A Jewish joke in Mayor Tom Menino’s eulogy? It was his idea.
But Mitch Weiss, Menino’s last chief of staff, didn’t have one — until the moments before it was his turn to speak.
“If the mayor could, he would say, ‘Get the Jewish kid a stool,’ ” Weiss blurted out to a crowd that roared with laughter at Menino’s memorial service this month.
The mayor was always ribbing Weiss about something, and he wanted one last parting shot, tickled by the thought of Weiss sitting through a Catholic Mass and learning the prayers.
In the weeks since we’ve said goodbye to our longtime mayor, what’s got tongues wagging is how Weiss, out of all the people Menino had known, got to deliver his eulogy. More important, was there a message in the messenger?
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Weiss was Menino’s sixth chief of staff and held that role for four years — a blip in an administration that lasted two decades and a political career that stretched even longer.
They were an unlikely pairing: a 71-year-old old-school politician from Hyde Park and a 38-year-old Harvard Business School graduate not from around here.
Until Weiss stepped into the pulpit of the Most Precious Blood Church, most people had never heard or seen him, which is what made Weiss and Menino a perfect match. Weiss prefers to work behind the scenes, while Menino liked to be front and center.
Weiss kept such a low profile that he likes to recount how a TV newscast describing the scene outside the Menino home after his passing mistakenly identified Weiss as one of the mayor’s grandchildren.
Even more intriguing is whether Weiss deprived Bill Clinton of saying a few words at the funeral. That rumor has been ferociously bouncing around town. Catholics are sticklers about the eulogy — and they prefer one per Mass.
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I’m told that’s not what happened. At one point, the Menino family wondered about Clinton’s availability to speak, but nothing was formalized in the whirl of funeral arrangements. In the end, the former president went to Faneuil Hall, where Menino was laying in state, to pay his respects.
Which brings us back to the beginning: So how did a staffer little-known outside City Hall get the honor of doing Menino’s eulogy?
To find out, I headed off to Harvard Business School, where Weiss now teaches entrepreneurship. Sitting in his office, he recounted how two weeks before Menino’s Oct. 30 death, the former mayor asked Weiss to do the eulogy.
Besides the Jewish joke, the mayor requested that Weiss bring the “music.” That’s what his old boss would say when he liked a speech, and it was Weiss who wrote the mayor’s major policy speeches.
In the quiet moments before and after visits to Menino at the hospital, Weiss began taking notes on his iPhone. Three days before the funeral, Weiss began writing, the words — and tears — flowing out of him.
The seven-minute eulogy covered a lot of ground. How Menino offered him the chief of staff post over a meal of tripe. How Team Menino wasn’t a machine because it “had your big, beating heart.” How the mayor would pester Weiss’s 2-year-old daughter, Hannah, for ice cream.
“I can still see her shaking her head, ‘No,’ ” Weiss said.
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“It’s a good thing,” he continued, “she didn’t need building permits.”
By most accounts, the eulogy was a hit. The Menino family and Team Menino loved it, but so did strangers who tracked Weiss down at Harvard, saying his remarks made them cry.
“No, he made you cry,” Weiss would say, referring to Menino. “I just put words to it.”
Some folks wonder if Menino, in tapping Weiss, was making one last political statement, handing the baton to the next generation of city leaders. Was this the beginning of a Weiss campaign?
“I’m not angling to run for public office,” said Weiss. “And definitely that’s not what the mayor was thinking.”
Still, Weiss wants to change the world, and that’s why he is at Harvard to pioneer a public entrepreneurship course, one that brings together private entrepreneurs and public leaders to solve problems. Think along the lines of Bridj: the novel pop-up bus service that supplements mass transit.
Last week Weiss’s daughter asked if the mayor was still sick. He had been telling her that Menino was sleeping. But his wife nudged him, saying it was time to be straight.
“No,” Weiss told her. “He died like the flowers.”
Shirley Leung is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @leung.