Bill Chew is leaving San Jose. Unless you hang out at San Jose City Hall, that might not mean much to you. So let me elaborate. The fit guy on roller skates — the man in the cowboy hat who wore white and ran for mayor — is leaving town, at least for a good while. We’ll be poorer for it.

At the age of 65 — he turns 66 next month — Chew is headed south to Long Beach for family and financial reasons. He says he’s lost a gig as a live-in caretaker in San Jose, forcing him to contend with an outrageous rental market.

“I am going to Long Beach to my brother’s house and we’ll see from there,” he told me. “I went to school at Long Beach State, and I liked it there. It was pretty cool.”

Chew holds out the possibility he might return, but for now he’s packing up and departing in his 1990 Mazda van (180,000 miles, third engine.) He leaves a quirky legacy with this footnote: He loves San Jose, particularly its sidewalks.

Pole vaulter

A fine athlete who moved to California from Illinois when he was in ninth grade, Chew was a pole vault champion at Long Beach State. He came to San Jose in the mid-1970s, when a group of athletes, including Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner, were preparing for the Olympics at San Jose City College.

Chew wound up liking San Jose and decided to stay. For 14 years, the political science graduate worked for his father at a plastic pipe business in Milpitas. He had a later gig as a door-to-door Kirby vacuum salesman.

It was a rebounder, a small trampoline, that first exposed him to the motoring classes. To keep fit and burn fat, Chew bounced up and down on the device at Moorpark and Bascom avenues, not far from San Jose City College. Drivers noticed.

Roller-skating

But what gave Chew his most renown was his roller-skating. For more than two decades — 1990 to 2013, by his account — he got around on roller skates, generally wearing white. He says he accumulated more than 300,000 miles before deciding he needed to relearn how to walk. He now wears dark clothes.

Chew first ran for mayor in 1990, getting 1 percent in a primary that featured Frank Fiscalini, Susan Hammer and Shirley Lewis. He ran in most mayoral races thereafter, reaching his peak of 5.8 percent against Ron Gonzales in 2002.

“I didn’t care what anyone else thought of me,” said Chew, who went on to host a gentle public television interview program with the city’s Create TV channel. “I just had to go fight the war.”

Though he regularly railed against the evils of money in politics, Chew was never particularly partisan. He would frequently stop by the Mercury News offices in City Hall with story ideas, like stopping the profusion of occult-like cards dropped on city sidewalks and streets.

And yes, he has nothing but good to say about the sidewalks in a car-oriented city. “San Jose has the best sidewalks in the world,” he says. “And because no one’s on them, you’re totally safe.”

FYI: A celebration of the life of Don Edwards, the former San Jose congressman who died Oct. 1, will be held at 1 p.m. on Jan. 30 at the IBEW Hall, 2125 Canoas Garden Ave in San Jose. For reservations or more information, call 408-803-1948 or email preminger@gmail.com.

Contact Scott Herhold at 408-275-0917 or sherhold@mercurynews.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/scottherhold.