He started out as Hamilton’s somewhat unconventional, unofficial greeter and ended up becoming Bermuda’s goodwill ambassador to the world. The windmilling waves to early-morning commuters, the beaming smiles and the heartfelt cries of “Good morning!” and “I love you!” became synonymous with the Bermudian spirit around the globe.

By the time Johnny Barnes died last month at the age of 93, his three-decade mission to spread kindness and to share happiness had attracted worldwide notice. His passing did not just plunge Bermuda into grief, but caused eyes to moisten from the Caribbean to Canberra, Australia, and all parts in between.

News of his death was widely reported and commented on internationally. There were respectful obituaries in such prestigious publications as The Economist magazine and Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. And American documentarian Matt Morris’s award-winning 2011 short film about Johnny Barnes entitled Mr Happy Man, already seen by close to a million people since being posted online, racked up thousands of new hits.

It is rare when such tremendous renown is founded on the qualities of the heart rather than on fame — or infamy — in the political, military, corporate or sporting spheres.

And it’s rarer still in this jaded world we inhabit when the type of unconditional love so publicly espoused by Johnny Barnes is not taken as prima facie evidence of loopiness rather than something closer to saintliness.

As The Economist sensibly observed, his good-natured habit of hailing and saluting passers-by was actually something of an outgrowth of Bermuda’s long-established culture of politeness — an eccentric outgrowth, to be sure, but one with an all too recognisable line of descent.

“For Johnny Barnes, his extravagant love of Hamilton’s commuters came partly from Bermudians’ habit of saying ‘Good morning’ anyway, partly from his genuine joy in the life God had blessed him with and partly from the switching his mother had given him when he failed, as a child, to greet an old lady,” the magazine commented. “Every day ever since, he had tried to spread happiness to as many people as possible.”

When Johnny Barnes spontaneously took up his post at the Crow Lane Roundabout one morning in the 1980s and embarked on a six-hour weekday ritual of greeting drivers, cyclists and pedestrians arriving at the gateway to Hamilton, he was initially viewed with no little scepticism.

He tended to raise more eyebrows than smiles in those early days. His self-appointed mission was seen as curious, at best, and even as a possible hazard to traffic by some of the grumpier naysayers among us.

But the recently retired bus driver and former Bermuda Railway electrician sensibly ignored his detractors. Instead, he went on to spend the next 30 years pursuing his new-found vocation of sharing and evangelising goodwill with literally everyone who crossed his path.

“I enjoy making people happy,” Johnny Barnes once reflected. “I like to let them know that life is sweet; that it’s good to be alive.”

Until as recently as last December, he made good on his word to make people happy in all but the very worst weather. For all of those years, he offered what amounted to a morning benediction to those trudging their way to work and an unaffected and genuinely enthusiastic welcome to the visitors in our midst. A deeply spiritual individual in later life, his idiosyncratic decision to act on the Christian teachings about brotherly love resulted in him becoming celebrated and embraced as one of Bermuda’s national treasures. For it was almost as if Johnny Barnes daily sank an artesian well into that great underground reservoir of compassion, which too often goes entirely untapped in most of our lives. As a consequence, for all too many commuters and visitors, he was a living reminder of the oft-overlooked power of benevolence, a figure who restored their faith in humanity — and, to some degree, in themselves.

As Michael Dunkley has said, Johnny Barnes was “a remarkable, original man whose life gave life to the love we all have in our hearts, and who, from his roundabout perch each morning, expressed that love to all who passed by — friend, acquaintance, stranger, it did not matter, because Johnny Barnes embraced the human race”. And the human race, the Premier might have added, embraced Johnny Barnes right back.

There have been many men and women who cast giant shadows across Bermuda during their lifetimes as a result of their words or deeds. In Johnny Barnes’s case, though, it would be entirely more accurate to say he was a fountain of light and hope and love. And as The Economist ruefully noted, his death has left not just an emptiness in our hearts but a deficit of magic in our midst, for the secret of his happiness has disappeared with him.