End-of-year custom demands we gaze back over the year just past and consider the deaths of those who led exceptional public lives. Perhaps it might be more fruitful to recall their chief aims in life, suggesting causes that we who remain can champion and celebrate in their wake.

In that respect, there’s much work to be done because many of the prominent Wacoans who died in 2009 did great things on behalf of our community.

Frances Sturgis, who died last spring at age 93, ever reminds us of the picturesque qualities we’d all like for our city and the surrounding area. So many outsiders are surprised at the beauty that our area holds. But this gentle yet determined founder of Keep Waco Beautiful knew such beauty did not come about easily. For example, Indian Spring Park, which Sturgis helped clear, was once overgrown with weeds and Johnson grass.

The developer of the Waco Hilton said one key reason he decided to build the hotel downtown back in the 1980s was because of the work Sturgis and others were doing along neglected parts of the Brazos.

Joe Ward, who died last year at 92, represented the very best qualities in civic leadership. This former council member and mayor quietly but resolutely headed off racial strife in our town by encouraging and appealing to others to peacefully integrate our schools and shops when the idea was hardly in the mainstream in the South.

Considering some of the racism of the era, Ward’s work represents a profile in courage, nothing less.

Roane Lacy Sr., 92, who built Plantation Foods into a turkey-processing business employing 1,800, and William Lacy Clifton, 89, who ran the local pharmaceutical company Behrens Drug, were examples of smart businessmen who never forgot the importance of giving back to community through public service and individual acts of philanthropy.

Former Mayor and longtime businessman J.R. Closs, who died at 82, represented the best of Central Texas, displaying humility, foresight and pride while pursuing programs paving the way for our future, including economic development along the Brazos.

Sound business principles and sense of community describe Spencer Brown, 88, former chairman, president and CEO of Extraco Bank, built up from a cotton compress and warehousing company. Friends and family were able to boast that when Brown died last year, the institution he created was still strong, employing more than 400 and serving 150,000 customers in five counties — and at a time when banks elsewhere in the land were faltering.

Longtime restaurateur Nick Klaras, who died at age 80, reminds us of the old-fashioned concept of hospitality — especially the kind that comes when people sit down to break bread together — as well as the pride one can have in one’s ethnic background, even as he prides himself as, first and foremost, an American.

Last but not least, Paul J. Meyer, 81 when he died, conjures up the epitome of the undaunted businessman. By Meyer’s count, that involved the startup of 176 companies, not all of them successful. He also highlights the rich variety of causes that can be embraced by the most inquisitive and adventurous of philanthropists.

Meyer’s causes ranged from Carpenter’s Hammer Ministry, which repairs roofs and builds ramps for the impoverished, to efforts to help the homeless through his work with Mission Waco, to the establishing of the Waco Mammoth Site, to which he and wife Jane donated $1.5 million.

These are but a few of the local men and women lost to time last year. Examples of yet other productive and charitable lives exist. Are we worthy of them? What will each of us do in 2010 to follow their leads?