Tom Wakely for Congress

Tom Understands The Value Of Education

Tom has integrated college basics with self-taught skills, becoming well-rounded, innovative, and more adaptable than some who have relied solely on traditional educational paths.  In Denver, Tom studied journalism and political science at Loretto Heights College. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he enrolled in the school's peace and conflict studies program. He studied Biology and Earth Sciences at Ohio State University. He completed his education by studying Liberation Theology at the Chicago Theological Seminary. "While at seminary, I organized a week-long conference on religion and politics," Tom said. "Among the speakers I invited to the conference was former New Mexico Governor, Toney Anaya, who spoke about his Catholic faith and how it moved him to commute all the prisoners on death row in our state to life in prison."

 

Tom Has Always Put Others Before Himself

A Vietnam-era USAF veteran, Tom, worked with César Chávez on the grape boycott campaign in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. On one visit to Denver, he met the President of Local #105 of the Service Employees International Union. That meeting led to Tom being offered a job organizing nurses, race track employees, window washers, and janitors. "I remember those campaigns very well," Tom said. "One day, while I was attempting to organize nurses at a local hospital, I was arrested and tossed in jail. When I went to trial, I remember the judge asking the members of the jury pool if anyone couldn't render an impartial verdict, to please stand up. That's when an old Black man stood up, steadying himself with a cane. He said, " Your honor, I'm a retired union bricklayer, and I could never convict another union man and send him to jail, no matter what he's done. That juror was dismissed. I was found not guilty. And to this day, I am still fighting for the working men and women of this country."

 

After seminary, Tom moved to Wisconsin to work as a community organizer. While there, he became a foster parent to two young twin Latino brothers. He organized the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Lakes in Elkhorn and served as the congregation's first pastor. He ran for the Badger High school board in Lake Geneva and was elected. When Tom was asked to move back to Texas to serve as the Executive Director of the Economic Justice Foundation in Austin, he answered that call. It was a role that earned him a Community Service Award from the city's NAACP chapter. 

 

Recognizing the heavy toll his political and community activism was taking on his mental, emotional, and physical health, Tom and Lety decided they needed to do something completely different. So they packed up and moved to the Pacific coast of Mexico, where they opened VIVA VINO, a jazz nightclub on the beach in Manzanillo. Three years later, Tom's brother called him to say their mother was very ill and asked if he and Lety could return to San Antonio to care for her. A month later, they were back in the River City and oversaw Ann Wakely's enrollment in Christus VNA Hospice.

 

After Tom's mother died, the hospice agency asked Tom and Lety if they would be interested in taking some additional hospice patients into their home. Again, they said yes, and over the next 12 years, they took 84 people, primarily military veterans, into their home and cared for them until they died. Their oldest patient was Lucy Coffey, a highly decorated World War II veteran. On her 108th birthday, Vice President Joe Biden called Tom's house and asked to speak to Lucy to wish her a happy birthday. In that phone call, he invited her to the White House to meet him and President Obama. Accepting that invitation, Lety took Lucy to Washington under the auspices of the Honor Flight program. After the two of them returned home, Lucy told Tom that she had a great time meeting the Vice President and President, touring the White House, and visiting the Military Women's Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, of which she was a charter member. She also said she told the President she had voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt four times.

 

 

Over the next few months she and Tom talked a lot about her family. She told him that she had been very politically active after the war. She also told Tom that one of the greatest challenges facing the country both then and now was income inequality and that if the occasion ever presented itself he should do something about it.  And that occasion came when Sen. Bernie Sanders decided to run for President. Tom entered the 2016 Texas Democratic primary for Congress, running as an economic populist and a democratic socialist. He won that contested primary, beating a party picked candidate, a multi-millionaire tech guy out of Austin. Though he lost the general election to a 20 year Republican incumbent, Tom walked away with another hard life lesson learned. A lesson that has prepared him not only for his 2026 New Mexico democratic congressional primary election but how to go on to win the November general election as an economic populist.