Judge issues challenge to high school audience
March 26, 2007
Judge Webb, formally known as Honorable Thomas
Webb, spoke to a combined audience of students from Lyndon and
Marais des Cygnes Valley schools on Friday, January 12, in the
auditorium of Lyndon High School. For 18 years he has been a judge,
often listening to juvenile or custody cases dealing with family
abuse or neglect. On this day, however, he conveyed the humble
beginnings of his own life, with the hope of challenging others to
make a difference in the lives of others, just as others did for
him.
Surviving on his
own
Growing up in a small village near a United Nations base, about 10
miles north of Seoul, Korea –Webb described himself as a war child
on the streets of Korea. His mother was an alcoholic. “During the
seven years that I lived with my mother, I cannot remember her
being sober one day,” he said.
Like many children, he would play during the day, and at night,
find a tree or bush in which to huddle and sleep. “I remember many
times, many nights, going to my home – when I say home, I’m talking
about a shack -- I can hear the laughter of my mother and the
marines, and I was not welcome in my own home,” he said.
If it was a cold winter night, the street children were accustomed
to finding a big Dempsey dumpster, or trash container about 6 feet
long and 4 feet wide, full of garbage, where they would push the
garbage aside, huddle together, pull the garbage around them, and
that’s where they would sleep, along with the rats. “And I remember
times jumping into those trash containers and finding the cold,
still bodies of children who had not survived the night, or the
nights before,” he added.
In November 1958 Webb said to himself, “There’s got to be more to
life than this.” So he left the village and traveled south to
Seoul, Korea. There he found a train station, which became his
haven for three days. It provided shelter from the cold, and
it also provided food because people who traveled on trains in
those days would travel and be gone all day, so they would carry
food with them. Webb learned to observe the people in the train
station, and find someone who was not paying close attention to his
sack food, and then he’d run as fast as he could, grab a sack, and
while he was still fleeing, he would reach inside, grab a handful
of food, then drop the sack. He would keep on running, so the
person who was chasing him would stop and grab the food, as he
elusively escaped into the crowd.
According to Webb, life was good for three days, but on the third
day, he ran smack into a police officer, who picked him up, put him
on a bench against a wall, and said, “You sit right there.” As he
continued to sit there for about an hour, a woman came and sat next
to him, put her arms around him, and she gave him a piece of candy.
All Webb can remember about that woman was that she had white hair.
When given a choice to go with the police officer or the lady, he
thought, “I’m not stupid,” and he announced, “I’ll go with her.”
She took him to the Holt Orphanage in Seoul, Korea, where a doctor
examined his teeth, then they gave him a calendar from which he
picked a date and a month, and that became his birthday. Webb is
also unsure of the exact year he was born: “I was born sometime in
1951, 1952 or 1953. I have no idea when I was born,” he told the
audience.
Webb recalled the day he first saw Harry Holt, the founder of the
orphanage: “It was the noon meal, and I was sitting in front of my
rice soup, and I know it was rice soup because we had rice soup for
breakfast, rice soup for lunch, and rice soup for supper. The
double doors of the kitchen opened up, and this man walked through
those doors, who not only had red hair on his head, but he had red
hair all over his face -- a full beard. I did not know that human
beings could have so much hair on their face.”
Like a surrogate Santa Claus, Holt had brought two big bags, untied
them, and dumped the contents on the cement floor of the orphanage.
Balls of every size and color started bouncing, and like all the
rest of the kids who could walk, Webb forgot about his bowl of rice
soup and dove into the middle of all those balls. After he finally
succeeded in getting ahold of one ball that no one else could take
away from him, he returned to his bowl of soup.
“At the orphanage they taught us that before we ate, we always
bowed our heads, closed our eyes, and a blessing was given for the
food,” he continued. “I thought back all these years as to why I
did not bow my head and close my eyes that day. Maybe because he
had given me a present, I don’t know. But I do know this. I saw
something that day that I had never seen in my life. I saw a grown
man cry. I had never seen that before. As Harry Holt prayed that
day, he not only prayed for the food that day, he prayed that God
would find a family for all the children. I felt in my heart
that someone really cared about me. I had never had that feeling
before,” said Webb.
