He had the gift of the Kulina "laugh"... and his entire family is blessed with it. If you heard it (and so many of us did), you could not help but laugh along. His laugh was his greatest gift to us.
There are far too may memories of Tommy and too little time to visit them all today. But here’s a decent glimpse into the light side of my best friend, Tommy. I imagine others here will cover Tommy’s many virtues, so I’ll touch upon those memories that will make Tommy laugh in heaven the most. I have to admit this is a difficult time but Tommy knows it’s also an opportunity for me to let the truth be known about a very special friendship. And as he listens in, I’m sure he will be paying careful attention to what Ihave to say, given my best friend’s storehouse of mischievous deeds.
I first met Tommy 40 years ago in at Saint Michael’s School in Annandale, VA. Call it luck, call it destiny, but Tommy centered in on me right out of the gate that first day of fifth grade. In those days we had to wear uniforms and shiny, polished shoes in Catholic school. If your shoes weren’t shined you got put to work. I guess it was the glisten of my well-shined shoes and the thought of getting me in trouble that caught Tommy’s attention in the first place. That’s when this kid I didn’t know from Adam ran up, screamed out “Magic fairy dust” and then heaved two handfuls of powdered dirt on my shiny shoes before running off cackling. This went on for days, every day during recess. I got tons of extra homework, he got lots of laughs. How this formed the bond of a lifetime is beyond me.
From then on, we’d go home after school every day to each other’s houses to play football, bike to the creek to catch fish with hand-lines, ride Tommy’s mini-bike, shoot his BB gun, play basketball H-O-R-S-E and much more. Youth was innocent, invigorating, and a true adventure!
But that wasn’t all. Tommy loved to get his good buddy in trouble in other ways at school. He frequently sat directly behind me alternately flicking my ears and then poking under my arms, so when I covered my ears, he jab me under the arms, and when I’d lower my arms he’d flick my ears. Oh how I loved it, especially when it landed me in the front corner of the class to write 100 times on the black board that I’d stop misbehaving in class, all the while knowing my good buddy’s face was beet red with silent laughter.
If you believed the nuns, penmanship was the absolute most important thing on Earth. That’s why Tommy loved to pop my elbow to mess up my penmanship practice sheets. He enjoyed walking behind me on the way to Friday Masses kicking under the soles of my shiny shoes to get me to walk out of step, resulting in me washing more blackboards, clapping more erasers, and lots of other menial tasks. Don’t get me wrong. I had my choice moments to get back old Tommy, but today is my turn to tell about you, Old Buddy.
Tommy, like me, loved a bargain, any bargain. Like the time we drove all the way down to some German grocery store in DC to buy this fantastic new candy known as gummy bears. We each bought $15 worth, went back to his car, dumped our respective bags on our laps and at the exact same moment, looked up at each other and said, “Can I have some of yours?”
Or like the time we got at least 20 free regulation sized footballs from the Coca Cola Company. Instead of buying all those bottled cokes and hoping the pro football players featured on the inside caps would match those on the big glue sheets, Tommy read the fine print about simply drawing in the faces which we did for days…by the hundreds! We needed that many footballs seeing how many got popped by Caesar, his giant German Shepard.
Tommy loved to visit me in college because he didn’t need to spend a cent. He relished raiding my vegetable garden, literally filling the sink with a garden variety capable of feeding 15 people. We’d go fishing on the New River where we’d catch nearly 100 bass and catfish, cook them up with venison and the works, feasting for hours.
Tommy’s laugh, his infectious laugh, is with me right now. That guy was always looking for a way to get the day’s work done so he could have a good hard belly laugh after quitting time. I’ll never forget the time I lowered the car visor and broke a small American flag he’d propped under there in his VW beetle with those fakey, tacky black and white leopard seat covers. When we stopped at a stoplight he asked me to check his back engine cover that supposedly was loose, and then sped away laughing that laugh leaving me at the intersection, all for breaking that 50-cent flag.
I taught him to camp, fish, shoot, and hunt. He taught me how to build a proper hot fire. We were the perfect match once we got our driving licenses. We shot ducks and rabbits, caught fish and picked field corn, and made pies with berries and apples cooked over those properly built fires. Those were the days!
But what do you say at a time like this? I’ll tell you, you laugh just like Tommy & I laughed one day in high school during an episode I call “The Trouble with Golf Balls”.
I never liked the game of golf very much. I find it too frustrating. You have to do far too many things correctly to be any good at the game and that’s not me. I also never really liked the ball used for the game. It’s too hard to comfortably play catch with, you can’t bounce it very well, and it sinks if it goes in the water. Other than the game of smacking the hell out of them with wooden and metal clubs or tapping them with weird flat-headed rods known as putters, golf balls have absolutely no meaningful purpose in life. That is, until Tommy and I found some fun ways to use them.
It was the night before April Fools Day when we somehow found ourselves out on a local driving range borrowing several hundred golf balls for the next day. We collected over six hundred of those single purpose balls in pillowcases that night.
