In the Connecticut town of New London last month, a judge died. His name was Thomas P. Condon. He was 71, judge of the town’s probate court. I never knew him, but I was very interested in an editorial that his local paper, the Day, wrote about his passing.
Judge Condon, the editorial said, “gave to each person the dignity that a human being deserves”-which is about as impressive a statement as you can possibly make about anyone. But the editorial made another point, too.
It said that Judge Condon, who was born in New London, lived there virtually all his life and died there, never yearned to move to a bigger city-specifically, never yearned to work for one of the giant, prestigious law firms in New York. Once, the editorial said, a New York lawyer visited probate court in New London, and asked Judge Condon why he was stuck in such a small town, using his obvious legal talent and knowledge in a place with only 30,000 residents.
Judge Condon, by way of an answer, asked the New York attorney how far he lived from work, and how long it took him each day to get into the big city.
The New York attorney said he lived a long way from work, and had to commute for 90 minutes each morning.
Judge Condon said that it took him seven minutes to get from his home to his office.
Both the New York lawyer and Judge Condon enjoyed playing golf. Judge Condon asked the New York lawyer how far he lived from his golf course, and how long was the average waiting time on a weekend.
It took the lawyer a half-hour to get to the golf course, and there was usually a 45-minute to one-hour delay before teeing off.
Judge Condon said his golf course was eight minutes from his house, and that there were usually no delays in teeing off.
The judge said that, in New London, it took him two minutes to walk to the place where he ate lunch each day-if he didn’t run into someone on the street he wanted to talk to. He said it took him five minutes to get to the beach. And he said he lived in New London because he liked it.
That’s what the editorial in the Day said. Judge Condon’s life sounded like a pretty meaningful one. I called his son, Tom, who is a columnist in Connecticut for the Hartford Courant, and asked him what he thought.
“My father made the dean’s list in college, and was voted most likely to succeed,” Tom Condon said. “He finished No. 1 in his class in Army Officers Candidate School. He would have done very well wherever he went, at whatever he wanted.
“What he wanted was New London. He liked where he lived. New London is a very small town-it’s only 7 square miles or so. In monetary terms he never became a very wealthy man, and he probably could have.
“Was he lacking in ambition? Absolutely not. A desire for material gain was not the driving force in his life. His ambition was to raise his family in a nice town that he loved, and to do the things he truly loved to do.
“My father loved to paint. He was a very accomplished amateur painter. Oils-he painted pictures of abandoned mills, and of barns, and of people and sailboats and lighthouses. All of it was real. All of it he saw around New London.”
Did his son think Judge Condon had any regrets? “It’s hard to say. I guess, to some degree, everyone does. There are things I think he would have liked to get around to. He wanted to write a novel, but never did.”
The important things, though, Judge Condon accomplished. Maybe that was what was so heartening about the editorial his hometown paper published on the occasion of his death. It was a signal of what truly matters in this world of ours.
“Ambition?” his son said. “The question is how you define it. If ambition is to have all the toys when the game is over, all the dough, then he wasn’t ambitious. If ambition is to have a life you can define and understand, to find a true community. . . .
“My father’s wake was on a terrible, snowy night. An awful night. There were more than 400 people there.
“He was friends with all of his children, and he lived in a town he loved. Four hundred people at his wake. On such an awful night. Yeah, I think my father’s life was successful.”
