One of the simple joys of life is “collecting” interesting people. By “collecting,” I mean having the good fortune of having folks pass through your life who are fun or inspirational or challenging or different or maybe all of the above at the same time. I feel I have been blessed in this regard many times over.
One such person who came into my life, made it fun, and left it too soon was my neighbor, Tom, who lived across the street from me about 30 years ago. I was at a point in my life when I was “coming into my own.” I had two wonderful young daughters and was in the process of making partner at my law firm. My wife and I had bought a very big and very old house with a 3-acre yard in a classic old neighborhood. Between family, work, keeping up the house and yard, and community activities, time was precious. This is where my story with Tom begins.
Tom lived across the street with his wife Linda and their three beautiful teenaged daughters. His route to being at that place at that point in time is a necessary part of this story.
Tom was born into a large Irish-Catholic family in Waterbury, Conn. As I recall, Tom had six or seven siblings. The family business was a brewery that turned out a number of beers, the best known of which was called Red Fox Ale. The family sold the brewery at some point when Tom was a child to the Rupert family, the longtime owners of the New York Yankees. Red Fox Ale had been a very popular brand with the troops overseas during World War II I understand.
Tom graduated from Georgetown University and returned to Connecticut and took a very nice job on Madison Avenue. This would have been in the early ‘60’s, so it was the time of the heyday of “Mad Ave.” as portrayed on the television show “Mad Men” a few years ago. Three-martini luncheons, country-club lifestyle, and easy life in the suburbs with a loving wife and family. And then at age 35, Tom was stricken with Parkinson’s disease.
I do not recall where Tom had met his wife, but she was from a large Clarksburg family, so when Tom’s life began to decline because of his illness, they moved back to Linda’s roots. I ended up in their neighborhood and in Tom’s life a few years later to my good fortune if not his.
The blessing, and the curse, of having Tom as a neighbor was that he had plenty of time on his hands. His Parkinson’s had progressed to the point where he could no longer work and could no longer drive (He didn’t give this up easily as police officers around Bridgeport at the time will attest). He got around our little town on a motor scooter playing tennis at the city courts with anybody and everybody who would take him on. Children, housewives, retired couples. They all became part of Tom’s tennis circle.
In the evenings and on weekends, I became his playmate. It was important to Tom’s coping with his illness, I believe, both mentally and physically, that he remain active. So if he saw me working in my yard or on my house, he would come across the street. He said he was activating a tradition from his old Connecticut days called the “BS’er” Club. A member who spied a neighbor doing household chores or yard work would bring a drink (alcoholic of course) to the other neighbor and “try to talk them through it.” Tom called these visits “counseling sessions,” the goal being to reform a neighbor’s “priorities.” Quite fun, if you weren’t working 60 hours a week and trying to help raise two young kids and take care of your home.
Tom’s main goal on his visits was to get me to toss an “aerobie” with him. It was my first experience with one of these things. If you don’t know what one is, I will describe it as a metal ring coated in plastic. It behaves like a Frisbee on steroids and has become a staple of my family’s beach vacations.
It was a great form of exercise for Tom, although a tad embarrassing for me. Tom had difficulty in tossing the aerobie back because of his Parkinson’s. So we would be much like a dog with his master with me spinning it way in front of Tom and Tom running it down and bringing it back to me like a dog fetching a stick. Tom had an amazing sense of humor, and often he would put the aerobie in his mouth and bring it to me and heel.
The aerobie became a cornerstone of our friendship. Since my days were usually pretty full, and since we were both insomniacs, Tom because of his medication and me just “because,” Tom would often get me out of my house at one or two in the morning and we would go to the parking lot of the nearby Toys R Us and toss the darn thing. Occasionally, when a new cop came on the local police force, the officer would drive by and see us and stop to check us out. Tom’s illness made his gait a constant stumble, so the new officer would sometimes ask me “Is he drunk?” Since I often would have had a couple of beers while we were “aerobieing,” Tom would yell at the cop, “Ask me about him, ask me about him.”
Our late night sessions at Toys R Us would frequently end with Tom asking me to take him to Kroger. At that time it had an all-night deli that made a sandwich called the “4 by 4.” I don’t remember now what either four represented, but I recall we ate a bunch of them.
As I said before, Tom had a wonderful sense of humor. His condition made his face look distorted and his speech became slurred, so most people thought he was mentally challenged. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He would call me at work every time he heard a new lawyer joke. I had already heard them all, but I would laugh uproariously.
Once Tom had been trying to work a crossword puzzle while sitting on a bench in the waiting room at his doctor’s office. A person came by and looked at Tom and saw the pencil shaking in the air. The guy grabbed the pencil and gave Tom a quarter. Tom immediately called me, told me the story, and asked me to take him to Walmart to buy a big supply of pencils. He told me he thought he could make a bundle, buying short and selling long.
One of my favorite Tom stories involved Thanksgiving dinner at his home one year. Being the traditional family patriarch, Tom insisted on carving the turkey and pouring the wine for the adults. Suffice it to say the dining room floor ended up littered with pieces of turkey and the white table cloth wound up splattered with red stains. His great wife Linda took it all in stride, and we all sat patiently while Tom performed his traditional duties. He then topped it off with his favorite toast: “Here is to my beautiful daughters, no car dates until you’re 25 and no sex until I’m dead and gone.”
Tom and his family moved to Winchester after a few years as our neighbors, his wife taking on a new career in anticipation of Tom’s not being around much longer. One day he was found dead on the ground beside his motor scooter in a neighbor’s yard, no doubt looking for a friend to play with or to talk through the hazards of yard work.
As I have mentioned before, I like to find a word or phrase to describe people I know well. For Tom the word is “irrepressible.” He never gave up.
Evans “Buddy” King is a proud native of Christiansburg, CHS Class of 1971. He resides in Clarksburg, W.Va., where he has practiced law with the firm of Steptoe & Johnson, PLLC, since 1980. He can be reached at evans.king@steptoe-johnson.com.
