A life that shines

Tommy the shoeshine man is every bit as content as the suits who tower over him like kings, reading their Wall Street Journals while he busily brushes and buffs their expensive loafers and oxfords.

The shoeshine stand, near the lobby of the renovated Hilton Capitol Center, is like a mahogany-colored throne, with brass stirrups and discreet drawers filled with polish, brushes and buffing rags.

The customers chatter easily and steadily with the 55-year-old who grew up in Gonzales, then went off to Vietnam as a U.S. Marine before returning home to a career as a blue-collar laborer.

He and his wife, Carolyn, have two grown sons. Norman is in the U.S. Navy, while Vincent is studying education and history at Southeastern.

Lately, business has been pretty slow—too slow, really. It just isn’t the same as when he shined shoes at Militello’s. There, suburban bankers, lawyers and executives ducked out of Corporate Boulevard traffic all day to sit in a row reading the paper and waiting for a shoeshine. Now Tommy’s stand is tucked down the hall from the registration desk.

He spends much of his day reading and waiting, but he’s glad for every minute of it. That’s because he’s living a second chance, the kind most guys never get.

He was born with a bum circulatory system and a tendency toward chronically high cholesterol. Surgeons had performed four bypass operations by the time he was 45 years old.

Eventually, his heart got so weak they told him to stay in the hospital until a suitable heart donor could be found.

In the late summer of 1998, a 17-year-old kid named Jason was riding his motorcycle in his Pontiac, Mich., neighborhood when a car struck him, inflicting fatal injuries.

The teenager’s family prayed over their brain-dead son, ultimately deciding to let go and to donate his organs so someone else might live a normal life.

Already ensconced at Ochsner’s transplant wing in New Orleans, Tommy got the call at 1:30 a.m. “I was so nervous, they couldn’t get my blood pressure down. But when my wife Carolyn got there it went right on down.

He went under the knife that afternoon. “That was Sept. 9, 1998,” he says. “Same night Mark McGuire broke the Major League home run record.”

His body has healed, but long scars criss-cross his chest and abdomen. Nearly 10 years later, he undergoes annual angiograms, and he’ll take drugs to prevent his body from rejecting his Michigan heart for the rest of his life.

He wouldn’t be here if not for his wife and sons. “We’re a knit family,” he says. “We’re one.”

So even days shining the shoes of the exec set are cherished.

“I’m not gonna mess up this good thing I’ve been given. The good Lord gave me a second chance at life, I’m not going to be no fool and screw it up.”