In my grad school years at Indiana University, I remember my Professor, Jerry Jacquard, inviting Tom out to help us start up a ceramic shell program. I was one of the grad assistants helping to set up the shell room. I recall that we were working late one night, and Tom decided to cook his specialty, linguini carbonara, in one of the big kettles we had around the studio. We all ate big plates of it to keep us going.  It was wonderful.

The next time I ran into him was about a year after graduation, and I was working in metal chasing at the Johnson Atelier, then in Princeton, N.J. Tom had come out from Carbondale on a straight away road trip to visit for a few days. I don’t know that he stopped sleeping! He was an intense man back then.

Later, when I was teaching sculpture and running the foundry at Sonoma State University in California, I went out to Southern Illinois University for my sabbatical. I brought a bunch of waxes to cast using a ceramic shell. This is where I first learned what an early bird Tom was.  I was a night person, but he expected all his students, and visiting artists (me) to be there on the job at daybreak. What a struggle that was for a night-owl! Tom’s foundry was pristine, and his methodology was spot-on.

While still at Sonoma State, I invited Tom out to my foundry as a guest artist. His early morning starting time did not work quite as well in laid back California, but we managed. He was casting a series of vertical bronzes, and the ceramic shells were tall and thin, and very vulnerable to breaking. My son, a young teenager at the time, was helping out. We were all in awe of Tom. Alas! My son knocked over one of the shells and broke it. He became terrified of what Tom would do, and he ran away. He was nowhere to be found.

When Tom got into the studio, he was non-plussed. “Never mind”, he said, this is easy to fix, and he made the repair. But my son stayed out of sight, hiding in a field adjacent to the studio and he didn’t come back for a couple of days, none the worse for the wear upon his return, but still shaken up! The force of Tom’s personality was that strong! It all worked out in the end and everything got cast!