Noting a transition -- Tom Byrne

Today’s DPP mentions the death last night of Thomas Byrne. While they did publish it as a news obit, they apparently did not think the death of a former mayor was important enough to be placed on a news page.

That may be because in many ways Tom Byrne must have seemed to younger people at the paper as remnant to a day long gone [it is almost 39 years since he left the third floor of City Hall], when the city was used to having leaders who were Irish and Catholic and when the city and its news were important enough for the newspaper to cover.

Tom Byrne was not the last Irish mayor. We have one now. He was not the last Catholic mayor. That designation has to belong to Randy Kelly or Jim Scheibel. [I am sure that somebody knows.] But it seems that somehow there has not been a mayor so Catholic [he had been a seminarian before his military service and he was an archbishop’s brother] or so Irish, so connected with the city’s working and ethnic past. [For the record, I am neither Irish – at least not the green kind – nor am I Catholic.]

I realize that sometimes when we look back, we see things colored a bit, like early, color photographs left in the sun too long distort the colors we see, but it seems to me that the passing of Mayor Byrne in some ways illuminates that an era has changed.

The new Saint Paul has different people living here and different people in leadership. Let us just hope that as we move on the latter is adequate for the former.