1/23/23

Monday, January 23, 2023

In bed by 10:30, up at 5:30, no toddy.  19 degrees out, high of 32, wind from W at 9 mph and wind chill of 9 degrees.  Winds expected between 6 and 18 mph with gusts to 34 mph, a cold cloudy morning to be followed by a sunny afternoon.

Our Town.  Two teenage boys were shot on the city's north side Saturday night and were transported to the hospital in serious condition, Milwaukee police said. Police have confirmed that a 14-year-old boy died of injuries following the shooting late Saturday night.  Currently, no suspects are in custody.  The shooting occurred on the 2600 block of North 52nd Street around 6 p.m.  A 13-year-old boy was shot in both arms, the Milwaukee Fire Department said. The 14-year-old boy was "pulseless/non-breathing" but was resuscitated, according to the fire department. Both victims were transported to Froedtert Hospital.  The investigation is ongoing.

Aged Organs.

Pickles by Brian Crane

 

Second Draft of Eulogy

Draft (2)

[Most honors in life we cherish. They signify achievement, or attainment, some excellence.  One honor we dread, that is eulogizng  a best friend whom we have lost.]

Tom St. John and I have been good friends since 1967, when we started law school together.  I He was 23, fresh out of MBA & CPA training at UW-Madison.  I was 26, fresh out of the Marine Corps.   Each of us aspired to become a lawyer.  Each of us was married.  Each of us had our first child during our law school days.  We came to know each other early on in law school and our friendship grew during our first 2 years of study.   

 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 at the top of 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 unanimous concurrence of the incoming board and the approval of the Dean and Faculty.  There was never a question about who would be the Editor-in-Chief.  Our first board  meeting was held in his little apartment at 46th & State Street, across from the old Milwaukee Montessori School.  Our exuberance and eagerness to work together on the law review was dampened only a few weeks later when we learned that Tom, 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 to serve in harm’s way.   Fortunately, the Army recognized his already-evident legal and intellectual skills and assigned him to assist a judge advocate general office in the Finger Lakes region of New York.  That office handled appeals from courts-martial and the preliminary reviews were handled by Tom,  with 2 years of law school behind him.  By the end of his tour of duty, his supervising officer came to assume that if Tom found no serious errors in the court-martial, there were none.  Tom developed a code using the old Lucky Strike cigarette slogan, LSMFT.  'Lucky Strikes Means Fine Tobacco'.  When Tom wrote those initials on his memos to his supervising JAG officer, they became, "Legally sufficient/mighty fine trial."  As his time in the Army drew to its close,  Tom wanted to return to Marquette and finish his degree requirements  The bad news was that his scheduled discharge date would make him too late to start his senior year with the class of 1972.   By this time I had graduated and was on the law school faculty .  Tom called me from New York and asked me to write a letter advising the Army of the effect of his discharge date and asking whether he could be discharged a few weeks early to allow him to start school with his new classmates.  I did of course and to my surprise, 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 district 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.  I remember Judge Gordon presiding over Tom and Micaela’s wedding in their first home on Edgewood Avenue in Shorewood.   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 defendant in a criminal case in which Judge Gordon made what Friebert considered an egregiously erroneous ruling, holding the fellow in contempt of court for lying on the witness stand testifying 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  story from half a century ago because, as all the lawyers who have known 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 of course that is what he did.  First in the small  firm known as Friebert & Finerty, soon to become Friebert, Finerty, & St. John.     Tom was a brilliant, tough-minded lawyer, thoroughly dedicated to advancing his clients' causes. In 1975 I decided to leave teaching at the law school to practice law, Tom encouraged me to join his firm, which I did, mainly because Tom was practicing there. [For a time we were a firm of only 4 lawyers, Bob Friebert, John Finerty, 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 I learned and taught at the law school.]

Tom was a man of great talent.  He was a brilliant lawyer, a lawyer’s lawyer, regularly appearing on lists of the  top lawyers, the super lawyers.  More importantly, he was a client’s lawyer, a zealous advocate on behalf of each of his many clients, a professional and a friend they could trust.  He was a teacher, regularly called upon as a guest lecturer at the law school and as an advisor to law students in their appellate practice and trial practice courses.  He acted as a mentor  both to the young lawyers in our office and to our law clerks.  He shared his legal, business and other talents generously in the community, serving as a volunteer and as a board member to charitable organizations, including JVS and Neighborhood House.  He also was an outdoorsman, a  sportsman and an athlete.  We spent many a day fishing and boating and water skiing, with him opting to do the skiing and me opting to drive the boat.  We went camping together, sometime by ourselves, and when we could with our children.  Tom introduced me to downhill and crosscountry skiing, hoping probably that  I could develop some skill in these sports at which he excelled.  I managed to dash those hopes pretty quickly but I have always been grateful to Tom for his misplaced optimism about my potential.

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 stood by my side through difficult times in 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 only 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.  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 of law.  When I learned of his death in water, I couldn't help remembering a fable that the two of us made up decades ago.  Someone asked us how the two of us met, a guy from Appleton and a guy from the South Side of Chicago. One of us said we met cliff diving at Acapulco.  That after a day of defying death by diving off the cliffs all day, we  went to a local cantina to drink beer and got into a fistfight over a beautiful señorita, Maria Conchita.  It was all made up of course and ridiculous  but no one was hurt by our fable and we enjoyed and played off that fable for years. 

 Emily Dickinson’s perhaps shortest poem was just 2 lines, a couplet:  “In this short life that only lasts an hour / How much - how little - is within our power.”  Tom was younger than I am, and he lived a much healthier, more vigorous life.  I long thought that Tom would be the eulogist at my funeral.  But here we are.  I’m grateful to Caela to be able to share a few memories of Tom, to attest to his excellence as a lawyer and as a man, and to honor him.  I’m grateful to Tom for sharing so much of his goodness with me all these years, and with so many others.