get to know. I began my own involvement in Town affairs with a visit to his office to introduce myself and inform him that I would be running for school committee. He offered that he heard that I had been a great hockey player at the high school and had a big job at an important law firm in Boston. I informed him that I was a not very good high school hockey player and that my job was not big, nor was my law firm important. He looked up at me, looked down to write a note to himself, looked up, smiled and then said, “you do understand how politics works right?”
He went on to tell me all I could hope to know about politics in Winchester. He attended my first meet the candidate event and after I spoke came up to tell me that he thought well of my chances. I informed him, with a bit of over enthusiasm, how much I appreciated that. Lets not get carried away he offered, you are running in a 3 person race for 2 seats on the local School Committee and the field includes a candidate who seems one traffic stop away from trouble. Second place shouldn’t be too much of a reach for you after that education we gave you.
I was lucky enough to survive that race. Best of all, I got to know John Sullivan and while I watched he guided the Town Meeting and the Town to a recognition of its fiscal reality, acceptance of the need for a tax override and the implementation of that override to build new schools, put in place a comprehensive flood mitigation program and support the education budget as the school population continued to grow.
He did so with humor, intelligence and, above all, kindness and concern for others. His wit on the floor of the Town Meeting was unmatched and his appreciation for those who served the Town was without limit. In his 60s he met a woman at the library, found love, flew to Bermuda, got married, came back and gave us all something else to believe in. You could name every building in Town for him and it would understate his role and presence.
He got better as he went along. He faced his struggles on his own and he shared his victories with everyone.
John Sullivan.
A man for Winchester.
God Bless You, Mr. Moderator.
Peter Haley
January 12, 2021
