A Sibling's Perspective

By Rick Wales

Seattle, October 20, 2001

I am Tom's brother, Rick.

We all know Tommy from different perspectives and from different stages in his life. I'm going to give you a glimpse of what he was like as a brother.

Born
Tommy was born in 1952 in Boston. He was the sixth consecutive generation of descendents of Thomas Crane Wales - all with the same name. Our maternal grandfather who was a large presence in our lives, was a soldier in WWI, was wounded and sent home twice, was reported at one point to have been killed in action. But he survived the war, was decorated for bravery, and lived to the ripe old age of 86. I mention these because I think the weight of this heritage gave Tommy a sense of purpose and mission from a very young age.

I was born two years after Tommy, and our sister Kitty came along 3 years after that.

Honesty
When Tommy was 5 he wandered into a studio being renovated next to our house and managed to knock over and break a painter's light stand. A little while later, after the painters had returned, he came back and explained that he was the one who had broken the light and apologized. The painters whisked him off to our mother, congratulating her on her little paragon of honesty. Kitty and I got to hear this story quite a bit when we were growing up.

Beat up
At a little community fair one spring when he was 10 or 11, Tommy stood up to some young bullies who were menacing the crowd. They roughed him up a little bit and held him while others threw snowballs at him. Afterwards, we walked home together. At one point he said: "Well, Ricky, now I guess we know what it's like to get beaten up." This was so typical of him. He shared the lesson with me but took the whole cost on himself.

Fay
Tommy played football at Fay. He was not the fastest and certainly not the biggest, but he was tenacious and he understood the game. I played on a junior team and our coach took us once to watch the varsity play. The coach called us together on the sidelines and he said to watch how the defensive end played. Watch what he does, that's the way that position should be played. We watched. It was Tommy. When he was a senior, he was captain of the team

Milton
In 1966 we moved to England for a year and Tommy went to Winchester as a boarder. Winchester was a very old, very strict school. Tommy had a good time there and learned many useful things including the ability to climb on steep slate roofs, which was useful for escape from the dorm at night. Tommy came to Milton when we got back from England, and I followed him here a year later. On my second or third night, long after lights out, there was a knock on my dorm window in Robbins House, which was interesting since it was on the third floor. It was Tommy, and he came in and we talked for half an hour or so in whispers, and then he left the way he came.

Tommy bent the rules a few times at Milton. In those days, students were allowed to put their beds up on stilts, allowing more room for a desk and chair underneath. Tommy took this as an opportunity for ambitious architectural expression. He raised the bed and enclosed it with a wall like a sealed loft, and then he painstakingly built a little window, complete with mullions. He bought himself a small TV, about the size of a shoe box (TV's were illegal), and installed it in the loft, wired so that the sound stopped if his door was opened. A teacher would hear the TV from outside the door but as soon as he opened the door - silence.

In an act of culinary defiance, he started bringing a little shaker of meat tenderizer to meals in the school dining room. He was always willing to share, and that shaker got a lot of action.

Job Offers
Tommy went to Harvard, and then to Hofstra Law School. When it came time to interview for a job in NY, he applied to 5 of the great old firms. At the interviews he told them he knew they were conflicted: "You know I can do the work. You know the strength of my performance as a law clerk and in Law School. But you are thinking it would be better for the firm's image to have someone from a top name school. On the other hand, I think you should have the courage to choose the best person for the job. In fact, I challenge you. I dare you to hire me." He got job offers from all 5 firms.

He went to work for Sullivan Cromwell, but after a year and half he left to move his family to Seattle and resume his career in public service this time as an Assistant U.S. Attorney.

One Million Dollars
We had a long-running joke about making a lot of money - which we never did. Our business model as we defined it (and it never changed over the years) was supported only by two deeply held principles: the business idea - whatever it was - had to be able to make us $1million. And the initial investment, as paid in by Tommy and me, had to be less than $5. The truth is that he never cared about money for himself. He consciously avoided orienting his career or his energy to making money. To him this just was not a good use of time.

