During northern Ohio’s “Big Snow” that started Thanksgiving weekend of 1950 and virtually shut down Cleveland, Mayor Thomas Aloysius Burke ordered the city’s service director to hire every available contractor who owned a bulldozer, tractor or plow to clear the impassable streets, regardless of cost. That take-charge attitude characterized his life. Born in 1898 to a prominent Cleveland surgeon and his wife, young Tom was expected to pursue a career in medicine. He chose law instead, graduating from Holy Cross College (B.A., 1920) and Western Reserve University (LL.B., 1923), and establishing a private practice. In 1930, he was appointed assistant county prosecutor, resigning seven years later to run for a municipal judgeship. He lost, vowing never again to enter a race for public office. But that decision would change.

When Frank Lausche was elected Cleveland mayor in 1941, he appointed Burke as his law director. When Lausche was elected governor in 1945, Burke filled his remaining term as mayor. Running as an independent Democrat, in four successive mayoral elections he would flatten his opponents, including former safety director Eliot Ness. His administration instituted a large capital-improvement program, including a lakefront airport later named in his honor, the first downtown airport in the country. In 1954, Burke had a brief stay in Washington, appointed to fill the term of the late U.S. Senator Robert A. Taft. Later that year, he ran for the seat but lost by a margin so close that the votes were recounted. He attributed his ultimate defeat to a statement he had made criticizing the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, a position that did not play well in a few southern Ohio districts, and returned to his position as senior partner of the firm Burke, Haber & Berwick. Burke died in 1971 at age 73.