Class: 1970
Deceased: August 7, 2004
The friends of Thomas Herbert Mathison, a West Village neighbor who died Aug. 7 at the age of 56 of leukemia, celebrated his life on Sat., Sept. 18 at a memorial gathering in the back room of the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, a West Village restaurant and bar on Hudson St.
He lived his entire life with cerebral palsy, which didn’t stop him from traveling by foot and public transit from one end of his beloved Manhattan to the other, according to a longtime friend, Steve Smith.
A summa cum laude graduate of Carleton College in Minnesota where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Mathison went on to Yale where he earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. in philosophy, again graduating summa cum laude. In the late 1970s he came to New York, settling in the West Village, where he worked for an adve1tising agency.
He then concentrated on scholarly research and writing, contributing to academic journals and serious magazines including Dissent. “He was the smartest man I ever met,” Smith recalled. Although Mathison spoke with great difficulty, his conversation was compelling and he was always ready to guide friends and visiting family on his own walking tours of the city. By his own estimate, he walked about 20 miles a week. He would meet many of his friends at Tortilla Flats, the restaurant on Washington St.
Born in Eau Claire, Wisc., Mathison was the valedictorian of his high school class, a member of the debate team, a Boy Scout and an avid chess and bridge player.
He is survived by his parents, Lee Z. and Ruth Baker Mathison; a sister, Kerry Lou Moravec, a nephew, two nieces and several uncles and aunts. His family thanks Beth Israel Hospice and Dewitt Rehab Center as well as David Milch and Dr. Robert Milch, who helped during Tom’s final illness. Donations may be made in his memory to National Public Radio, one of his favorite sources of information and entertainment, or to United Cerebral Palsy of West Central Wisconsin.
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NEW YORK OBSERVED; Tom’s World
By ROY HOFFMAN
Published: July 30, 2006
On a brisk fall night, 2003, I wait for my friend at his Jane Street apartment, so he can join me for a walk through the West Village. I watch him make his way slowly through the labyrinth inside his oneĀ bedroom residence — 10,000 books teetering floor to ceiling and bulging on shelves — as he slowly puts on his jacket.
“Need a hand?”
“No.” He fumbles with the buttons. “Thanks. I’m OK.”
He is in his 50s, with thinning brown hair and a brushy goatee. He looks up at me through big eyeglasses, smiles, sighs. “Let’s go,” he says.
On the street, he pushes ahead, stepping down a huge curb into the crosswalk, shuffling to the opposite side, then laboriously putting his left foot up and bringing the rest of his body along. A man passes by, calls out, “Hey, Tom.” A young woman waves.
Over the course of many years, wherever I have lived — Chelsea, the East Village, Brooklyn or, now, faraway Alabama — I have dropped by Tom Mathison’s to take a late-night stroll. I met Tom at a party in the 198o’s, and when I later caught a glimpse of him in his neighborhood, I reintroduced myself and joined him for the first of our many rambles.
He became my tour guide along cobblestone streets where brownstones lean close to one another and corner bars are lively deep into the night.
A Wisconsin native with a dry wit and a doctorate in philosophy, he is a wise guide indeed. Not that he tells me much about his dissertation at Yale on Wittgenstein, or offers a tour-book history of Jane Street, Bethune, Horatio, Greenwich. Like a perambulatory Joseph Mitchell, he sketches the denizens of the small hours: the newspaper vendor who sells him the first early edition, the bartender who’s laboring over a novel, the literary critic who carries on about French deconstructionists while drunk.
He complains rarely about his cerebral palsy, having once written, “My condition is congenital, essentially unchanging, a threat to neither health nor energy, and certainly no physical barrier to an entirely adequate imitation of everyday life. Yet much of the world still demands proof that I am not an alien being. This is the source of unending adventure in my life.”
He is fearless, even as we cross streets at his methodical pace and I flinch as taxis loom at our shoulders. One night when he was alone, a robber pushed him down and plundered his pockets; within days, Tom was back on the street.
This is, after all, Tom’s world, the dozen blocks, like his thousands of books, where he finds freedom. He cannot drive. He does not like strangers to look at him twice. A child of the heartland, he no longer feels in sync there. Here, on foot or negotiating the subways as needed, he disappears happily into the labyrinth of the city.
