“My dears: I can’t believe you could outdo yourself,” Estelle Getty, who played Sophia Petrillo on the 1980s sitcom, scrawled in messy cursive. “Thanks again and again. Happy new year.”

Those who knew Barnum, 64, were unsurprised that he once bonded with a famous actress. He seemed to know everyone and be involved in nearly every organization in Pinellas County, Fla., where he moved from Long Island when he was 16.

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Barnum’s death on March 27 particularly struck St. Petersburg’s vibrant LGBT community, to which he had dedicated much of his time and money for decades. In a region now known for hosting the southeastern United States’s largest Pride parade, Barnum was an early advocate for ensuring LGBT people were respected and embraced in all areas of life.

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The city’s mayor, Rick Kriseman (D), said Barnum was a constant presence at the parade’s staging area, where he handed out bottled water and got people excited for the celebration. He also helped to broker the sale of Georgie’s Alibi, a now-shuttered gay bar next to his office that became known as his second home.

As one of the earliest donors to the LGBT civil rights organization Equality Florida, chief executive Nadine Smith said, Barnum pushed businesses to broaden their nondiscrimination policies and ensured the local domestic-violence center was knowledgeable about violence among LGBT couples.

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Barnum was so enmeshed in the region that he could and would connect anyone with anyone else, Smith said.

“Whoever you needed,” she said, “Bob knew at least two of them.”

Barnum was known to his community for seeming to be everywhere — producing a show at the now-renamed Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, teaching business classes at the University of South Florida, and attending Saturday morning services and kiddush at his synagogue.

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His younger brother, Scott Barnum, knew him better for the acts of kindness that few people got to see. Bob Barnum cared for his sister Debra for seven years after she had a stroke, pushing her wheelchair onto cross-country flights and arguing with insurance companies to get her treatments covered.

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He gave the tallit, or prayer shawl, from his bar mitzvah to one of his cousin’s grandsons to wear at his own ceremony. When a housing bubble formed in 2008, Barnum advised his customers to buy fixed-rate mortgages that helped them stay on their feet when the economic crisis hit.

“A lot of those people still have their homes today because of what he did,” Scott Barnum said.

More stories Faces of the dead This is how they lived — and what was lost when they died. Read now

Long before he became a real estate agent, Bob was a teenager who saved his earnings from working at White’s department store to buy his first car, a 1964 Ford Thunderbird. As he transitioned into adulthood, he worked as a supervisor at Arby’s, earned a business degree at New York University and ran his own catering company before entering real estate in 1997.

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Anyone who walked into Barnum’s office was greeted by his two dogs, sometimes dressed in costumes, and a wall-to-wall homage to the now-defunct Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Much of the art was 3-D, with images of lion rings and human cannonballs underneath the circus’s iconic big top. Barnum was a distant relative — a cousin separated by 33 or so degrees — of P.T. Barnum, who founded the show bearing his name in 1871.

Nearly 150 years later, it seems as if everyone in St. Petersburg has a story about Bob Barnum. Kriseman remembers standing with him to present an award, which Barnum had helped to fund, to the city police department’s civilian of the year.

Smith remembers him teaching her naughty words in Yiddish and helping her in 2013 to buy her first home, a light-gray house with an apartment over the garage. Barnum jumped up and down on the floor with her to test the structure, which eventually held Smith’s now-wife and their son.

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Steve Kornell remembers Barnum letting him use the phone bank in his office when he was running to become St. Petersburg’s first openly gay council member in 2009.

“He was a big part of making it safe for me to be who I am and to open the possibility that I could not only run for office, but I could win,” said Kornell, who served on the council for a decade and stepped down in January.

But over the past several months, no one had a clearer window into who Barnum was than his boyfriend, Oscar Lam. They met online in May, and Lam flew from Boston to visit Barnum every other week.

The pair swapped stories about their upbringings and learned that Barnum’s Jewish family and Lam’s Chinese one were not so different. They took nighttime walks on the beach and gazed at the stars. Sometimes Barnum would mix up what day it was, and Lam would smile at what he considered an adorable quirk.

On the night of March 25, Lam checked Barnum into a hospital with symptoms of covid-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.

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“You can get through this honey,” Lam wrote to Barnum in a text message. “I know you will. I can’t wait to hold your hands again.”

Barnum responded in the middle of the night. “Pneumonia. Very serious. Probably coronavirus.”

After Barnum died on March 27, Lam sent his phone a photo of a sunset and one last message.

“This is the first sunset knowing that you have become a star in the sky and always in my heart,” he wrote. “I want you to know … that I lit the Shabbat candles and the yahrzeit candle for you tonight. You have been a great part of my life and I have loved and will always love you dearly.”