Coming to America
Webb also described the day he arrived in America: “In 1959 I was
on a plane coming to the United States. Most people want to adopt
children who are seven months old, not seven years old and
who had grown up their whole life on the streets. On that plane
were about 100 children. Most were diapered babies, and I was the
oldest one.”
Upon arrival in Portland, Oregon, a lady took him by the hand,
walked him halfway down the steps of the plane, stopped, and
pointed to Roy Webb, a school administrator from the state of
Oklahoma. This was to be the Korean child’s new father. He was a
big man, over six feet tall, about 235 pounds, and bald. In stark
contrast, Roy Webb looked at his new son, who at seven years of
age, probably weighed not more than 39 pounds, and without
hesitation took him to the airport restaurant.
In the restaurant, Judge Webb remembers a waitress going by his
table with a platter full of hamburgers and french fries that
someone in the restaurant had ordered. “Ohhhh, I smelled
those hamburgers and French fries,” Webb remembered, “They smelled
so good, my stomach just did a flip-flop and I pointed at the
platter full of food, and when I pointed, the waitress stopped,
took a plate, and put it in front of me for me to eat, and I said
to myself, ‘I love this country. They just bring the food to you.
This is wonderful. I love this.’” When he could not eat another
bite, he then did something that embarrassed his new father. The
young boy stood up and took a handful of french fries in both hands
and started stuffing them into his pockets.
“The number one rule of survival on the
streets: You should never leave food behind,” said Webb. “If
you cannot eat the food, you carry that food with you.” When the
new father saw his son pushing those greasy french fries into his
pockets, he started shoving all the plates away from him. “But it
did not slow me down one bit,” the judge remembered. “I would
go across the table, grab another handful of french fries and stuff
those into my pocket. By this time, the waitresses who had been
standing around watching me eat all this food, they came running
over and they had these bags, and they started putting food into
these bags. Then I realized in this country, this is how they
carried their extra food. So I reached into my pockets, got the
french fries out, put them into the bags, and dad said there must
have been seven or eight of those doggie bags full of food that I
had not consumed. He said that I would not let him carry one bag,
because that was my food. And I held onto that food from the
taxi ride to the motel.”
At the front door of the motel room, the new arrival to America
stopped and carefully surveyed the room before putting all his food
into a corner by the bed. Then he took off his jacket, and his
father gave him a banana. This young native of Korea had never
eaten a banana in his life. After he had finished the banana, he
began putting the banana peeling into his mouth and started chewing
on it. “Of all the foods that I had eaten in this country,” he told
the audience, “this was the worst. My face was doing things that I
could not imagine. It was so bitter, but it was food, and you never
throw food away. Dad tried to take the banana peeling out of my
mouth. The only thing I could think was that he was trying to take
food away from me, so I started stuffing it further into my mouth.
So there was this little tug of war going on over this banana
peeling. Finally, my dad who weighed 235 pounds, picked me up by
one hand, took me over to the dresser, and gave me another banana.
For me to eat the banana, I had to take the peeling out of my
mouth. As soon as I took the peeling out, he grabbed it out of my
hand and threw it into the wastebasket. And that is how I learned
not to eat the peeling of the banana.”
The next morning the two flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the young
Korean boy met his new mother, Ruth Webb, a school teacher. Through
a son’s eyes, Judge Webb described her as a very unique woman:
“When she was happy, she was crying. When she was sad, she was
crying. I remember when she first saw me the tears were just
flowing, and she was looking in my ears and counting all my little
fingers. When she gets me home, she puts me in the bathtub and as
she was washing me, all of a sudden she puts the washrag down and
she starts counting my ribs which are protruding out and she prays
through her tears: ‘Lord, put some meat on these bones.’ I played
on two championship football teams, played on a Marine Corps
football team for two years, and during that time I consumed a lot
of food, but I was very active. When I got out of the Marine Corps,
I still consumed a lot of food, but I wasn’t very active. I’m
5-foot-8, and about 25 years ago I weighed 235 pounds. One
Christmas I waddled into the kitchen where my mother was cooking,
and I asked, ‘Do you remember that prayer you prayed when I first
came over?’"
“Yes, I do,” she answered.
“Well, you can stop praying that prayer now,” Webb said.