And in the nightspots of his neighborhood he finds another home. We arrive at a door front on Washington Street where music pounds and we enter. In Tortilla Flats, jammed with partygoers half his age, he is greeted by a waiter, and he shuffles through the dancing, drinking crowd to a booth. We order beer, and he lifts his, shakily. “Ah,” he says with a sigh as he takes a long swig.
Our plates are served. “Can I help?” I ask. He shakes his head emphatically. The pretty waitress, knowing him, cuts up his Mexican food. He peers out at the youths who down shots of tequila and laugh and press together close. “Tell me,” Tom says, looking at me through his big eyeglasses, “I’m not too old for this.”
”You’re not too old.”
That winter Tom began to tire easily and his feet became swollen. He went for medical tests. I was far away when his mom and dad, Ruth and Lee, called me on New Year’s Day, 2004, to say he’d been found to have leukemia.
Tom and I spoke often on the phone, but when I next traveled to New York, his parents had taken him south to Texas, where they were retired and Tom had a sister. I missed being able to pay a visit to my most nocturnal pal.
Those hushed blocks bounded by 14th Street, Houston, Eighth Avenue and the Hudson were emptier without him. Like a friend in any nook of the city not mine, Tom personalized the terrain. There were people I met, like Steve at Tortilla Flats and Janet at Cowgirl Hall of Fame, whom I identified as “Tom’s friends.” Restaurants that had come and gone, like the funky Gulf Coast near the Hudson, or the sleek El Teddy’s in the far-off territory of TriBeCa, were “Tom’s places.”
The medical updates I received from Tom’s parents seemed hopeful, then not. Up, then down. Then farther down. Tom wanted to leave Texas and return home. A friend he’d met at Yale, who had become a successful TV producer, had him flown to New York. He had further treatment; he was rapidly failing.
In early August 2004, I was back in New York. In his room in hospice at Beth Israel Medical Center, I found Tom small in his bed, straining forward from his pillow to talk to me. He had always spoken with a slur, but his voice was weaker. I sat next to the bed and, eager to be upbeat, caught him up to date on my family and friends. We talked about the streets he loved.
When the nurse arrived with his dinner on a tray and prepared to feed him, he looked up at me with large eyes through big glasses and said, haltingly, “No. You. Do it.”
I lifted the fork, watched him eat slowly. He thanked me, sank back into the pillow and closed his eyes.
When I leaned over to give him a hug goodbye, I felt his brushy whiskers. I was back in Alabama when I got the word that a few days later he had closed his eyes for good.
Tom’s books were donated to a school in the Philippines, and a memorial service was held for him at Cowgirl Hall of Fame, but the day it took place, Hurricane Ivan was bearing down on my Alabama home and I was unable to attend. A spring evening a year and a half later, I have my own.
Down Jane, over to Washington, by late-night stoop sitters and small cafes vibrant with talk, I walk Tom’s streets. The lore he shared with me of bartenders and actors and past-midnight amblers is joined now by one more story, his own. From doorways call out voices of people who once dwelled there, still heard by those who knew them. Along the cobblestone streets, tread the feet of those who, while vanished, still keep pace with old companions.
Tom, adventuring alongside me, his coat haphazardly buttoned, trudges faster as we near the river.
When I arrive at Tortilla Flats, I take a stool at the end of the bar, order a beer and through the din of the music and sway of the crowd, alone, toast my friend.
Roy Hoffman’s novel “Chicken Dreaming Corn” has just been released in paperback by University of Georgia Press.
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A Special Man, With Quiet Dignity
Published: August 13. 2006
To the Editor:
Thank you for “Tom’s World,” by Roy Hoffman (New York Observed, July 30), the lovely memorial to Tom Mathison, whom I knew when I lived in the West Village in the late 1970’s.
At that time, the only visitors to the then-decrepit Jane Street pier were Village “regulars,” including Tom and me, who came for a daily stroll or jog. One day, after having nodded to each other many times in passing, I introduced myself. Tom and I chatted and became friends, going to an occasional movie, seeing a play at the Public Theater or catching a bite at the local diner.
When my husband, Lenny, and I moved to the top floor of a fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn (the last flight more akin to a ladder), we invited Tom to our first gathering, a costume party for Halloween. Tom arrived, and Lenny, concerned that Tom’s cerebral palsy would be a barrier to joining us, ran downstairs and offered to carry him up the three flights of stairs. Tom simply said: “No thanks. I’ll do this myself.” And being a man of quiet dignity, he did.
Judy Noble Speregen
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
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