Kelly's other legacy -- caring
Michael Dowling, a gay activist who organizes an annual AIDS exhibit and runs a program teaching art to troubled youth in South Boston, once viewed James M. Kelly as the man many knew him to be: a leader of South Boston's antibusing movement and of the court fight to keep gays out of the neighborhood's St. Patrick's Day Parade.
But when Dowling met Kelly, he discovered a city councilor who encouraged Dowling's work with teenagers and World AIDS Day and who wrote a $100 personal check to Dowling's organization each year.
"He was a guy who was really willing to help you out," Dowling said. "To me, that was his real legacy. If he thought of you as his own, he took care of you."
Kelly was renowned as a standard-bearer of white, Irish-Catholic South Boston. But many constituents who sought his help on zoning matters or chatted with him at community events often saw a different side of him. As a city councilor, he became a friend to many in the diverse communities he represented: Chinatown, with its large population of Asian immigrants; the South End, with its thriving gay and Latino communities; and young professionals from out-of-state who made his district their new home.
"I think beneath that white skin, there's a heart of gold for all people," said Reggie Wong, 64, a longtime community activist and businessman from Chinatown, where one city councilor recalled Kelly making elderly men smile by saying "Happy New Year" in Cantonese.
Glen Berkowitz, describing himself as a "Jewish kid from New York" who now lives in the South End, said the last public official he expected to bond with after moving to Boston in the early 1980s, when wounds from the busing riots were still fresh, was Kelly. Taking a job as a traffic manager for the Big Dig, Berkowitz was forced into constant contact with the councilor. Any worries he had about Kelly vanished. "There was never once that I doubted his compassion and sincerity in taking care of things that had nothing to do with Southie or had nothing to do with Irishness," Berkowitz said.
Andres Branger, a gay Venezuelan immigrant who came to Boston as a student in 1983, was wary when he contacted Kelly in fall 2004 to gain his support for Orinoco Kitchen, a Venezuelan restaurant he hoped to open in the South End. From what he could decipher from news stories about Kelly, Branger saw the councilor as "somebody who was conservative and not necessarily open to change."
But Kelly surprised him. Over lunch at Anthony's Pier 4 in South Boston, Branger recalls, Kelly seemed fascinated with South America and quizzed Branger about everything from Venezuelan politics and commerce to how Venezuelan cuisine differed from Cuban and Brazilian food. And Kelly quickly embraced Branger's idea of opening a small, neighborhood restaurant that would bring a new ethnic tradition to the South End restaurant scene.
"For a moment there, we bonded," Branger recalled. "He felt that I had come to this country with the intention of basically making a home here, and he realized what I was trying to do as an immigrant was sort of to become part of the greater whole. He kind of respected that, and I really felt that from him."
Branger said Kelly turned out to be an invaluable advocate for Orinoco Kitchen, helping Branger negotiate a bureaucratic maze to acquire permits and a liquor license.
"I think I really couldn't have done it without him," he said.
Many in the gay community resented Kelly for his public opposition to same-sex marriage and to allowing gay groups to march in the St. Patrick's Day Parade. But they also learned to respect the man who would personally return phone calls and would look them in the eye and tell them why he disagreed.
"Politically, he and I weren't on the same page, but he was a very good man for delivering services for the South End," said John Neale, a real estate agent in the South End. "And, personally, I found him to be charming and very attentive to issues. Potholes, trash, and dogs are three of the biggest issues of living in the city, besides school and safety. And he was always responsive on those things."
And, for political reasons or otherwise, Kelly himself evolved as the neighborhoods he represented -- South Boston, Chinatown, and the South End -- grew increasingly diverse. In his last City Council campaign in 2005, against Susan Passoni, a businesswoman and former Manhattan resident who strongly supported gay marriage, he suggested he was warming to civil unions.
His passion for preserving his own neighborhood's identity, some say, helped him relate to activists from very different neighborhoods. Jeremy Liu, executive director of the Asian Community Development Corporation, said he and other Chinatown activists sought Kelly's help when there was speculation that the city was trying to rename a section of their neighborhood South Bay. Not long before, Kelly had fought the city's efforts to brand the waterfront in South Boston "the Seaport District."
"He really got it," Liu recalled, adding that Kelly offered to file a resolution against the South Bay moniker. "That's part of Chinatown, and you can't just take the name away like that."
His constituents debate whether Kelly's feeling for the other neighborhoods in his district could ever match his devotion to South Boston. But some say he had a place in his heart for all of them.
At one point last year, he approached Councilor at Large Sam Yoon, the first Asian elected to the council, in a corridor at City Hall. Putting his hand on Yoon's shoulder, the ailing councilor said, "Take good care of Chinatown, would you?"
