His teeth are gone, and his beard is no longer full. His heart is weak, and his frame more bone than flesh. But Wesley, at age 80, is still a magnificent specimen - if for no other reason than that he's still alive.
"Many times I came back from death," he said one day recently as he sat on a couch in his daughter's house in Coatesville. He resides there now after four years in a nursing home and what one friend describes as a "miraculous" recovery from congestive heart failure.
Wesley's life is too colorful, picturesque and quirky to be reduced to a single word. For starters, he's a black Republican Episcopalian ex-con who has been married five times. But there's no denying its dominant theme: drugs. Wesley spent the first half of his life surrendering to them, the last half battling them on behalf of others, mostly in and around Coatesville.
There, he is a revered figure, for his work as a counselor, for the antidrug marches he led, for the hundreds of people he helped escape addiction and the lives he redeemed and redirected.
"He's a true community hero," says former Chester County Commissioner Colin Hanna, who joined Wesley's antidrug marches during the 1990s. "He's a natural leader with a wonderful way about him. He can be impatient with people who don't share his sense of discipline and self-reliance, yet he has a gentleness and tenderness of heart."
His effectiveness stems in part from what Chester County Judge Anthony Sarcione calls Wesley's "pedigree" - as a drunk, a heroin shooter, a man so desperate for a high he used to boil off the alcohol in paragoric acid to harvest the trace opiates.
Today, Sarcione says, Wesley is "a walking, talking symbol of hope."
Ask Wesley what his proudest achievement is, and he replies without hesitation: "My recovery."
