The Waco Business League hasn’t bestowed a lot of lifetime achievement awards in its three decades. Its first came last year, honoring insurance pioneer, philanthropist and political activist Bernard Rapoport, now 92.

Tuesday night, the league made it two, bestowing the honor on Tommy Salome, who turns 78 on Thursday.

Between the two, we understand why this honor is deemed rare by our city’s top business folks. It’s because those who rate such honors also happen to be rare, utilizing their genius for business in ways that go beyond private enrichment, focusing on bettering their communities and helping those most in need.

Certainly it’s true with Tommy Salome, the epitome of what our nation and our town seek from the finest of citizenry. The son of a Lebanese immigrant, he worked hard in the family grocery business. He studied hard, too, at Baylor University to become an accountant, married his college sweetheart, served in the Air Force as a navigator and eventually took a job at M. Lipsitz & Co., the local scrap metal business. His stay at Lipsitz has spanned more than half a century.

So what can be more of a success story than that?

How about this: What makes Tommy Salome a terrific role model for our up-and-coming business brethren is his quiet but solid work as a civic leader, making a difference in key positions, often at critical junctures in our history, for Goodwill Industries, the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce, the Heart of Texas Fairgrounds and others. He now chairs the Waco Foundation.

He has come a long way since his days with the Junior Chamber of Commerce when he and chums similarly destined for civic leadership lobbed rolls at one another in the Raleigh ballroom. Those who know say he has a vivid talent for cutting through the chaff, finding the real merit of an argument or dilemma, then forging a success of it. Wife Martha displays the same attributes.

Among so many other things, Salome co-chaired the $4.4 million fundraising drive for the Doris Miller YMCA, in the process strengthening a foundation for others to build upon in poverty-stricken East Waco. He rates it as one of his proudest achievements.

Many of us remember his fundraising for the new Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce building — the first environmentally green chamber building in the nation (named the Salome Commerce Center in his honor). At the time, he struggled because of painful knee problems.

Friend Stanley Strum told a Trib editorial board member that Salome soldiered along “like a tough, old NFL player,” ignoring the agony and raising more than $7 million for both the building and the charting of the chamber’s strategic plan.

Why the success? “He first makes his contribution, and he doesn’t ask anyone to do what he hasn’t done,” Strum said. “He is so credible, it’s hard to tell him no.”

And why devote time to such pursuits? Salome tells us the answer goes back a good ways: “The thing that most influenced me was, as a young man, the Waco Jaycees had a shopping day with orphans from the Methodist Children’s Home. We’d have lunch with the kids, then each of us would take two or three shopping downtown. That set the course for me.”

It’s not a course many of us might take the trouble to pursue. But in our book, that makes Salome all the more worthy of Tuesday’s rare honor and our community’s gratitude.