Clarence Thomas: The Supreme Court's most happy fella There were even kind words for Yale Law School, the place from which Thomas was once so estranged he adorned the frame of his diploma with a cheap cigar price tag and stowed it in his basement. "I never thought that I would treasure doing my job, and I've reached that point," Thomas said. Even the most boring cases to others are fascinating to me. He said: "I've gotten to this point where it's like the priesthood," for which he once trained. This is what I'm called to do. Quite a contrast from the moment more than 22 years ago when his wife, Virginia, delivered the news that the bitter battle over his nomination had concluded with the Senate voting narrowly to confirm him. "Whoop-de-damn-do," was the reaction he recounted in his memoir, "My Grandfather's Son." The book was both a testimonial to his hardworking grandfather and an often-bitter takedown of his enemies. Thomas remains the court's most complex and controversial member. To the part of the public that pays attention to the court, he is perhaps best known for not asking questions at oral arguments. For the few who make it to the court to witness the justices at work in oral arguments, he is always silent, usually rocking back far in his leather chair, eyes skyward. Outside the court, Thomas has often talked about the burdens of his job. At an event in 2009 for high school students, the justice recalled looking longingly from his chamber windows at passing pedestrians who seemed carefree. "I tend to be morose sometimes," he said, describing his job as an "endeavor" that sometimes could be called "an ordeal." But his colleagues and friends talk of a different person, with a booming laugh and welcoming word for everyone who works at the marble palace, from the chief justice to the janitor. It was that Thomas literally on display on the giant video screens in the vast ballroom of the Omni Shoreham, a grinning man in a vested tuxedo, his now-receding hair a startling white. He laughed about his past as a campus radical at Holy Cross College ("But I was never a dopehead," he said) and his unlikely path to the court, which he said began with a decision in 1979 to pack his belonging in a U-haul and move to Washington. And fortuitously, again, good people looking out for me, Senator [John] Danforth, offered me a job. And so I came here, and I was only going to stay a couple of years and go back to Savannah, and one thing led to another, and I ended up on the court," he said. As the crowd's laughter died down, Thomas added: "No, it was like totally Forrest Gump." Thomas didn't seem particularly interested in Sykes's questions about the workings of the modern court - the rise, for example, of a specialized bar of Supreme Court practitioners.