Ga. Justice Wanted to Wear Tie to Hospital During Heart Attack
Georgia Supreme Court Justice George Carley is exceedingly polite, a stickler for detail and an old-school dresser who almost always wears a coat and tie.
Carley made few exceptions to his self-imposed dress code, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports in a profile of the 71-year-old justice who has served three decades on the bench.
There is, for instance, the time that Carley awoke at 4 a.m. with intense chest pain, realizing it was a heart attack. He smoked a cigarette, thinking it would be his last, and then told his wife, Sandy, of his pain. She ordered him into the car for a trip to the hospital.
The Journal-Constitution tells what happened next:
But wait: He’d forgotten one other thing, he told Sandy. Would she go back into the house and get his coat and tie? Carley might have been about to die, but he wasn’t about to die out of uniform.
Forget it, Sandy said.
As she backed down the driveway, her husband collapsed, falling forward in the front seat. The last thing Carley can remember, before being revived in the emergency room, was Sandy screaming, “Don’t die on me now you bald-headed son of a [expletive]!”
Carley, who plans to retire at the end of his term in 2012, even wore his coat and tie when riding a mule in the Grand Canyon, the story says. “The mule didn’t mind,” he explains.
