D. MICHAEL TOMKINS

David Michael Tomkins was born October 25th 1947 as the second child of Winnifred Mildred Singer and Alfred Ephraim Tomkins. When he was three years old, the family moved to California, where he grew up on the mean streets of Pacific Palisades and learned his street fighting skills. At the age of five, for a very Michael Tomkins reason (unknown), he requested his family no longer call him David, but Michael. For another unknown reason his parents acquiesced. He was always able to make friends easily and was well liked by most, a quality that he possessed throughout his life. He was active in little league sports and cub scouts and capped that career as an eagle scout. But for the existing pictures we would not have believed it either. He often said he accomplished this by having food flown in for his camping badge and other work arounds for the additional badges.

 

Michael was unable to read until the age of 8. His mother was instrumental in recognizing his learning disability and finding him a reading instructor named Mrs. Mahan who was able to teach him to read kinesthetically. He never was able to read out loud without stopping at the end of a line, before actually moving his eyes on to the next line and starting anew. He became a voracious reader and ultimately a published author.

 

He attended Paul Revere Jr. High and spent summers body surfing at Will Rodgers Beach and playing sports. He spent the first year of high school at Pacific Palisades, where his parents did not believe he thrived. There was a young school being developed in the Ojai Valley and his family decided that Michael would do better in a private residential school. Michael did not want to go and drug his heels the entire way, guilt tripping his parents via letters for many months on end. However, under the guidance of the then dorm manager, Michael Hermes, he flourished and made many friendships that endure today. He rode horses to class, played baseball, and graduated as one of the endearing members of the class of 1965 and Michael Hermes and his wife Liz continued to play a pivotal role in Michael’s life.

 

Following high school, he attended Cal-Western in San Diego where he got his degree in political science. During his college years he was a cheerleader and, never one to be overly sensitive to political correctness, lead an unfortunate cheer against rival Santa Barbara which put him in front of the school disciplinary board.

 

Following college, he attended the University of Minnesota Law School because of the similarity of the weather to his home in California. Somehow, he was able to go through three Minnesota winters without stepping outside.

 

Following Law school, he worked for Ralph Nader in promoting Indian Welfare and rights, ultimately moving to Seattle in 1973 with his Saint Bernard Prosser. They lived in a small apartment on Aloha in Capitol Hill. Even with him passing the bar in a notoriously difficult year to do so (only 30% of the Washington State Bar applicants passed that year), he was unable to find a job – ANY job at an established law firm. Therefore, he opened his own law firm, hired a secretary, and he was off. His first book, Trial and Error, follows this time in his life.

Some might say he fell in with the wrong crowd, during those early years, representing the many burgeoning head shops in Seattle and possibly writing and directing a movie of a dubious nature.

 

He met Ms. Rennie, as he often called her, in 1983 at a houseboat party on Lake Union. From that time on they were inseparable and Margie worked with him in his law practice and his ever-constant business ventures. They married in 1990 in South Africa during Apartheid, for one reason because maybe he thought it wasn’t legal (or so her brothers thought). Their daughter, Kaysee-Li, was born in 1994 in Guangzhou, China – summing up the non-conventional approach to living life with Michael.

 

His book The 30 Hit Season – about a 47-yr. old attorney who has a dream that he gets 30 hits off of major league pitching and helps the Mariners win the world series – was published the same year. He had his “cup of coffee” in the Majors while promoting his book, playing alongside a 19-year-old Alex Rodriguez who mostly laughed throughout the all too short “Michael Tomkins Day” at Cheney Stadium.

 

He continued to write novels, ultimately publishing The World Below, a story of conservation in a changing underwater world. He collaborated on For the Sake of the Vine, a mystery set in the wine country of Eastern Washington. He leaves many unpublished works and screen plays such as – The Dirty Little Note about Chinese adoption and The Runner about an autistic boy playing baseball in the major leagues.

 

Michael loved to travel. He followed the Mariners to Peoria, Arizona for spring training for 28 years. He loved the warm weather and of course reading by the pool. He went to China twice, once to bring Kaysee-Li home and once to take her back (just kidding). He and Margie spent two months in Africa in 1990. A few of his favorite travel destinations were Belize, where he explored retirement opportunities, South Carolina, where he was involved with Clive Cussler in his research and recovery efforts of the Hunley, and Brazil where he worked with a doctor friend on a naturopathic mud bath treatment for people and horses. He traveled to Mexico twice, to bring home children whose adoptions he facilitated.

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He was active with the organization Families with Children from China; he spent a year or two on the board only because he went to the bathroom once during a meeting and was elected to serve while he was gone. He never really caught on to the correct adoption lingo, however. Adoption seemed to translate to buying babies, adoptable children became “inventory”, and the wait for babies to come home was the “turnaround time”.

When he met people for the first time and happened to have Kaysee in his arms, he would hold Kaysee up and ask “Does she look Jewish”? He was so irritated by the hoops he had to jump through to adopt Kaysee that he flatly refused to answer the screening questions, such as “what will you tell your child about adoption”? This so incensed him that he wrote on his application “I’m not going to tell her, and if asked I’ll deny it”. He joked initially that it sounded like passing the home visit would be a breeze as long as we took the kiddie porn off the wall. He then tortured the social worker, who asked him in their one on one interview to explain his comments on kiddie porn, and he led her down the lurid path of describing a past clients “issues” while somehow making it sound like they were his own, culminating in her eventually realizing that he was describing a client and not himself. He was out of that meeting in 10 minutes. We are lucky Kaysee is here.

 

Many friends have remarked about his boundless generosity in life, his irreverent sense of humor, and his kindness to all he encountered. Voted Washington’s Funniest Lawyer, Michael was like no one else. He continued to practice law through January 2018, when his illness prevented him from continuing his work. D. Michael Tomkins passed away in his home in Seattle, WA at the age of 70, with his beloved daughter and wife by his side.

 

He is survived by his wife Margie Rennie, daughter Kaysee-Li Tomkins, brother Richard Tomkins, brother-in-laws Edward (Jeanne) Rennie, Michael Rennie, Peter Rennie, sister-in-law Barbara (Donald) Bernard, and several nieces and nephews. He had a special relationship with his nieces’ children, Corbin, Petra, and Oliver Kelley, and Emerson Michael Asp who is named for him. He also had a very special bond with the child of a friend, Jake Singer.

 

Ted Kennedy said of his brother Robert, “Love is not an easy thing to put into words. Nor is loyalty, or trust, or joy. But he was all of these. He loved life completely and he lived it intensely”, and the same can be said of Michael.