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Every Sunday of his boyhood, Rich Mucci’s parents drove him from Acton to a house in Winchester that belonged to his grandparents, Arthur and Carmella Montuori.
Mass first, then the Montuori place, where his mother’s seven siblings and their children turned up, too. He did not play youth sports on Sundays. He did not see his friends. He went where the family went.
“You didn’t play sports. You didn’t go to friends’ houses,” Mucci said. “You went to your grandparents’ house.”
Mucci, a 46-year-old trial attorney who has lived in Winchester for 24 years, has been named the town’s 2026 Citizen of the Year by the Winchester Chamber of Commerce.
The honor, voted on by past living recipients, will be presented May 20 at a chamber dinner at 5:30 p.m. at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester. He will also ride in the town’s En Ka parade.
Mucci is the 47th person to receive the honor.
Mucci is one of the younger people ever to receive the recognition, a fact he keeps trying to talk his way out of.
“Embarrassing, to be honest with you,” he said.
He learned of the award at the chamber’s annual lunch when its leader described this year’s honoree as someone “not afraid to dress up as a hot dog” — or, on another occasion, “as a chili pepper.”
Mucci — with a chuckle — said he did not see it coming, even as the descriptions narrowed.
The Sundays at the Montuori house explain a lot of what came after. His mother, Rosalie, had grown up in the North End of Boston, the second of eight, and the family stayed close.
When Mucci finished Holy Cross in Worcester, where he double-majored in history and sociology, and enrolled at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, he picked Winchester to live in because the aunts and uncles and cousins were already there.
He met his wife, Stacy, a teacher in Dedham, in 2004 and bought a house in town the next year. They have two children, Ben and Katherine, ages 16 and 11.
The career took the long way home. Mucci spent about five years as a prosecutor in the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office, supervising in Lowell and Framingham, where he won the John F. Kerry Award. Two civil-practice firms in Boston followed.
About 15 years ago, he opened his own firm, the Law Offices of Richard Mucci, on Shore Road in Winchester. The practice spans business and civil litigation, construction, employment, real estate, personal injury, family law and criminal defense.
The quiet work and the loud work
The work outside the courtroom is what put him on the chamber’s ballot. For 15 years, Mucci has served on the board of the Council of Social Concern, the Woburn-Winchester nonprofit, including a term as president. Together with the En Ka Food Pantry, the organization runs a food pantry serving roughly 2,000 households. It operates a child care center for underprivileged children. Each Thanksgiving, it distributes about 400 holiday baskets.
“They serve a population that is in need and so vulnerable, and they do it quietly and with dignity and respect,” Mucci said.
The council is the quiet work. The Rotary is the loud work, and around 2012 the loud work began wearing a costume.
Mucci, then on his way to becoming Winchester Rotary Club president and a Paul Harris Fellow, founded the Winchester Chili Fest as a club fundraiser. It ran about six years before the COVID-19 pandemic ended it.
The hot dog suit came out for chamber events. He has sat on the chamber board for more than a decade.
“I kind of live by the motto of Rotary — service above self,” he said.
When COVID-19 shut Winchester down, Mucci and Dot Butler, herself a past Citizen of the Year, co-founded Winchester Together, a kindness movement that delivered random treats to residents while steering business to struggling local merchants. He helped start Stroll Week, a Christmas event, and Winchester Spirit Night, a fall event. The merchants stayed on his mind.
“There are so many great businesses that do so much for the community,” he said. “There’d be nothing without the help and generosity of the small businesses.”
The pandemic pulled him into government, too. Mucci ran for the Winchester Select Board to act as a bridge between town hall and small-business owners on reopening policy and served one term, two years of it as chair.
He declined to seek re-election. He remains a Town Meeting member.
“It was like having a full-time second job,” he said. “I really missed the service and the charitable work that I enjoyed more, quite frankly.”
The kitchen table
The instinct for both — the politics and the charity — runs in the family. Rosalie Mucci, a former teacher, spends her days doing the small kind of volunteer work that does not get awards: raising money for a coffee-shop acquaintance whose home was destroyed in a hurricane, distributing Dunkin’ gift cards to people on Arch Street in Boston, organizing shoe drives.
His father, Richard, who worked at Fidelity in the insurance industry, has stayed involved with the Boys and Girls Club of Nantucket, where the family has long had ties. Mucci had his own early brush with public life — a college internship for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, working in then-Sen. Joe Biden’s office — but the model that stuck was the one at the kitchen table.
He has also been president of the Winchester Swim and Tennis Club for the last seven years, a stretch that included building a new facility.
The past Citizen of the Year recipients Mucci recites include longtime public works director Jay Gill, former Book Ends owner Judy Manzo, retired police Sgt. Dan Perenick, Cathy Alexander and Butler. He has trouble placing himself in that company.
“I’m probably one of the younger Citizens of the Year ever,” he said. “Embarrassing, to be honest with you.”
He pushes the focus elsewhere.
“I think of myself as just being part of a couple of great teams in town that do a lot of great community service projects,” he said. “As much as I won this award, it’s really about those organizations and the people involved.”
Mucci sees a thread that runs through everything he signs up for in town.
“Family-oriented, community fellowship,” he said. “It usually involves food, because I love food.”
Beyond the Griffin Museum dinner and the parade, Mucci is leading planning for the Winchester Rotary Club’s centennial project — a stone, landscaped outdoor amphitheater the club hopes to build for its 100th anniversary next April.
It would be a permanent fixture in town, the kind of place where the festivals and fundraisers and cookouts that have defined his civic life could keep happening long after he stops wearing the costumes.
Asked what he would tell his 25-year-old self, the answer came without ceremony.
“I’d be right where I am — living in Winchester, happy, with a family, immersed in a small community, trying to do the best I can every day to better people’s lives here,” he said.
Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He runs The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.
