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Veteran’s Day 2013 Profile: Tommy Webb

Circumstances do not predict the future.  Tommy Webb is living proof.  

Tommy is a child of the Korean War.  He has no idea the day or year he was born.  His birth mother was a prostitute and a drunk.  He does not recall one day when his mother was sober.  His village was up the hill from the Marine base, and he remembers cold nights, and being locked out of their shack because his mother had visitors.  

When he was somewhere around seven years old, he walked away from that shack, ending up ten miles away in Seoul, Korea.  As a child of the streets, he knew he needed to find shelter and food.  Both were found at the train station. 

People traveling carried food, and when they weren’t paying attention, he would steal some.  A police officer caught him after a few days, and told him to sit on the bench.  When he returned, he brought a white-haired lady along.  She sat by the little boy on the bench, and gave him candy.  The officer asked who he’d rather go with.  The lady or him?  Tommy says he wasn’t stupid.  He chose the lady.  It was a road that led him to the Holt Orphanage, and to become the son of a couple named Webb.  

His life is full of miracles… happenstances that took him to the next chapter.  Things like:

  • The New Mexico couple that had planned on adopted him, changed their mind three days before the flight was to arrive in Portland, Oregon.
  • The Webbs had been told it would take two to three years to get a child, yet months after their application, they were given three days to pick up this little boy in Portland, Oregon.  
  • A trip to Disneyland began the shift in Tommy’s thinking from hating the Marines and they stood for to enlisting and becoming one.

Faith makes this man who he is, and it’s faith he wishes people had more of. 

Tommy is now the District Magistrate Judge.  He shares his belief, “You can make a difference,” at every opportunity.  Find out more about Judge Webb at: http://www.judgewebb.org/index.html

tommy_webb_rawforweb_partone.mp3
The whole conversation Part One: Tommy Webb, Leonard Hitz, and Cindee Talley
tommy_webb_rawforweb_parttwo.mp3
The whole conversation Part Two.