ROCKLAND – When John L. Knight walked into a room there was “a little less sadness, a little less gloom and a little more happiness,” the Rev. Mark Reinhardt said Wednesday during Knight’s funeral Mass at St. Bernard’s Catholic Church.

Knight, a former state legislator and city attorney, died Sunday at 79.

The Rockland church was filled to capacity for the Mass.

Knight was a familiar face on Rockland’s Main Street, in court and at municipal sessions, as well as at the Catholic church where he attended numerous funerals of old friends.

“You spend more time here than I do,” Reinhardt told Knight after one funeral. “As long as I can walk out of here at the end, I am all right,” Knight told his priest.

Like many in the church on Wednesday, Knight had served proudly in World War II, doing his service around the world as a merchant mariner. When he returned, he graduated from the University of Maine and then Suffolk Law School.

He was elected to the Maine Legislature in 1959, became chairman of its Judiciary Committee, and was instrumental in creating the state’s first Right to Know Law and in the formation of SAD 5 in Rockland. He resigned from the Legislature in 1964 to become a complaint justice under a newly formed District Court system.

As an expert on the Right to Know Law, he served as an ally to many news reporters trying to pry information from reluctant municipal officials.

Knight served as Rockland city attorney from 1975 to 1982, then worked on an advisory committee to reform probate rules. The list of boards that Knight didn’t serve on would be far shorter than the ones he did, Reinhardt said.

He was a member of the Farnsworth Art Museum board and worked tirelessly on area nursing projects and fund-raisers.

A humble man, Knight would have been embarrassed by the praise as well as the turnout on Wednesday, Reinhardt said. “This is not a sunset, but the sunrise, the beginning of a perfect day,” the priest said.