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COMMUNITY ORGANIZER THOMAS GAUDETTE, 75

The beauty of Thomas Gaudette was that he never chose a subtle approach.

Shortly after forming the Northwest Community Organization in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood in the early 1960s, Mr. Gaudette adopted some aggressive tactics in his fight to save the community from slum landlords, drug houses and general deterioration. At one point, he sent a truck full of garbage to decorate the sidewalk of a tavern owned by the wife of an uncooperative ward leader.

While his community group’s efforts weren’t always instantly successful, Mr. Gaudette felt the most important part of his work had been achieved: The people he helped organize began to appreciate their power.

“I don’t know how many houses have been rehabilitated . . . but I can tell you about individuals, how they’ve changed,” Mr. Gaudette once told a reporter. “Once, they were fearful, scared, hesitant. It was impossible to do anything. . . . Then all of a sudden they were not afraid, not fearful. `By God,’ they say, `We can whip the enemy.’ “

Mr. Gaudette, 75, an early organizer in Chicago who was trained by Saul Alinsky, died Saturday of a brain tumor in his Beverly home.

In a sermon to be delivered at Mr. Gaudette’s funeral service Wednesday, Monsignor Jack Egan, one of Mr. Gaudette’s fellow community organizers, tried to demonstrate his appreciation for the community activist’s decades of work for Chicago.

“Tom Gaudette was an angry man in the finest sense. He hated to see people get pushed around and spent most of his life trying his level best to correct the ills brought on by prejudice, discrimination and poverty,” said Egan, who now runs DePaul University’s office of community affairs and was previously an Alinsky colleague and the Archdiocese of Chicago’s key crusader on behalf of the inner city.

Egan said Mr. Gaudette “fought for the poor and dispossessed in every neighborhood in which he worked. He learned well and was sought after as a consultant to many organizations.”

A Boston College graduate with a bachelor’s degree in business, Mr. Gaudette originally came to Chicago to work as a traffic manager at the Admiral Co. In his free time, he was president of the Chatham Community Organization and began to build a presence as an aggressive leader who was willing to stand up against white flight and discriminatory real estate practices in his neighborhood.

At the urging of Alinsky, Mr. Gaudette agreed to leave Admiral and take a job as president of the new Northwest Community Organization at half his Admiral salary. Working with Alinsky and Egan, he later formed the Chatham and Austin community organizations and helped found the Pacific Institute for Community Organization on the West Coast, which trains community organizers across the country.

In his many roles with community organizations, Mr. Gaudette mobilized residents to address important problems the community was facing, including substandard housing, real estate panic peddling, overcrowded and inadequate schools, declining business areas and mutual fears and suspicions of ethnic and minority groups.

His tactics were often dramatic, such as sending busloads of residents to the doorstep of a slum landlord or a city alderman. And he was relentless in getting people to think about the cause of community problems so deep-rooted that many had given up on correcting them long ago. Under Mr. Gaudette’s leadership, low and moderate-income people began to see those problems as fixable.

“Tom intimately touched the lives of hundreds of people,” said Ron Snyder, a project director with the Pacific Institute. “He had the ability to sit with folks and hear very simple concerns and begin to draw a picture of what’s possible when people come together and start looking at what can be done.”

After helping start several community organizations, Mr. Gaudette formed his own consulting group to help train organizers nationwide. But throughout his career, he was always a teacher. In the 1970s, he ran a community organizing school for activists around the world out of a rundown storefront in the Austin area.

Mr. Gaudette is survived by his wife, Kathryn; a daughter, Marie; six sons, Thomas, Francis, Paul, Daniel, James and John; and five grandchildren.

A memorial mass will be said at 10 a.m. Wednesday in Christ the King Catholic Church, 9235 S. Hamilton Ave., Chicago.