‘Good people do good things:’ Former Holyoke Sen. John Burke remembers his friend Martin Dunn

“Wholesale sadness” is how John P. Burke describes his reaction to the death of his good friend, Martin J. Dunn.

He’s felt it before, he says, ticking off a list of three other notable names from Holyoke’s past: Anne McHugh; Jimmy Kelly; Ernie Ross.

“I look at it this way,” Burke explains. “A community can take a lot of body blows, but I noticed when Anne McHugh died a lot of air went out of the city of Holyoke. It happened with Jimmy Kelly, and, when Ernie Ross died, air went out of that city again. Now, more air goes out of Holyoke. Four people that did a lot of work behind the scenes for Holyoke, weren’t selfish and wanted a lot better community are now gone. You can’t lose a lot of people like that.”

He adds, “Those four people to me kind of formed a backbone for the city of Holyoke. They could be controversial, but, at the end of the day, they only had the interests of the city at heart.”

Burke, who lives in Dedham, knows a lot about the Paper City.

Born and raised in Holyoke’s Highlands, he was, at age 24 in the late 1970s, the youngest person elected to the state Senate. He took the seat which had been held for years by popular Chicopee politician Roger Bernashe and before that one of Holyoke’s most famous pols, Maurice A. Donahue.

Burke surprised everyone in late February 1990 when he announced he wouldn’t seek reelection that fall after 12 years in office. As many as a dozen potential candidates, including Bernashe (and his daughter) came out of the woodwork. Eventually, it would be Dunn, then mayor of Holyoke and Donahue’s nephew, who wound up Burke’s successor.

At the time, Burke told the media of his decision, “I asked myself, do I want to be a state senator at the age of 45?” he said. “The answer was no. At that point, it became an easy decision.” Today, he explains further that he (and several other senators about his age at the time) came to the conclusion that then-Senate President William M. Bulger wasn’t going anywhere soon, so there was no upward mobility track for them.

So, Burke called it a day, and, when his term ended the following January, he hung around Holyoke for three months until the St. Patrick’s Parade and then left town the following day, moving east to plot a course for his future. “The big game was in Boston,” he says. “I knew that if I was going to make a living I kind of had to be where the game is being played”

For a time, he had an office with the public relations firm run by one of his sisters, but eventually, he found his way into the world of political consulting and lobbying. Today, at age 66, he also has an insurance business and has been happily married for 28 years with two adult children, a son, 27 and a daughter, 25. (Bulger, by the way, stayed in the Senate until 1996 after being named president of the University of Massachusetts. He resigned in 2003 amid pressure when he refused to cooperate with authorities searching for his brother, the notorious mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, and today lives in retirement, collecting a state pension of upwards of $200,000 a year.)

Burke says the seeds for his own career in politics were sown around the family dinner table where there were at least the nine Burkes and often friends of all the kids and their parents each night. “We always discussed politics and government,” he explains. “We kids could get involved, but mostly it was a grown-up conversation. You absorb everything.” The ultimate message, he notes, was “Good people do good things.”

His decision to run for Senate came after a redistricting in 1978 that saw the entire city of Westfield added to what was then the 1st Hampden Senate District. With a good turnout in Holyoke, he also won most of the city of Westfield and was bound for Beacon Hill.

The Burke-and-Dunn connection dates back to childhood. Burke says they first met playing Pop Warner football, he for the Highland Patriots and Dunn for the Churchill Packers. About a year separated them in age, but they shared friends, Burke says.

He remembers how Dunn’s mother, Florence, hosted one of his first coffee hours in his Senate run: “Marty must have had 40 kids there, all of them voters. He could draw people in from all parts of the city. He had friends who touched every ward.”

Dunn followed Burke’s lead into politics in the 1980s, first as alderman and eventually as mayor. Burke says as senator, B he tended to stay out of local decision-making until his pal began raising concerns about a trash-to-energy plant project, known as Holyoke Energy Recovery Co. (HERCO), proposed for property on Main Street.

