He worked for the public
They wheeled a pair of trash bins into his office on the seventh floor of City Hall last week, but as Joe Casazza cleaned out his desk, he seemed relieved that he wouldn't have to part in retirement with the most cherished possessions from a life in government: the memories.
He has served three mayors over 39 years as commissioner of public works in the city of Boston, which, aside from being manager of the Red Sox, is probably the most second-guessed job in New England. Times have changed, trends have changed, the city has changed, but one thing has stayed the same: the guy who maintains Boston's narrow, ancient, and often crooked streets.
He sat at a small conference table in his office Friday afternoon remembering how hesitant he was to take the job when Kevin White offered it to him in 1968.
"I said I wasn't ready to get into Boston politics," Casazza recalled. "The mayor said, 'Politics? Who said anything about politics? I'm hiring a public works commissioner, not a politician. I'll handle the politics.' "
Ever since, Casazza has been there. He was the guy who developed the idea to use Boston's sidewalks as outdoor cafes, then overcame the opposition of so many city bureaucrats and politicians to implement it. Under Tom Menino's rule, the city now has 42 restaurants with sidewalk cafes.
He was the guy who came up with the plan to hang flowers and banners from lampposts. Quietly, Casazza developed a method to install fiber-optic lines all over Boston, insisting that all utilities work together when streets were cut open -- or pay a steep price.
"We put together an underground facility that you wouldn't believe," he said.
Get Joe Casazza going on snow, and you 'd better have a couple of hours to spend hearing him out. There's the brine mix created by salt trucks at the front end of the storm. There's the moisture content, the timing of the fall (day or night, weekday or weekend), and the temperatures that are predicted afterward.
"This makes all the difference in the world on how we go about getting rid of it," he said.
The worst storm he's faced? Not the one you think. "April 1, 1997," Casazza replied. "The day before, we had people running around in T-shirts. We had taken some of our equipment off.
"But it wasn't a plowable storm. The snow was so heavy that you had to dig it. Front-end loaders bigger than this office couldn't get through it, that son of a gun."
Mid-conversation, he beckoned his trusted deputy, Joe Canavan, into the office and posed the same question.
" '97," Canavan said, without missing a beat. "Three inches an hour, 34, 35 degrees. You couldn't get through it." The two men then laughed at how alike they think.
There were other monsters as well, and invariably some criticism that went along with them. Any DPW chief could throw the whole cavalry on every snowfall, but at upward of $85,000 an hour for snow removal, it's the best ones who are judicious in their response, and that comes with an occasional mistake.
"When something goes wrong, people think it rolls off my back. The hell it does. My skin's the same as yours," he said.
He's had the same assistant, Jaqui Connors, for 31 years. He and his wife have been married half a century, six children, 17 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. He is 72 years old and has a reputation for taking any bullet on behalf of any member of his staff.
"Mayors come and go, but Joe Casazza stays," Menino said yesterday. "He knows public works."
Casazza was asked about his favorite part of the job. "It sounds like a cliché," he replied, "but it's the only part: It's a job where people come with problems, and somehow you solve them."
The news media don't spend much ink or airtime on the snowfalls that are perfectly plowed, on the roads that are free of potholes, or on the alleys that have been scrubbed of trash. If they did, Joe Casazza would be a household name.
Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com. 
