Remembering Thomas Elias Weatherly, Jr.

Thomas Elias Weatherly, Jr., also known as Elias Weatherly and W. died in early July, 2014. The exact date are not known. If he died on the Fourth of July, an appropriate date for him since he believed in the potential of the USA, yesterday and today would be his tenth Yahrzeit. 

There is no obligation for me to say Kaddish for him but in my heart, I do. I remember him as a good man, a man of qualities both positive and negative. He was a man of principle and stuck by them. He was a poet and he was an intellectual. He believed he had a Jewish soul and so he made a sincere effort to study Judaism and eventually became a proselyte. He was working for me at the Strand Bookstore at the time and he was a key member of my team. After becoming a Sabbath observer we had to make arrangements to his schedule. By that time we had become friends, a friendship that deepened over time. We stayed in touch after I left the Strand in 1990 and he moved on to manage the shipping department.

After I adopted my son, Weatherly gave me parenting advice. I, a white Jewish man and he, a Jewish African-American bonded even more deeply since my son is also an African-American Jew. When my son was two, Weatherly gave him a yarmulka that my son loved until he lost it during a toilet training incident. Weatherly found the incident particularly amusing.

He split his last years between New York City and Huntsville, AL where he took care of his late parents' home. When he was in NYC we spoke and sometimes we managed to get together. Our conversations were intense and gratifying, covering politics, economics, race relations and literature. When I learned of his sudden death, I grieved deeply.

Ten years after his death, he remains with me in memory. Remembering the people in my life is important even when they are gone. Whether is is my brother or Weatherly, both of whom passed away in the summer, or college roommates who died in the past two years matters not only because of their qualities but also because of the experiences we shared, experiences worth remembering. I did not light a Yahrzeit candle for Weatherly yet in my mind's eye I see him; tall, taller than me, black with short curly hair, a warm smile, curious look and even glowering, depending on the conversation, and then later with his bushy grey beard, he still lives in my memory though certainly dead and buried in Alabama.

Here is a nice article about his poetry: https://jacket2.org/feature/short-history-tom-weatherly

Here are a few photos, two scanned Polaroids from the early 1980s were previously posted by me after I learned of his passing, the other two were taken less than a year before his death at a kosher Indian restaurant on Lexington Ave. in NYC.

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