Hizzoner

 The mayor of our fair city passed away peacefully last night, four months after he was elected to a fifth term and a month after revealing he had stomach cancer and it had spread pretty much everywhere.

Two months ago, his beloved wife died of cancer, too. Which reminds us yet again that cancer is a platinum-grade son of a bitch, because it kills both the good and the bad without distinction.

Tom and Cindy Henry were both on the good side of that ledger, and not by a little. They were as good a couple as the city of Fort Wayne, In., has ever known, and their passing is a double blow that will be felt far beyond the tight circle of their immediate family and friends.

In a lot of ways they were Fort Wayne, and not just because Tom was an exemplary mayor for 16 years. On his watch downtown Fort Wayne went from sleepy backwater to vibrant city center; if no one used to go downtown because, you know, it was just downtown, everyone goes there now. 

All of that you'll read elsewhere today, of course. Here, though, you'll read not  about Mayor Henry but Mayor Tom, who was just a regular guy like the rest of us.

Back in the day, see, fellow sportswriter and longtime friend Steve Warden and I used to bug out for lunch to the Green Frog Inn, a wonderful old place down on Spring Street which was owned by Cindy Henry. We still do it occasionally, though both of us are now retired.

Anyway, one day we're sitting there and here comes Mayor Tom, who recognized us as Journal Gazette staffers. Mayor Tom was limping a bit. We said "Hey, you're limping", something like that, and Hizzoner immediately went into Regular Guy mode.

Which is to say, he spent a couple of minutes telling us about his groin pull.

Now, I don't know how other mayors in other towns do things, but I don't imagine many would regale a couple of newspaper grunts with tales of a, um, rather intimate injury. I mean, it's not like we were lifelong buddies or anything. At best we were casual acquaintances.

But Mayor Tom was Mayor Tom, a Fort Wayne guy with a Fort Wayne lack of pretension who lived his whole life here, and who devoted more than 40 years of that life to serving his hometown as an elected official.

"Man," I marveled to Steve that day at the Frog. "In what other city would the mayor tell two people he barely knows about his groin pull?"

Think we know the answer to that.