"Believe."

Abdullah Khambaty

December 14, 2015 - On Saturday, December 19, 2015 the City of Gloucester (MA) paid tribute to our own Abdullah A. Khambaty, establishing an Extraordinary Service Award in his name. He was a longtime Gloucester city councilor. He also will be the first recipient.

Khambaty service awards
to recognize contributions
to city's civic or cultural life

City Council President Paul McGeary said the council wholeheartedly supported the idea of honoring Khambaty for his service to the city as a public official as well as his private support of nonprofits and cultural institutions.

Future awards will be given to individuals or groups who make an outstanding contribution to the civic or cultural life of Gloucester.

Khambaty’s wife, Lynne Khambaty, said this first award will be presented on her husband’s birthday. Khambaty, who died July, 2014, would have been 85.

Khambaty served the city for more than 30 years, primarily on the City Council — he served as council president for many years — as well as on the charter commission. He also served on the School Committee.

“I’m very proud, and he was very proud, of the city. He loved Gloucester and he felt the city adopted him just as he adopted the city as his very own,” Lynne Khambaty said of her husband, who was born in Bombay, India, now Mumbai. “He wanted to help make things better if he could and I believe he really did.”

Khambaty came to the United States as a teen to attend Chauncy Hall Preparatory School in Boston. In 1954, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Tufts University and later took courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Rhode Island.

Lynne shared a colorful story about how the two met. “We met in a church choir in Providence, Rhode Island. He had a beautiful tenor voice. His landlady said he was too loud singing in the shower and told him there was a church nearby and he should go sing there, and he did — and that’s when we met,” she said.

In 1963, he and his family moved to Magnolia when he began his long career with the United Shoe Machinery Corp. in Beverly.

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