So many memories of Tom Wehrer & family...

I'm really sorry I missed Tom's memorial service, as he was so large in life he could have walked from the pages of Jack Kerouac or Ken Kesey, but he was truly one better, an original original. So, my memories are mostly from 1957 or so through the mid-1970's.

Tom was one of the only kids I knew in elementary school where what we did for part of a summer was read autobiographies of famous Americans: Teddy Roosevelt, Eli Whitney, Clara Barton, and George Washington Carver. He was an intellectual so early on, we talked about whether there was a god and who Jesus was and wasn't, and why there was an antique barber's chair in the basement ("you spin in it and you can see the Universe," he said. "What's the Universe?" I asked. I'm still not so sure that simple dizziness produces cosmic consciousness.) When we were still at Burns Park, he gave me a bio of Ted Williams, because Tom was nuts about baseball and we went to Tiger Stadium and saw Rocky Calavito; Tom was ecstatic and laughed five miles when his toddler little brother, Stevie, could say "Rocky Calavito" in one breath. We took Steve in a wicker basket spoked wheel pram from their house at 1502 Cambridge and Paula, my brother John, and I and Tom climbed up on the Big Rock at Hill and Washtenaw to watch "cool cars" go by. There was no paint on the rock then.

In another summer in the earliest part of the 1960's, Tom and I with some of Tom's pals strolled down to the Blue Front in Ann Arbor and bought cigars for our fathers, we said, and went to the Arboretum and sat on a huge log over a ravine and smoked and saluted Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for providing us with "inspiration." Halloween saw Tom's mom, Ann, carefully pasting black beards onto the faces of my brother John, and Tom, Paula and me, and we went out trick or treating, all of us under the age of ten, and we were certain adults saw us as the true beatniks we'd become later on in life...Tom already had bongo drums. It was glorious, imaginative, and you could always count on Tommy Wehrer (and his family) for an adventure.

My family had four kids, his had five, and we belonged to the same swim club so we sometimes crammed into one car to enjoy the summer in the pool out towards Ypsilanti; there were long stretches of countryside to appreciate on the way out, all gone now. I'd never had cowtongue for dinner until Mrs Wehrer asked me to stay one night and join the family, but I don't recall that I could stomach tongue. One of the things that will always stand out was how many people came and went at 1502. Tom had many friends, as did his siblings and parents, and there was always a party there, it seemed, especially as the years went by.
In the early 70's, I ran into Tom out front of his house, and we sat on railroad ties and he told me how soap works, and how soap was different from laundry detergent, and how the chemicals worked to break up dirt and grease. Ordinarily, I would have paid no attention, but Tom made it fascinating. Knowing him, he might have made up the whole thing, but I doubt it. His mind went in many directions and he knew some trivia and data about lots of things. I recall talking briefly with Joe that day, or sometime then, and chatting up my activities in college with protesting the Vietnam War, but the Wehrers were already there. Leaders of progressive thinking and action, after a fashion.
Years went by and then one day, as I was finishing grad school at the University of Michigan, there was another party at the Wehrer house, and Joe told me they all were moving to the Bay Area, to California. Soon the house was empty of the family, and someone else moved in. The neighborhood was never the same. My parents are now 85 and 89, and Dad has the nasty disease that saps the mind of clarity and lucid expression, and they are among the very last on Lincoln Street to be there...we moved in about 1957 to Lincoln Street, and Joe and Ann Wehrer moved in with Martha, Tom, Paula, Lisa and Steve, I think, about the same time. I sincerely miss them all, and I will always miss Tom. He was truly one of my best friends as a kid, and I hope one day to see him again... and we can finish our discussion about soap... Love to all of you in the family, and Wehrer friends, and those brilliant creative cinematographic and musical minds you'd find at 1502 Cambridge...