The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Mourning a former mayor
His family, parish and the city were Serra’s great loves
MIDDLETOWN — It was the outcome his friends and colleagues had dreaded.
Those friends and colleagues now have the sad duty of bidding goodbye and farewell to Thomas J. Serra, who died Saturday after a prolonged fight against pancreatic cancer.
“I’d say there’s nobody in town who has not been impacted by him or is not hurting today,” former Mayor Sebastian N. Giuliano said Monday, acknowledging that he was one of those who was hurting at the loss.
Current Mayor Daniel T. Drew has ordered all flags on city buildings to remain at half-staff through Serra’s funeral, which is scheduled for Saturday at St. Sebastian Roman Catholic Church.
Fellow Democrat and Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz said Serra “was born in Middletown, lived in Middletown his whole life, and served Middletown throughout his life” in a variety of roles.
Those roles included serving as an educator at Vinal Tech, as a parishioner at St. Sebastian’s, as a member of the business community, and in the politics of the city as both mayor and a long-time member of the Common Council.
“I would say Tom Serra was one of the longest serving people in Middletown city government,” Bysiewicz said during a telephone conversation Monday.
“He’s been involved in the Common Council, I believe, since the early 1970s,” she said.
But Serra’s reputation extended well beyond the city limits, Bysiewicz said.
“He was well-known and respected on both sides of the aisle,” she said, by the state’s U.S. senators and the members of the congressional delegation in Washington and by the state’s constitutional officers.
Governors, Democrats and Republicans alike, “were all well-acquainted with Tom Serra,” and the smart ones sought his advice, Bysiewicz said.
That included Bysiewicz and now Gov. Ned Lamont.
As they were launching their campaign both for the Democratic nomination and then in the general election, “We both had in-depth discussions with Tom,” Bysiewicz said. “I had the highest respect for him.”
Serra was the Majority Leader of the Common Council.
Mary Bartolotta is the deputy leader, said of Serra, “He had a presence about him.”
In recent weeks, she said he was gaining in his battle his disease.
But that was not to be. “I’m sorry for his family — and for us,” Bartolotta said.
“It’s too soon to talk about it,” Bartolotta said about the procedures for choosing a successor for Serra.
Giuliano, the council’s minority leader, said he too had seen signs over the past month “like he was making a comeback.”
In their last face-to-face discussion, Giuliano said the two leaders (and others) “discussed how to get the Middletown-Xavier Thanksgiving game back.”
“It’s going to be hard to think of the Middletown Common Council without him,” Giuliano said. “Even when he wasn’t physically there in the council chamber you felt a moral presence there and that he was watching you.”
When the council or a councilor did something Serra did not approve of, “he had a way of letting you know,” Giuliano said.
Although they shared a mutual respect for one another, “He and I had our battles – knock-down, dragged-out fights.”
“People asked me how we could have those fights and then get along the next day,” he said. “The only way I can express it is that at the heart of our rivalry was a dynamic: we were two guys in love with the same girl” – the city of Middletown.
“We were both passionate about the same things,” Giuliano said.“The three great loves of his life were family, his parish and the city.”
He agreed with Bysiewicz’s observation that Serra’s presence was felt beyond the city, and that his advice was sought by state officials.
“If they were going to do something that would affect Middletown, they would ask his advice, because they needed to know where he was on it,” Giuliano said.