By Thom Smith
PALM BEACH — Standing room only. Bill Brooks would have loved it. After all, the more than 500 who packed the chancel at St. Edward’s Church in Palm Beach Jan. 25 were his “congregation.” Not because they were there to honor the departed former priest, educator, TV station boss and politician, but because they represented everything he loved and worked for: diversity, compassion, dignity, love, service and the triumph of the human spirit.
Brooks died Jan. 16 at age 76 while on a cruise to the Panama Canal, after battling lymphoma for two years.
He knew it would be a tough fight, but he believed profoundly that all things were possible: After all, his beloved Boston Red Sox had won not one but two World Series in the last decade.
Indeed, for the scrappy firefighter’s son from Boston’s Dorchester community, all things were possible. High school buddies scoffed when Brooks, who could swear with the best of ’em, announced he intended to become a priest. But he did.
Three decades later, while serving as a teacher and counselor at Cardinal Newman High School, he again stunned friends by resigning from the priesthood because the Roman Catholic Church refused to condemn the Vietnam War.
He continued his calling, just without clerical collar. He married Martha Finnigan, his beloved Muffy, a former nun, and went to work for Crisis Line, an emergency telephone counseling and suicide prevention program. That led to his hosting a public service talk show on WPTV-Channel 5, which led to a job in 1975 as the station’s public service director.
Four years later he was running the station, building it into one of NBC’s most-watched affiliates.
More importantly, he used the station as a bully pulpit, believing it should use its power to help those in need.
The Food for Families program he created will hence bear his name. He chaired the Urban League and the United Way. He sat on the boards of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Palm Beach Fellowship of Christians and Jews, the Palm Beach Chamber of Commerce, the West Palm Beach Centennial Committee and the Alzheimer’s Association.
When he reached Scripps-Howard’s mandatory retirement age of 65 in 1998, Brooks pulled another surprise: He won a seat on the Palm Beach Town Council. He held it for eight years.
“Bill needs nobody to speak for him,” the Most Rev. Robert Mulvee, retired bishop of Providence, R.I., said in his eulogy to his old friend. “His life speaks for itself. He was a good and decent man who all his life did his very, very best to love God and to love his neighbor.”
“People sensed his joy,” Mulvee said. “People sensed that he cared. … He had a down-to-earth, honest-to-God belief that we were all family. … Bill had no boundaries to his love. He never lost that smile. He never lost that twinkle in his eye. He never complained.”
Christine Brooks Sullivan, Bill’s niece, summed up the day by quoting from one of her uncle’s favorite historical figures, Winston Churchill: “We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”
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