What drove us to do it was unclear, but I had to play that practical joke of jokes on my girlfriend and needed an accomplice. There were certainly enough balls for us to put them to some useful purpose on April Fools, and we were just the fools to prove it.
That morning Tommy and I got up very early, well before our parents, friends, or high school had awakened. As we rounded the bends in the road on the way to our high school we could hear those golf balls shifting back and forth in the beetle. We hoisted one of the heavy pillowcases of those wretched golf balls up to my girlfriend’s locker, all the while keeping a lookout for the janitor. As luck would have it, the gods were with us. I’d memorized the combination of my girl’s locker just in case it might come in handy in the future. She didn’t know it yet, but that morning was her future.
I opened the locker in a snap, inserted a long piece of cardboard and poured the entire bag of balls into the locker opening. Our smiling eyes met as the lumpy flow of golf balls first thumped and then thundered into the metal locker behind the cardboard. Tommy slid out the cardboard as I closed the locker on the count of three. We both stood back with pride at the trap we set.
We had the perfect, I mean perfect, set-up of a joke, but my girlfriend never showed! We finally abandoned our posts as the first bell rang, disappointed at the anti-climatic end to our perfect practical joke.
As the morning moved on, Tommy and I decided to do something we had never ever done before in high school—the dreaded “S” word. Yes, we decided to skip class. We were graduating seniors and it was a gorgeous spring day. Besides, we had one more perfectly good pillowcase of golf balls begging to be used.
We snuck out to Tommy’s car, got in, all hunkered down like a couple of midgets on the bench. Tommy slowly eased our escape vessel off school grounds and once we turned the corner we sat up, cranked up the radio and started howling like a couple of coyotes. Having no destination didn’t dampen our celebration in singing to The Temptations.
We decided to drive out to a nearby Burke Lake Park with a lake to compete smacking the balls with baseball bats and golf clubs. Within nothing flat, we were teeing them up and driving them out into the lake. I’d pound a few with a driver then Tommy would have a whack with a three iron. I’d smack a few with a 32 Louisville Slugger; Tommy would hammer some with his Fungo bat. He’d challenge me to hit the furthest, driver against driver, driver against my bat, bat against bat. After an hour, we didn’t even put a dent in our pile of golf balls.
As we bet and counter-bet on who could hit the furthest, skip the ball the most consecutive times, or hit a ball closer to the other’s splash, a rowboat came onto the scene. There, out about 200 yards, a lone fisherman made the stupid mistake of crossing into the line of fire.
“Fisherman in the driving range!” called Tommy. “Water pedestrian in the line of fire,” he continued. Despite my remarks about letting the guy pass before resuming our contest of skill, strength, and overall sports acumen, Tommy said, “The heck with that noise. Let’s keep cracking these balls. It’s a big lake. He’ll figure it out.”
I shrugged my shoulders and teed up another ball asking, “Where were we? Oh yeah, trying to put our shots in the ripple rings of the other guy. I’m up.”
I blasted a drive out 200 yards that landed 25 yards from the fisherman. Tommy fired one but sliced it off to within 10 yards of the boat. That got the fisherman’s attention who started rowing considerably faster.
Laughing, I whacked another ball, this time splashing down closer to the guy now feverishly rowing. Tommy, laughed even harder as he teed up, reared back and cracked the orange ball straight for the boat. The line drive shot, flying four feet off the water surface, skimmed above the lake before skipping six times right up to the boat. I howled as I picked up the bat. It was getting to the point every time we looked at each other our faces became more contorted with the levity of the situation. Our laughter was becoming dangerously contagious.
I pinged a rocket of a shot straight for the fishing vessel. As the bright orange ball faded we could see it heading straight for the boat. I yelled, “Fore!” Tommy fell down in hysterics, and the ball drilled the bow on the dead fly! The sound of that rock-hard, good-for-nothing ball colliding with the side of the aluminum boat echoed like a shotgun blast across the water. It was a direct hit that neither Tommy nor I could stand to look at each other about. We were helplessly on the ground crying with laughter, absolute crazy laughter.
But the fisherman wasn’t laughing. And he wasn’t fleeing anymore. He had changed course, rowing directly toward us! I suggested we bolt but Tommy didn’t want to leave the rest of those wretched golf balls behind. Instead, he said, “What’s the guy gonna’ to do? There’re two of us and only one of him. What’s he going to do to a couple of guys with clubs and bats? Cast his deadly fishing lures at us? Don’t worry. I can handle him,” Tommy said.
Firing on the fisherman was my first mistake. Listening to Tommy was the second.
That guy rowed and rowed some more. Closer and closer he came. You could tell he was ticked off because every third pull on the oars he’d pull so hard one of the oars would skip out of the water, causing the rowboat to zigzag. All the while, Tommy and I were wondering what the guy would do when he got to shore.