Dunn was sounding warning messages about the project and its potential health effects on the city, and Burke says he started looking into it as a result and raised concerns of his own with state and local authorities. As Burke recalls it, "I said one day to somebody, 'If this is such a great idea, why don’t we put it in Longmeadow. That was pretty much the end of HERCO. It went from being built to not being built.

“Marty was right about it…He had so many very good instincts and characteristics, but he knew this was not a good thing. It was not good for lower wards (of Holyoke). Who would want to look out of their window on West Glen Street and look at a big chimney. He did things for the right reasons.”

Burke declines to share exactly when Dunn may have learned of what described in news reports of the time as a “surprise decision” not to seek a seventh senatorial term. “He did know about it, and this is the first time it will told,” Burke jokes. “I cannot say how he found out about it, but he had a 36-hour head start, if I had to guess.”

Dunn’s becoming senator for two terms and his subsequent decade spent on Beacon Hill as legal counsel to the Senate brought the childhood friends closer than ever, Burke says, recalling in detail Dunn’s office at the Statehouse and shared moments together.

“You could look right in at him, and he’d either wave you in or tell you he had work to do,” Burke remembers. “We must have sat in that office hundreds of hours over 10 years. We’d laugh and joke. He had a fantastic sense of humor. ‘Are you dispensing curbside justice,’ I’d ask, and off we’d go.”

Even after Dunn returned to private practice of law in Holyoke, they never lost touch with other, Burke says. The back-and-forth texts, sharing political observations and jokes, didn’t cease, even as death drew near, Burke says.

Dunn’s passing on Sept. 11 at just 64 years old was as impactful for Burke as the deaths of McHugh, Kelly and Ross, all of them children of Holyoke, he says.

McHugh, who died in November 1989 at age 53, was a veteran education activist who served as a Massachusetts Turnpike Authority commissioner and member of the Board of Regents of Higher Education. Kelly, a former superintendent of the Holyoke Public Schools and the Soldiers' Home, had died a month before McHugh of a heart attack at age 56.

Ross, who was Burke’s chief of staff for most of his Senate term, died suddenly at the age of 60 on the day of the city’s 60th St. Patrick’s Parade in March 2011. A longtime member of the parade committee and an insurance agent by profession, Ross was active in civic affairs for decades.

“Obviously there were others, but those four I mention meant an awful lot to me,” says Burke. “I knew them well. I watched what they did. None of it was ever really to help themselves. They were always into helping other people and trying to make the city a better place. At the end of the day, you can’t lose too many more.”

“Marty was serious when he had to be and always kind,” says Burke. “He had the all the good attributes of a human being.” Including loyalty.

“If you were his friend, he would defend you if he had to…until proven otherwise,” Burke says. “You didn’t have to earn his loyalty, he knew. He had this instinct to know whether you were going to be loyal or not.” So much of what Dunn stood for in politics – like loyalty and kindness and respect for all, even those on the opposite side of the aisle – seem be vanishing attributes, fears Burke.

Of late, he adds, Burke’s watched a political divisiveness enter the city he loves, reflective of what’s happening on the national scene as well and the antithesis of the things he says his friend, Dunn, stood for in politics. Burke spent time over the past six months in Holyoke, campaigning for U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal in his race against current Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse, and, from what he witnessed, the current mayor’s loss should not have been unexpected. Burke dismisses it as being reflective of an “old Holyoke vs. new Holyoke” interplay.

As much as the face of Holyoke has changed over the past 40 years with its burgeoning Latinx population, Burke says, the wants and needs of its citizenry have pretty much stayed the same: good schools and education for their children; an affordable community in which to live; a solid business and industrial tax base; and leaders who care about the people and put the community’s needs over their own personal gains. Leaders very much like Marty Dunn.

Cynthia G. Simison is executive editor of The Republican. She may be reached by email to [email protected].

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