Tom Sucher – my friend; my duplicate bridge partner; my mentor

This is a tribute to the finest man I've ever known, Tom Sucher.

I first met Tom while playing duplicate bridge. His team, Bill's Buddys, consisted of a group of six "old-timers" who first learned the game "back in the day," in the 1950's. They were a sharp group, and played twice a week amongst themselves (there were 8 of them), for money, $2.00 for a win, plus 10 cents for each IMP over 20 in an 8 board match. They were very experienced money bridge players, although the stakes were nominal; pride was on the line.

Tom's long-time partner was Richard Mugalian, long-time state representative, from Palatine, IL, a wonderful, quiet, soft-spoken man, a throw back, a public servant in the tradition of Franklin Deleano Roosevelt, and Dwight David Eisenhower. Richard's views on social issues and mine dovetailed.

Richard died, quite unexpectedly, of a heart attack, and Tom was devastated. In the Winter of 1991, or perhaps it was 1992, Tom approached me with an offer for us to form a partnership whose goal was to play together in the 1996 Summer Nationals in Albequergue, NM, where he second oldest son, Scott Sucher, the world's most renknown gem forger lived (and still does), and again in the 1998 Summer Nationals in Chicago.

This we did, and have many wonderful stories to tell (more to follow).

Tom is the guy you call at 3 am to come 40 miles to pick you up, and take you home. Tom is the guy to call when your guts are bleeding, and there is no one to talk with. Tom is an original, as kindly and giving and generous a human being as has ever walked the planet.

I love him, and that is about all you need to know.

Be well, my dear readers, and may you always have a Tom Sucher in your life.

Friend, Partner, Mentor:
All these and more, you have been to me,
and hopefully I have been to you.

To know you is to understand
that at the core of your being
to be “your friend”
encompasses a life-long compact,
a commitment and a loyalty
quite rarer now
than in supposedly simpler times past
When a man's word and his good name
counted for everything.

These things I have come to know,
because of your teachings,
You have lived them, by your steadfast examples;
by your consistency, and by your constancy.

Your highest compliment, you have said,
was given to you in a moment that would have
hurt and broken many not so given
to understand, that to “lose” a job
for having “too much imagination to be an
insurance executive” was neither a set back nor a defeat,
but an Affirmation of the things which you
most Value and cherish.

The simpl things: Family, Friends, Food, Laughter,
Music, Song, Beauty, Faith, Hope and Charity.
And the greatest of these,
the tie that binds,
the leitmotif which weaves its way
through the fabric of our beings;

The greatest of these, my Friend,
my Partner,
my Mentor,

The greatest of these, is Love,
Your Gift to us all.


'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicit is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be ahsam'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.