Eccentricities
Tommy was gleefully, defiantly eccentric in some things. He wore a fedora; as a child he had seen his grandfather in one and I think he liked keeping that connection to the past. He wore bow ties. For a long time he shaved with a barber's straight-edge razor. He wore old-fashioned rimless glasses. He wrote with a fountain pen.

He was a phenomenal cook, imaginative and fearless about trying new things. His technique was unorthodox; many a first-time dinner guest was amazed to see him dry the lettuce by going outside with the lettuce in a dish towel and whirling it around his head. He was a tireless fruitcake booster and made batches every year to mail out at Christmas. We gave him quite a bit of grief about this. One year he sent us all e-mails:

Subject: A doorstop no more

Yes, you who have much maligned my fruited beauties, my fruitcake made the front page of the Lifestyle section of the morning paper. My baby! Scorned for so long, but now a star!

It's true. He'd actually managed to get someone from the paper interested in the story of Tommy and the fruitcakes.

Here's another email:

Subject: Alzheimer's
Ricard,
When I brought up your address, there was a reason. I had something to say. Can't remember what it was.

Hope you are fine.

Herman

Tommy seemed to delight in everything he did. He was a mope-free zone; he never moped, and he had an amazing knack for getting other people to get enthusiastic about things they wouldn't normally like. Even stuck in an endless traffic jam with his kids and me, he could soon have us all convulsed in laughter, to the point the car ride was the highlight of the afternoon.

Breath
He wasn't perfect. He had very bad breath, for instance. He and I used to camp and climb quite a bit and one of the scariest things that ever happened to me in the mountains was waking up in a small tent with Tommy to find that we had both turned toward the center in our sleep. Interestingly Tommy never had a cavity or a filling and we always wondered if there was some kind of compensating connection with the breath thing.

Ceasefire
I tagged along one time when Tommy went to talk to a group about gun control. We drove up to a residential area north of Seattle where a small county democrats club was having a picnic meeting. We found our host and moved a few lawn chairs into a big circle. The host introduced a "young man named Tom Wales who wants to talk to us about gun control". Tommy moved into the center of the circle and started his spiel. He quoted statistics. He told anecdotes. He had an impressive ease with the crowd. He had that look of amused confidence you get when you make a bet you know ahead of time that you will win. He knew he could change minds. At the end we passed baskets for donations through the crowd. We handed out literature, thanked the host and left. As we drove back down to the City, he asked me how much we had pulled in. I counted $49 bucks. "Not bad for a half a day's work." Truly, it wasn't much, but it was the accumulation of these little bits that added up to something big.

Doing Things that are Hard to Do
When we were kids, we went through a brief phase - and this was entirely his idea - where we would come home from school, get the vinegar bottle down, pour a big tablespoonful, and drink it like medicine. It occurred to me to ask him why we were doing this. He said, "The worse it tastes, the better it is for you."

Tommy always turned to face and pursue the things that are hard to do. He faced the music with the painters and the broken light. He volunteered to stand up in front of assemblies here at Milton and read poetry, something rarely done. He campaigned for long shot causes. You could goad him into doing something if you told him it would be hard.

Great Causes and Small Kindnesses
Tommy was a hero of the great causes and the small kindnesses. Shortly after he moved to Seattle, his neighbor lost her husband to cancer, and Tommy started doing little things to help her out. Putting the trash out on trash day, doing little chores. This was about 20 years ago. They became great friends, and over the years have helped each other. But it started with a little act of kindness.

On a climb in the Olympic mountains this summer, Tommy and a friend had summitted and then descended back much of the way down a steep slope on which they had been pelted with falling rock and ice. Two climbers came up from below, climbing without helmets. Tommy insisted they take his helmet, exacting a promise they would return it to the store where he had rented it.

Tommy did these things privately, but it seems he did them everywhere. I'm sure each of you who knows him has had this similar experience, something Tommy did to comfort or to help out, maybe a welcome phone call from far away, something known only by the two of you. If he saw someone sad or hurt or being treated unfairly, he had to help. And he was like this from the time he was a child.

Tommy was a hero of the great causes and the small kindnesses. The world needs more people like this. And maybe that is his legacy to us. To let us know we can all be heroes.