A full 10 minutes later we found out when the very tip of the bow touched the mucky slippery bank. Without saying a word, he rushed from the back of the boat to the front, hopping from the bench to bench up onto the nose where he tried to leap to shore with one powerful jump. However, as we watched in absolute amazement, the thrust of his jump sent the boat flying back out into the lake and his outstretched body smack flat in the mud in a fantastic belly flop! It happened so quick we thought we were watching a real live cartoon; boat beneath man one second, man in mid-air next, man splats in mud.
And this wasn’t your ordinary run-of-the-mill lakeshore mud either. No, Ladies and Gentlemen, this was that stinky, green-black, gooey mud that you avoid at all costs; the type that doesn’t want to let you go as hundreds of little bubbles rise to the surface.
As the stunned fisherman stirred face first in this mess it took every ounce of restraint, nearly more than we possessed, not to laugh out loud like a couple of donkeys. The mud-caked guy was so totally, absolutely pissed but without saying a word, he slowly stood up, slowly wiping the mud from his eyes as he rocked from side to side, trying to get unstuck from the swamp mud. What a sorry sight.
The fisherman worked his way up to us and burst out, “What the HELL are you two doing?!”, as he oddly spun around fumbled to get something out of his back pocket.
“We were just hitting a few golf balls,” innocently replied Tommy.
“Oh yeah? Fairfax County Police!” the fisherman yelled, flashing his badge. Tommy, the guy who insisted on staying and who was going to handle everything wasn’t doing a very good job with his mouth and eyes wide open.
That’s when I piped up, “We got out of class early today, Officer, and me and Tommy just wanted to hit a few golf balls—a contest of sorts. That’s what we’re doing; competing to see who could hit the ball the furthest,” as I rambled on. “We didn’t see you, Sir, out there until you started rowing our way. We’re sorry we hit the ball so near you”…blah, blah, blah
To my amazement, judging from the guy’s expression, the officer started warming up a little, just a little, to all the malarkey. “Tommy and I have never been out here before. Is the fishing any good? Do you catch many out here?” I proceeded. “I’ve heard they’ve actually caught those huge muskies out here.” Well that somehow hit a positive chord when one was sorely needed.
“Yea, I caught one of those monsters here earlier this spring.”
“Really?” recoiled Tommy in his best acting voice. “How big was it?”
“32 pounds. It was a monster!” said the off-duty cop.
“Unbelievable! How long did it take to get it in?” asked my silver-tongued buddy.
“Nearly two hours.”
“Two hours? Must have been some fight.”
And within 10 minutes of jiving we’d somehow convinced the guy it was all a big mistake, and we all hoped to catch our own monster muskie some lucky day. So we waved goodbye to the fisherman-cop as he waded in his muddied, caked flannel shirt, blue jeans, and baseball hat out into the lake to retrieve his boat. Unbelievable. He never even asked about the golf balls, let alone our consistently poor aim.
And when we returned to Annadale High School we knew our early dawn trap had been sprung. Everyone had a golf ball in hand, bouncing them, tossing them, flipping them. And as they passed by, they’d call over to Tommy and me saying things like, “Great practical joke” or “Killer of an April Fools joke, dude.”
We knew we needed to find someone, anyone who witnessed the grand opening of the locker. And as it was told, my girlfriend arrived late that morning, right between first and second classes when everyone was out in the halls. Perfect timing for “the release”. When she opened the locker all 300 golf balls avalanched out in a thunder in all directions down the halls and the stairs. The crowd’s first reaction was utter disbelief followed by a mad dash to catch a souvenir. Perfect mayhem on April Fools, just what it’s supposed to be, thanks to my buddy Tommy and those lovely things known as golf balls.
Hey Bud, what do you say the first thing we do when we get together in heaven is head back out to that lake and settle once and for all who’s the champion at blasting those no good balls into tomorrow?
Tommy was indeed a really good friend. He was loyal as the day is long and had the greatest sense of humor. I had the opportunity to visit Tom a couple of times before he died. Even though he was sick and knew he wasn't going to make it, he was more interested in what was happening in my life. There was no regret from Tom. He loved his life, enjoyed remembering the good times with friends, and was so grateful to be a member of the Kulina family. He is indeed missed
Thomas P. Kulina
Robert Lowe
Tommy K. -
He had the gift of the Kulina "laugh"... and his entire family is blessed with it. If you heard it (and so many of us did), you could not help but laugh along. His laugh was his greatest gift to us.
He is greatly missed.
Mike Lowe
Stephen Wendt
Michael Guthrie
Tommy was indeed a really good friend. He was loyal as the day is long and had the greatest sense of humor. I had the opportunity to visit Tom a couple of times before he died. Even though he was sick and knew he wasn't going to make it, he was more interested in what was happening in my life. There was no regret from Tom. He loved his life, enjoyed remembering the good times with friends, and was so grateful to be a member of the Kulina family. He is indeed missed
Teresa (Terri) Keys (Lee)
Tommy, love You....Thanks for being YOU....see you in heaven....you are one in a million :-)