Although he had spent the last few months undergoing treatment for lung cancer, John Picano did not let his illness get in the way of his work with the South Florida Fair and the Palm Beach County community.

The day before Thanksgiving, Picano, public relations and guest services manager for the South Florida Fair, was in the office lining up his media contacts for the upcoming fair in January, said fair chief executive officer Rick Vymlatil.

That afternoon, Vymlatil said, Picano went home to his two sons, daughter and wife Kathryn in suburban West Palm Beach and told them he had a very productive day at the office. He died Thanksgiving morning, while he was sitting in his favorite chair watching television. He was 60.

For those who met Picano recently, he was the go-to person for all things related to the South Florida Fair. It’s a position he held for 17 years, where he was in charge of advertising and contacting local media to promote the event in the region. But he also was a helpful co-worker and a champion for community involvement, Vymlatil said.

“He was the man, so to speak,” he said. “He was wonderful on customer relations and dealing with the public. He was a good writer. If people on our staff would struggle to put something together in writing, there were several of us who would say, ‘Let’s get this to John, he’ll figure out a way to pump it up’.”

But there are those who, like Vymlatil, first met Picano through the radio waves. Picano was news and program director at WJNO, an AM news station, and Vymlatil recalled listening to him in the 70s and 80s.

“He was really an icon of the radio market in Palm Beach County, and had a lot of trends in the radio business,” Vymlatil said, adding that before the age of Internet and news feeds on Twitter, Picano and WJNO was where you turned if you wanted to know about the news immediately.

Picano also was an avid golfer and a member of various community organizations, including the West Palm Beach Kiwanis Club, the public relations committee of the Palm Beach County Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

“Not only was he a good reporter and a good PR guy, he was just a good man, period,” Vymlatil said. “He’s the kind of guy you’d want your daughter to marry someday. He was a very special guy.”