Notes & asides.(Thomas Hume appreciation)

* Remarks at the funeral service for Thomas Hume, St. Clement's Church, Stamford, Connecticut, November 6, 2003

We were all of us, in the Yale Class of 1950, asked to give a few sentences of biographical information for the 50th anniversary yearbook. Tom Hume wrote: "My life changed on November 16, 1981, when I suffered a stroke at age 53. After a difficult recovery, stretching over two years, I have limited ability to read, write, or converse." But he did manage, with appropriate contrivances, to drive a car, and to captain a Dyer 29, frequenting Long Island Sound, which, as he put it, "I know well and find endlessly fascinating." And he cruised in the waterways of Europe, and spent happy days with his ten grandchildren. He cultivated, also, his artistic skills and painted in watercolor.

When in 1949 I introduced Tom, at Yale, to my fiancee, Pat Taylor, she turned to me after he had left the room and said, "That is the most handsome man I have ever laid eyes on." I suppressed my jealousy, and concurred. He was, also, a brilliant student. As an architect, years later, he did wonderfully imaginative work for me, including a subterranean swimming pool which I cheerfully hailed in one of my books as the most beautiful this side of the mosaic pool in Pompeii, which caused my critics to croak forth that I was advertising my own artistic talents, requiring me to rebuke them publicly by saying that I had nothing to do with the pool, except to pay for it: The artistry of it was Tom Hume's, and Robert Goodnough's.

One evening in October 1981, we set out on my sloop at 6 P.M., headed for Newport. We arrived just after 10 the next morning, a heady propulsion, Stamford to Newport, 135 miles in 16 hours. All of nature, wind and tides, colluded to get us there at maximum speed, with a southerly wind, in bright autumn weather. Tom, the expert sailor, had sailed and raced with me from time to time, including one trip to Bermuda. He was always calm, decisive, inquisitive, companionable. But ...