"He Was a Good 'ol Boy, that Tom Harley, But He's Deeeaad Now!"

[TrueTomHarley]

Leroy Whitehouse passed away the other night. I’ll miss that man. A tall, drawling 80-something-year-old black man from the deep south, I used to jest with him how I hoped he would one day give my funeral talk:

“Yeeeaass, he was a good ‘ol boy, that Tom Harley, but he’d deeeaad now! D_E_A_D!”

LeRoy would uninhibitedly offer comments to the 50/50 congregation about his younger days back home “working for the white man.” Or relate how even long term Bethelites are not perfect, illustrating it with a brother who declared “I don’t give a damn!” Taking the nervous titter in the audience for appreciation, he repackaged the line and ran it through two or three more times: “I don’t give a damn!”

I will miss him plenty. He was a friend.
 

[TrueTomHarley]

In the ICU once again with a bad ticker, Leroy Whitehouse knew this time would be his last. “Yeeeaap, I’m cashing in my chips this time. I’ve cheated death 17 times, but not this time.” One half expected him to crawl under the workbench and die, as did my cat.

It turns out that 80-some-odd-year-old Leroy, from the Mississippi delta, knew the blues, and he would jam with the brothers less than half his age. “Heeaol, this is yur ‘ol man. I can’t come tonight. I broke my G string. What I need is another G string! I'm sayin that I need another G string!” Brothers on whose answering machines Leroy left a message never erased it.

Like all of Jehovah’s Witnesses, he didn’t know how to stretch one. When he rode with Darin and Darin got pulled over for running a stop sign, Darin wasn’t going to take it. He knew he had stopped. He knew he was just being harassed for DWB. He took LeRoy with him to the courthouse and they put him on the stand. “Yeeeuup, he just came up to that stop sign and eeeaassed on through,” the latter said under oath. Darin didn’t say a word. He pulled out his checkbook.

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