1/18/23

Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Tom St. John

 In bed @ (:20. up at 5:15, 33 degrees outside, high of 36, wind chill at 25, mostly cloudy, wind NW at 8, winds 6 to 21 mph today, gusts to 35 mph. Sunrise 7:19 sunset 4:45, 9+26

Amitriptyline  Day 6, still bothersome on waking, dry mouth, dizziness, wondering if the dry mouth is attributable to CPAP or the med, or both.  Took another nap at 6:30, probably first of several.

Secure message to VA clinic today.  Dear Dr. Chatt:   I am wondering if I should be seen in connection with a couple of throat issues I have experienced lately.   My voice has become noticeably weaker than it ever was and I occasionally have had difficulty swallowing my meds, with pills or capsules sticking to the back of my mouth/top of my throat resisting swallowing.   This has been a recent development and doesn't happen all the time.   I've also lost some weight lately without trying to.   I am wondering about this in light of my Barrett's esophagus.  I started taking amitriptyline a week ago and of course I don't know whether that may have anything to do with the voice and swallowing experiences. Thank you.

Tom St. John died today in the U. S. Virgin Islands.  We were notified by text message from Dan Goldberg.  He was in the islands with Micaela and Saul.  No other information was available.  Dan was informed by Jack Levine.  Tom and I were classmates at MULS, starting in August or September of 1967. I was fresh out of the Marine Corps; he was fresh out of grad school at U.W. Madison.  I had just turned 26 years old; Tom had just turned 23.  I had just left 4 years in America's military; though he didn't know it then, Tom was destined for 2 years in the military right in the middle of his legal education.  Each of us was married and each of us would be blessed with a beautiful daughter by the time we graduated.  Tom was the star of our law school class.  At the end of our 1st semester, when grades and class ranks were distributed, Tom was first in our class of 119 students.  First by a wide margin.  He maintained that position for the next three semesters and was unanimously elected editor-in-chief of the Marquette Law Review by the outgoing board of editors with the concurrence of the incoming board.  Our first board meeting was held in his apartment on 38th Street.  Our exuberance and eagerness to work together on the review were dampened a short time later when we learned that our leader had been drafted into the Army.  The war in Vietnam was getting more lethal every month we all feared that Tom would be sent there as an infantryman but the Army recognized his already-evident legal talents and assigned him to assist a judge advocate general office in the Finger Lakes region of New York.  By the time his 2 years of active duty were drawing to a close I was on the faculty of the law school.  Tom wrote me and asked me to write a letter advising the Army that Tom would be returning to law school after his discharge and asking whether he could be discharged a couple of weeks earlier than his scheduled discharge date to allow him to start school with his new classmates.  Kind of surprisingly, the Army agreed, Tom returned to Marquette, and became a star in the class of 1972, as he had been in our original class of 1970.  Federal court Judge Myron Gordon selected Tom as his law clerk and the two of them became a mutual admiration society until Judge Gordon's death in 2009,   While clerking for Judge Gordon, Tom got to see in action a young attorney named Bob Friebert.  He shared with me more than once the story of Friebert representing a young man in a criminal case in which Judge Gordon made what Bob considered an egregiously erroneous ruling, holding the fellow in contempt of court for lying on the witness stand in his own defense and jailing him.  Friebert was quiet for a moment or two while he collected his thoughts and then bellowed, as only Bob Friebert could bellow, OUTRAGEOUS! and then proceeded to tell Judge Gordon why he had erred.  I mention this background story from half a century ago because, as all the lawyers who knew him could attest, Tom could have been hired at any silk stocking law firm in the country, but he knew he wanted to practice with Bob Friebert and that is just what he did.  First in the small firm known as Friebert & Finery, then as Friebert, Finerty, & St. John.     Tom was a brilliant, tough-minded lawyer, thoroughly dedicated to advancing his clients' causes.  When in 1975 I decided to leave teaching at the law school to practice law, Tom encouraged me to join his firm, which I did. For a time we were a firm of only 4 lawyers, Bob Friebert, John Finery, Tom St. John, and me.  I learned more of the realities of law practice from working with those three lawyers than I had learned from all the academic doctrines in law school.

Tom was my friend from the 1960s to the 2020s, 55 years.  He helped me learn how to practice law, though never as well as he did.  He helped me through difficult periods of my life.  He introduced me to many friends of his who were to become friends of mine.  I remember telling him at a dinner that he and Caela hosted that he was a catalyst of friendship for all the people he brought together, who knew one another through their common friendship with him.   I am grateful to Tom for that, for enriching my life with that gift, and for so much more. We each shared much of our lives with each other.   Though he was the younger of the two of us, I followed in his footsteps.  I followed in his footsteps at the law school, at the law review, and in the practice.  When I learned of his death in water, I couldn't help remembering a story that the two of us made up decades ago.  Someone asked us how the two of us met and one of us said we met cliff diving at Acapulco.  That after a day of defying death diving off the cliffs, we got into a fistfight at a local cantina, fighting over a beautiful señorita, Maria Conchita.  It was all made up of course and ridiculous but no one was hurt by our imaginary meeting and we held on to that fable for years.