A Good Man

By Charles Tobias Mueller

College Entrance Essay, October, 2001

I recently lost a man who was my friend, mentor, and godfather. My uncle, Thomas Crane Wales, died on October 11, 2001 when he was shot to death through his basement window. With his death, I lost the man that exemplified a life of virtue and who left a mark of love that I hope to emulate.

My uncle, despite living on the other side of the country in Seattle, was always active in my life. For as long as I can remember Uncle Tom has, without fail, called me on my birthday. This seems like a small amount of effort, but it was our ritual, a pact he made with me to celebrate our relationship. One year he sent me a dictionary, a jab at my grossly inadequate spelling skills.

Uncle Tom was a Federal prosecutor in the state of Washington, with a one hundred percent conviction record. My sophomore year of high school I entered the YMCA Youth and Government program. Unlike most of my peers, I enrolled in the judicial branch. My job was to write a full length brief for a Supreme Court case defending the constitutional rights of a mock defendant. I had never been in a law library in my life. When I got home I faxed the mock case to Uncle Tom and told him I needed serious help.
A few days later he called me back. He told me in explicit detail how to use a law library, what to research and the basic outline of a legal paper. That phone conversation was like a crash course in law. During the next few months, he continued to help me. That year I was awarded best 'Judicial Presenter' out of all the participants in Massachusetts. Uncle Tom never handed the answers to me, but he was always willing to show me the way I could best apply myself. He also encouraged me to work phenomenally hard.

Uncle Tom also taught me that in life we must have passions. When I was elected to go the YMCA Youth and Government Conference on National Affairs in NC, I again called my Uncle. I told him that I needed to write a proposal regarding issues at the Federal level. He mentioned gun control. This did not surprise me because he was an ardent advocate of gun control. He was the president of Washington CeaseFire, a Seattle based group that lobbies for gun control. Gun control was his passion, so we kept talking, and eventually he suggested an issue that interested me during the Clinton administration: the sentencing discrepancy between powder and crack cocaine. I had found an issue that, as Uncle Tom said, "you can really get behind." This was classic "Uncle T." He always wanted me to look at an issue, figure out what I believed, and then stand my ground with a firm and persuasive argument. He made a life out of this philosophy.

The last time I spoke to him was the week after the September 11th tragedies. I had called him and left a message on his answering machine saying, "After all the stuff that has been happening, I just wanted to call and say thank you for everything you have ever done and that I love you very much." A few days later he called me back. He thanked me for the message and told me he loved me very much. We discussed the idea that we cannot live our lives in fear, because that is the ultimate loss of freedom. Like every conversation with him, I felt like I had more to think about and new opinions to explore. It was the best phone call I ever made.

For a man that I only saw a few times a year and spoke to mostly on the phone, he really helped to shape my life. His tireless work as a prosecutor and advocate for gun control were not his only passions. He loved his family, my aunt, and my two cousins. He lived his life humbly and peacefully. He always forced himself to do what he felt was the right thing to do.

He was a heroic man because he lived his life without fear, despite having put many people in jail and publicly speaking out against groups like the NRA. His murder was no doubt politically motivated and it is unlikely that-given all of the possible people who could have done this-his assassin will ever be brought to justice. In the end, Uncle Tom would want us to worry less about finding the person who killed him and more about learning from his death. A well-lived life for me will be a life like my Uncle Tom's: using words and not violence, listening to reason but also standing my ground, and loving the people around me. His life taught me how being selfless is infinitely more rewarding, ultimately, than being selfish. Uncle Tom has been taken from me, but his lessons have not.