You really should write all that down
From left: Me, Tom, Yvonne, John, Bill and Charles in Atlanta.
Oh, my aching back. We brothers three — John, Bill and I — just returned from a road trip to Atlanta to visit our oldest brother Tom. He’s 80, and his wife Yvonne just celebrated her 90th birthday. Daylight is burning, so you better make hay while you can.
We had a wonderful time. The eggs at the Paducah Comfort Inn were not bad. John and Bill did most of the driving while Willie sang us past Nashville. Reminiscing with Tom, Yvonne and our nephew Charles was priceless.
Tom was my hero. He was 14 when I was born. Not long after, he shipped off to St. Thomas Military Academy on the college campus in St. Paul. He had an ROTC uniform and a sword. He was at Notre Dame when I was eight and a football fanatic. Tom was this mythical figure who showed up on holidays. He was a lifeguard at the Indiana Dunes. He got a tooth knocked out boxing. Way cool. He went to Ireland to research Samuel Beckett. Who does that?
Tom was at the Writer’s Workshop at Iowa City in its heyday. He had a class with Kurt Vonnegut, where the author workshopped Slaughterhouse Five. Tom liked it. The others reportedly did not. He hung out with the writer Dennis Johnson along the Iowa River. He had a 1965 VW Bug with four on the floor. Tom taught me how to drive in it, around the lake. We drove it from Burlington to Iowa City — just me and Tom, like I am a big shot — one dark and stormy night when we were forced to pull over and rent a room at the seedy hotel in Mount Pleasant. We were evacuated by a fire that night. It just doesn’t get better than that for an 11-year-old.
He married Workshop founder Paul Engel’s secretary, Amanda Woods, and they found their way to Atlanta. Tom co-founded Kelly’s Seed and Feed Theatre with a college buddy and threw everything he had at it. He became a playwright of regional acclaim. He was a singing waiter. He was a street actor with Samuel L. Jackson. He became a writer for Atlanta politicians like Mayor Maynard Jackson. Then he became director of cultural affairs. Then he would get fired. Then he would land a new job with a new politician. He was coordinator for Atlanta’s Y2K response. He was a park planner. Every time he got fired, the person who fired him ended up behind bars.
He once got Jimmy Carter to take the Lord’s name in vain. Tom had been working with the former president on a project, and interrupted Carter’s lunch at a benefit to ask if he could attend another lunch for another worthy cause. Carter slammed down his steak knife and blurted: “GD it, can’t I get a break?!”
Tom is funny. His plays were outrageous. He was Dudley Lumpkin, if you will, a Midwesterner peering into the South. He showed us one of his publicity photos buck naked with only a carton of Kent cigarettes covering his manhood. Classic stuff in black and white.
A lot of memories rushed back. Tom’s memory is changing. He can recall vividly his earliest childhood in Bancroft. He likes to think about the house in Algona, before they moved to Storm Lake the year I was born. But, for spells the memories vanish. He says it might have been the rugby in Iowa City. Or maybe the beer afterwards, I say, and we laugh. One of the benefits is that Tom reads a lot, and he can read the same thing he read yesterday as if it were new. Sister Ann can repeat the same joke to him and the punchline is fresh. Her memory isn’t the best, either, “but she is funny,” Tom says. Truth that.
You realize how remiss we all are in getting these stories down. Tom never bothered to tell me until just recently that he hashed out writing with Kurt Vonnegut or concocted skits with Samuel L. Jackson. What’s the fuss? If he can’t remember Slaughterhouse Five now, it does not make the encounter any less real or discount its legacy.
He is proud of Charles, a criminal defense lawyer who lives nearby. Charles is gathering the stories while he can. So is Tom. He is writing a book that he hopes to have done in a couple months. Tom can’t tell me what it is about. I want to read it to see if I am half as good. Tom is still my hero. He and Yvonne are happy. He rides his bike seven miles a day inside the gates of the senior community. She takes good care of him. They hold hands and listen to Leon Russell on vinyl. It’s a memory that plays well.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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What a sweet post. Thank you so sharing it.
I loved this article. Such great stuff.