When I met up with Julie in July, she told me the sad story of Tony's death which was something like this:
Tony became a successful master cabinet-maker and traveled across the country doing the storefronts for Ralph Lauren and other top commercial retailers. He lived in Norman, OK and was married to Cleo. They had two children- Carver and Laura.
Tony worked a team of top notch cabinet makers as employees. Some would stay behind working in his shop and others who would travel with him doing installations on the road. Some things never change though- Tony or Wander Yonder as he was once known- loved traveling and being on the road. It was however both rewarding and stressful. As a result---Tony struggled with an alcohol addiction. Alcohol affected him strongly and he battled the addiction his whole life.
When Julie moved back to Texas to take care of ailing parents in late 1999- they renewed their relationship. She tried to help him with his alcoholism, but with little success. In 2003, Julie moved her parents to FL and she and Tony continued a long distance relationship.
In September of 2007 Tony was clearing out his woodshop so he could sell his shop building. Late one night during the move he blacked out while driving and ran into a curb - the truck flew through the air - he was severely injured. Tony was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery with 3 crushed vertebrae. They put rods in his back. While in surgery he got a hospital induced staph infection.
Julie could tell something was wrong because after the surgery on the phone Tony was talking out of his head for a few days. She flew to Oklahoma. The hospital had over medicated Tony to the point that he didn't know what was going on. She decided to stay in Norman and be his advocate in the hospital. Because of the staph, Tony was on heavy intravenous antibiotics and heavy pain pills and couldn't leave the hospital. They both lived in his hospital room for 2 1/2 months.
Once he was released he had to continue intravenous antibiotics and continued on heavy pain pills. Julie ended up staying in Norman until April before going back to Florida. Tony never seemed to really get better. He was in extreme pain and never could get to where he was comfortable sitting. Since he didn't have health insurance, his surgeon didn't want to continue seeing him after his release and kept saying that because of the severity of his injury that healing would be slow.
Fast forward to September 2008, almost one year to the date of the initial accident: Tony called Julie and asked her to come back to Norman because he was terribly ill. She flew there immediately and got him back into the hospital. After many tests--- they decided the Mrvsa (staph) had migrated into his bones. Their solution was surgery to take the metal rods out of his back. After a week- Julie, who works with the Sierra Club, had to testify in a lawsuit against the County where she lives so she had to leave and fly to Florida before Tony's surgery.
Two days later Tony went into surgery. It was a Friday - on the next day he called and said that he felt better (Saturday), and on Sunday Julie got a call from the hospital saying that he had gone into cardiac arrest and couldn't be revived. Needless to say, Julie was devastated.
Julie wrote a song for Tony and a friend of hers, Raymond Harrell Odom, put music to it. He's now put it up on Youtube. Remember how Tony was called Wander Yonder? That's the name of the song....... (actually on Youtube, the title is Wonder Yonder)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EkQBrKnxQA
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