Moving to
Kansas
In 1961 the Webb family moved to Junction City, Kansas. “In the
1960s, if you’d look down the main street of Junction City, you’d
see a lot of bars where the GIs would go to party, and as the night
progressed some of them would drift down to a part of town that we
called the East side of town. We didn’t have the ‘wrong side of the
tracks,’ but if you lived on the East side of town, you definitely
lived on the ‘wrong side of the town,’ if you get the picture,”
said Judge Webb.
When his mother interviewed with the superintendent of schools, she
voluntarily chose to teach at an elementary school where the kids
who lived on the East side attended school. Judge Webb also
remembered walking into his mother’s classroom where he saw boxes
of cereal where normally one would expect to see assorted books or
textbooks at the back of the classroom: “I looked at my mom, and I
said, ‘Mom, why do you have all these cereal boxes in your
classroom?’”
Ruth Webb looked at her son and replied, “Tommy, I have some
students who come to class in the same clothes they slept in the
night before. A lot of my students never see their parents before
they come to school, and I want to make sure that before my kids
start out their school day, they have something to eat. So on the
first day of school, I ask each one of my students ‘What is your
favorite cereal?’"
When she completed the list of cereal requests, Ruth Webb went
shopping with her own money and bought cereal for the next day, so
that each of her students had something to eat before they started
their school day: “It’s amazing,” said Judge Webb. “She
didn’t have trouble with her kids being tardy to school. Her kids
were the ones waiting at the front door, so they could be the first
to run down the hallway to their classroom.”
Connecting with
parents
When he was in high school, Judge Webb described one Saturday
morning when he accompanied his mother on home visits to the
parents who did not show up for parent-teacher conference. “If you
go with me,” she bribed, “I’ll buy you breakfast.”
“Give me ten minutes, and I’ll be right with you,” the future judge
readily responded.
So he cleaned up and she bought him a big breakfast and they went
to the East side of town to visit some parents. Some of the houses
were run-down, but in front of one house in particular, a German
shepherd in the front yard ran as hard as he could and was jerked
back by the chain around his neck. Eerily, the screen door of that
home hung by only one hinge. Mrs. Webb asked her son to go to the
door with her, but young Tommy Webb felt like saying, “Do I look
like I have stupid written across my forehead, Mom?” Instead
he looked at her, and replied, “Mom, maybe you should come back
this afternoon when Dad can come back with you?”
“No, this is where so-and-so lives, and I’m here, and I am going to
go in and visit,” she said to him.
Young Webb said, “Okay, Mom, I’ll be right here waiting for you.
Good luck.”
As she got out of the car and stood by the gate, the German
shepherd was lunging, trying to get to her. The screen door opened
up, and there appeared a man almost six-foot-seven, 375-pounds, in
his boxer shorts and without a shirt. He looked at Mrs. Webb and
said, “What do you want?” although those were not his exact words,
recalled the young Webb.
Mrs. Webb explained who she was and why she was there. “You’ve got
to be kidding me,” said the man. He stepped past the German
shepherd, and as he did, he hit the German shepherd so hard on the
back of the head, he dropped to the ground. Without missing a step,
he continued walking toward the gate, unlocked it, opened it, and
Mrs. Webb followed him into his home.
Ten minutes later the screen door opened. The man opened the gate
for Mrs. Webb, and she came around to get in the car as young Webb
unlocked the door. The man hollered, “We’ll get his homework done
before he comes to school.”
At that moment, Mrs. Webb, who was five-foot-three, stood there and
started shaking her fingers at him. “He had better have his
homework done before he comes to school, and you better be at the
next parent-teacher conference, or I’ll be right back here visiting
you. Do you understand me?”
The big guy said, “Mrs. Webb, I promise, I promise, he’ll have his
homework done and we’ll be at the next parent-teacher
conference.”
With a smile on her face, Mrs. Webb said, “Thank you for allowing
me to come to your home today and visit you.”
With his hands in the air and a serious look on his face, the
man replied, “Mrs. Webb, no, you don’t understand. Thank you for
caring enough about our son that you came to visit us in our home.
You will never know what that means to us. Thank you.”
Mrs. Webb said thank you again, and they drove away.
After describing the event to the audience, Mr. Webb said, “One of
the things I regret in life is that I’ve never let my mother know
what an impact that day made in my life. For my mother truly
believes that no matter what the color of your skin, no matter what
title you might have before or after your name, no matter what part
of town you might live in, every person that she came in contact
with she treated that person with respect and with value.”
