It was with profound sadness that I learned of Tom’s death. My deepest condolences go to his husband Andy, his sisters Dianne and Debra, his brother Mike, and all the rest of his family and friends who loved him and will miss him.Tom and I were friends throughout our pre-teen, teen and young adult years. We first met when our fathers, Lloyd and Whitie, decided one year that our families would spend a one-week summer vacation together on a small lake near Traverse City where Tom’s family had two cottages. Both of our dads were WWII vets. Both suffered from what was known then as “manic depression”, and I recall that they spent long hours sitting in Michigan chairs in the shade near the beach chatting. Our complicated but loving relationships with our dads were something Tom and I had in common from the outset. If, for our fathers, that vacation was, perhaps, a time for mutual reflection, for us kids, it was a vacation of constant fun and adventure. Our sisters, Dianne and Darla were the same age (teenagers), and Tom and I were younger and a year apart. I think I was twelve and Tom was eleven.We all hit it off and had a really great time. The high point was when the four of us took a local bus to town. On our older sisters’ suggestion we went to see a movie. The film they wanted to see was The Rat Race, a hardboiled urban drama about a naïve sax-player (Tony Curtis), and a by now cynical and struggling model and “taxi-dancer” (Debbie Reynolds) sharing a down-at-heel New York City apartment. The other character I recall vividly was Don Rickles as the unscrupulous dancehall owner under whom Reynolds’ character ends up prostituting herself to pay for a new sax for her friend after his is stolen. At that age, Tom and I were more into Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy. But we were both, as it turned out, suckers for a good story and, although we were too young to understand the entire plot, we were still blown away by that film that none of our parents would have let us see had they known. Ever the joker, among other novelties that we took back with us from our adventure in town—milk chocolate “cigarettes” with shiny gold “filters”, sour grape gum and some of the Good & Plenty candy leftover from the movie—Tom bought himself a “whoopee cushion” and for several days we both found utmost hilarity in placing it on our parents’ and sisters’ chairs, until everybody told us enough was enough. The two families never went on vacation together again, but Tom and I remained friends and were mutual friends with another boy from our home town, Mark Gallimore. We all had a lot in common since we were readers, movie buffs and all three liked to draw. I just liked to draw, but Tom and Mark were both consummate artists already in their teens. We once entered a Halloween art contest together in which we used tempera paint to decorate the window of a local hardware store. After brief minutes of working on the most ghoulish mural we could create, I decided art would be better served by my sticking to filling in flat colors and washing the brushes for Tom and Mark, since they were in a league of their own when it came to artistic creation. By the way, our mural won the contest.The three of us would remain close friends until life happened and took us all our separate ways. I’m so glad that Tom and I were able to reconnect on social media a few years back and to share some of memories of those boyhood times, more than half a century ago. Tom was a kind, intelligent, sensitive, funny and courageous person we were all lucky to know. I’ll miss him. We’ll miss him. -Dan Newland-
