Heaven must be gathering angels again. This time it called Jake Gunther. They must be running low on iconoclasts with character up there.

It seems everyone has a story or two about Jake. Could he have touched everyone in our sprawling county?

I first met Jake Gunther in a late-night telephone call back in the 1980s. He was a local administrative judge then, handling mundane matters like traffic violations that are a big deal to people who are cited for them.

My husband, Jim, had been pulled over on the Forestburgh Road for a missing front license plate, shortly after the purchase of our new minivan. The dealer had not provided one and we didn’t know it was the law in New York. The local patrols did, and they wrote Jim a ticket.

It was not until the next summer that we found out a summons had been issued for Jim’s arrest for failure to respond to the license plate ticket. The ticket had been paid in the interim but the bureaucratic maze had lost track of it.

So Jake Gunther was on the phone with me as I rocked my baby to sleep in our Monticello bungalow. He was taking the time to make things right. He had found the missing summons in his office files and followed through with the State DMV to wipe out the warrant.

In the course of the phone call, the subject of local bureaucracies and politics came up. Jake, a fellow Democrat, was considering a run for the Assembly, it turned out. My husband was then a Democratic District Leader in Lower Manhattan. Jake was curious about the political machinery. It was his nature to ask questions, as if he expected everyone to have something interesting to tell him.

Jim and I were both impressed by his obvious intelligence and his persistent competence. He was not about to let a wrong go un-righted if he could help it.

It was not until a few years later that we actually met Jake. We took our children to the same local day camp and I reminded him of our phone volleys. He had a politician’s memory, instantly recalling the details of our snafu. I like to think that my husband gave him valuable advice about the political process but I know Jake Gunther’s own drive and sense of duty would have carried him anywhere he wanted to go.

A lot of people are suspect of politicians. It is easy to assign them petty motives for their service. It is my theory that the powers-that-be like us to be suspect. It is a way of keeping control; disillusioning the masses. If we don’t think we have the power to change things, we won’t.

Jake Gunther was one of those rare birds who actually cared about his society and believed he could have a positive effect. Just believing, of course, won’t make it so. Hard work, persistence, and a genuine interest in people and their lives is the formula for change. Jake had it all, and a love of family, to boot.

It is hard to imagine he could do more good in heaven, but who are we to know?