A Year without a Great Guy

A year ago today we said good bye to a great guy, my uncle Tommy. Pictured here with his fiancee Revell, you can see he was a man of fashion and good taste. He loved to bring smiles and to laugh. He valued family, faith, and friendship. Although his battle with cancer was relatively short, he never gave up or forgot his manners. As a brother of Sigma Alpha Epsilon he lived by the code of the True Gentleman.

The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.

—John Walter Wayland

I miss him very much and think of his often...wondering what he is doing in Nashville, then remembering he is gone. I am sorry he and Moo did not get to meet, and I hope I will be able to instill in Moo the qualities of the True Gentleman in Tommy's memory.