He was the right man for the job — and he loved it.

And they said so Tuesday, over and over again, as news of his death, at age 90, spread through the community. They were glad, they told each other, that he hadn’t suffered long. He broke a hip two weeks ago Saturday but never really recovered from the surgery.

But his personality and that gentle, caring attitude didn’t change during those two weeks. He was a gentleman, hospital nurses said, gracious and loving to everybody, still the same man who’d been elected mayor three times from 1955 to 1963 and no doubt would have been elected again if he hadn’t stopped running. He loved being mayor.

But not more than he loved his wife, Frances.

Foster Owen found that out “during one of my really thrilling moments” on his job as assistant city manager.

“We were interviewing all the living mayors for the annual report,” he said. This time it was more like a report on the century of Salisbury government.

“Linwood had the most impeccable scrapbooks of all his years in office. We went through them page by page, and he reminisced about the late ’50s and early ’60s when he was mayor. It was a critical time for Salisbury. The Spencer shops were closing,” and other big things were happening, and the mayor was busy.

But it was apparent that Linwood loved what he did.

“He loved being mayor more than anything,” his wife told Owen, but after his third term, she told him, “You’re going to have to choose the mayor’s role or me. If you run again, I’m going to divorce you.”

And she and Linwood and their daughters, Frances Lynn and Betty, who were there, all laughed.

“But he didn’t run again,” Foster said.

“Linwood was a hands-on mayor,” he added, “and it’s only been in recent times again — as we’ve had our two female mayors that were not employed in other things — that we’ve returned to that hands-on type of person who is almost a daily fixture in City Hall. Others all had other full time jobs, but he was very much involved.

“And he loved to talk about it.”

Former city manager Francis Luther, longtime childhood neighbor on South Fulton Street, went to work for the city while Foil was mayor.

Salisbury was lucky to have him come along at just the right time, Luther said. “We were still on shaky ground financially when he got on the council.” But Foil and several others — Ernest Hardin, John Isenhour — were “very diligent in trying to improve Salisbury’s situation and did.”

If you inquired around the state in the late ’50s and early ’60s, he said, you discovered that Salisbury was known as a place of excellent municipal government.

“He went to municipal meetings and learned everything he could” about running a city, adds Paul Bernhardt, who served with him as a member of the council and was later mayor himself.

“And,” he adds, “he was an extremely gentle person. He was nice to everyone who came to that council. He took their problems to heart and tried to solve them, and he was always courteous. He never lost his temper. And he’d been in the grocery and television and appliance business so long he knew almost everyone that came before the council.

Luther said he learned those traits from his parents, particularly his mother.

“I first knew them in 1929 when we moved there, and we were very close to the family.

“Linwood’s mother was such an extraordinary person. She knew what was right and how to raise a family. When I wanted to go barefooted, I’d as soon ask Mrs. Foil as my mother. Linwood came out of that environment with that kind of principles, and he had a lot of sensitivity to people. He felt with them, bled for them.”

And E.L. Foil and Sons grocery on the corner South Fulton Street and Ridge Avenue was an institution.

“I think his station was there, in that store,” Luther said. He enjoyed the South Fulton Street neighborhood and the people who came in to buy groceries — and get the news and visit a while.

“He was a down-to-earth and forthright, one-on-one individual. I don’t know that he had any enemies,” Luther said.

“Everybody shopped for groceries with him,” Bernhardt said. They made a lot of the things they sold — pies, cakes, salads — in the grocery area and added televisions quickly to the appliances they also carried. “He was kind of a pioneer in selling televisions in Salisbury. Evidently he had vision that it was a coming market.”

One of his regular customers was Mary Hanford, wife of florist John Hanford and mother of Liddy Hanford Dole. A resident of South Fulton, she shopped regularly at Foil’s.

“I’d just call, and the meat cutter would take my order and cut the meat just the way I wanted it, and then it was delivered and put on my kitchen table,” she remembers. “The bill was with it, and I checked it and put it on a stick file, and occasionally my husband would look at that little stick file and he’d say, ‘I must go pay Foil’s,’ and Linwood would give him a cigar or a Coke and they’d have a pleasant chat. I never had to handle the cash. They were wonderful friends, and he was an outstanding man.”

He understood the real need to have community leaders on the city council, Owen said, so he and other council members would go out and actively encourage other town leaders to run for office, not because they were against something or had a cause.