Giving
thanks
Judge Webb expressed deep appreciation for the people who had
touched his life: “If it had not been for some people reaching out
and making a positive difference in my life with compassion and
caring, the reality is I would not even be alive today. I am
thankful for Roy and Ruth Webb, who had two children, and yet they
chose to open their hearts, their lives, and their home to a
seven-year-old street child.
“I am thankful to Harry Holt who had heard about the dire situation
of the Korean children after the Korean War. He went to Korea,
where he saw them dying in the streets. He then came back to the
United States and had a special bill passed in Congress that
allowed him to adopt more children than what the law would permit.
And even after that, he went back to Korea and opened an orphanage
which touched the hearts and lives of millions of people throughout
the world.
“I am thankful for a mother who chose to give me life. I never saw
her after I left that village, but she is my mother and I love her.
I am also thankful for all the men and women who came and served in
the Korean conflict. We lost more than 50,000 American soldiers and
Marines, but because of those men and women I have the privilege of
living in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Likewise, Judge Webb is thankful for the white-haired lady who gave
him a piece of candy. “Can you imagine what you would smell like if
you did not have a bath for two or three weeks?” he asked the
audience. In reality, he noted, it had probably been more like 60
to 90 days since water had touched his body, clothes and
hair.
He explained, “The only time that boy would take a bath is when he
jumped into a stream that flowed passed his village, and he would
jump in with all his clothes on, because if he took his clothes off
while he was in the stream, someone would steal his clothes. So his
clothes never left him.”
“In that 60 or 90 days, he not only ate garbage, he slept in
garbage, and yet that little old lady came. Can you imagine what
that little boy looked like? The only thing I remember was she had
white hair. I remember how soft she felt. She put her arms
around me, and she squeezed me,” he said in wonderment and
disbelief. “That white-haired lady never knew the impact she made
in my life, but I am the person I am today because of an act of
kindness that she did to that little Korean boy in that train
station.”
Valuing
others
Looking directly at the audience, Judge Webb said, “You need to
value those around you. The sad thing is that many of you have gone
to school with one another for years. And for whatever reason, you
don’t value that person, and so therefore, you don’t treat that
person very well.”
Judge Webb then illustrated this point with a story about a time in
his life when he had wanted a 750 Honda and his wife had wanted a
set of china. Similar in emotional content to the short story “The
Gift” by Guy de Maupassant, Webb chose to sacrifice his “want” for
something that would make his wife happy. During a military move
from Japan to the United States, Judge Webb remembers watching his
wife as she individually unpacked the china he had given her. He
said he could tell that she valued that china by the way she
handled it.
“So often in the journey of life, you look at people like
they are paper plates, and not like china, and you handle
them and treat them like are paper plates. And then you
wonder why they treat you like paper plates, and not like
china,” he said.
Webb added: “The person that you choose to be is a choice that you
choose to make. My challenge to you today is to be a person of
character. And no matter what injustices occur within your life,
challenge yourself to be a person who will make a positive
difference in the lives of those you touch, and reach out with a
hand of compassion and caring. If you can do that, then you can
truly value others, and you can value yourself.”
Illustrating with a
poem
When deliberating personal choices, Judge Webb offered the
following poem to illustrate how one’s behavior is a reflection of
one’s attitude:
The Cold
Within
author
unknown
Six humans
trapped by happenstance
in dark and
bitter cold
Each one
possessed a stick of wood
or so the
story’s told.
Their dying
fire in need of logs
The first
woman held hers back
For on the
faces around the fire–
She noticed
that one was black.
The next man
looking ‘cross the way
saw one not
of his church–
and couldn’t
bring himself to give
the fire–his
stick of birch.
The third one
sat in tattered clothes
he gave his
coat a hitch.
Why should
his log be put to use–
to warm the
idle rich?
The rich man
just sat back and thought
of the wealth
he had in store.
And how to
keep what he had earned
from the
lazy, shiftless poor.
The black
man’s face bespoke revenge
as the fire
passed from sight
for all he
saw in his stick of wood
was a chance
to spite the white.
The last man of this
forlorn group
did naught
except for gain.
Giving only
to those who gave
was how he
played the game.
The logs held tight in
death’s still hands
was proof of
human sin.
They didn’t
die from the cold without
They died
from the cold within.
