And so the torch passes.
From Tony Verga to Ann-Margaret Ferrante — from one generation to the next, from autumn to summer — youth will be served, and youth will serve.
It will serve "more aggressively," if nothing else, Ferrante promised yesterday in an interview as she enjoyed the relief of the certainty that, at 36, she will take the 5th Essex seat in the legislature next January to represent Gloucester, Rockport and Essex under the watchful gaze of the Sacred Cod that hangs above the House chamber.
It is the House seat that Verga, 73, held for 14 years, and surrenders grudgingly to the daughter of Joseph and Frances Ferrante, a couple that Verga and his wife Adrienne have always considered friends — if not bosom buddies — in the Sicilian-American community that has grown up around the waterfront and fishing fleet over the 85 years.
Although her victory was convincing — minus the 1,058 votes (worth 13.3 percent of turnout) that were cast for third place finisher Astrid AfKlinteberg, Ferrante was chosen by 54.1 percent of the rest, 6,882 — Verga did not concede defeat on primary night; nor did he congratulate his conqueror yesterday.
"To be fair," Ferrante said she had dropped her cell phone into a puddle in the hurley-burley of election night. Still, congratulators who had tried got through. Congressman John Tierney got through, so did state Rep. Mary Grant of Beverly, and so did state Rep. Robert DeLeo.
A Democrat from Winthrop, DeLeo is a power in the House where Ferrante will work.
He is the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee where the money, scaled in multibillions, is divvied up to end-of-the line places like Gloucester, Essex and Rockport, where the focus is on the thousands and the bottom line is modest millions.
DeLeo maintains his position as the head of Ways and Means only with the indulgence of the one member of the house with superior, indeed, peak power — the speaker himself, Salvatore DiMasi of Boston's North End, the big-city version of Gloucester's Sicilian West End.
In the fluid distribution of power within the mysterious House that DiMasi rules, the ruler's hat hangs unstably on his head, coveted, say those who should know, by DeLeo and another would-be speaker, John Rogers of Norwood, who serves DiMasi and his members as majority leader.
Speaker DiMasi seemed to mobilize all available resources to save Verga from Ferrante's insurgency, organizing a party of lobbyists to raise a political battle budget for Verga that pushed spending on the campaign to more than $100,000. Most of Verga's funding came from Boston or at least outside the district, and became an issue that might have cost him dearly.
Having lost with Verga, DiMasi, like his fallen footsoldier, deigned not to connect with Ferrante or even respond to calls from this newspaper for comment on the political defeat he and his lobbyist friends had suffered on Cape Ann.
It is a loss that hurts because it is so unusual. In the four years since DiMasi became speaker, Verga is only the second member of his leadership to be felled. Indeed, so loaded are the quivers of the incumbents in today's elective system that few even try to take out a sitting member of the party in power.
Of the 140 Democrats, barely two dozen had intra-party competition. Only Verga did not survive (though the scandalized Dianne Wilkerson was also ousted from a Senate seat from Boston).
So Ferrante enters this obtuse, seductive, alternative universe isolated high on Beacon Hill and overlooking the world it rules with a certain cache.
To be sure, it comes not just from her surprising victory, but also from her close workings with Congressman Tierney and U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and an undisputed expertise in the ecology and economy of commercial fishing.
It was this expertise last year that brought Ferrante into Gov. Deval Patrick's inner sanctum, where he'd gathered other representatives of the industry — including Verga — to form a political strategy to confront federal regulations aimed at keeping fishermen from fishing until more groundfish species had time to recover.
It was at that meeting that Ferrante, a lawyer with a land use and marine industrial practice, outlined the possibilities of seeking a declaration of an economic disaster. Adopted by the governor, the initiative morphed through the political system into the $14.3 million federal earmark Kennedy and Sen. John Kerry brought home this spring to be distributed to the fishing people of Massachusetts.
Not present at that meeting were legislative leaders.
Ferrante has never met DiMasi, who will begin the next session still in the pinnacle of power, still looking warily over both shoulders.
When she is introduced to the speaker, who certainly never wanted to meet her as Verga's replacement, Ferrante said she will that she will shake his hand with a proposition, "How can we work together to help Cape Ann?"
She said she sees an advantage of having effectively won her seat in September, weeks ahead of the other new members who will not secure their places until November.
Her counterpart, the still new mayor Carolyn Kirk, is impatient to begin the new working relationship. Kirk said when she visited the victory party Tuesday night at the Gloucester House, she told Ferrante, "I need to put her to work right away."
Ferrante said she is ready to go.
"My style is full study, and building coalitions," she said. "It's nice to have the extra head start."
Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com
