Tom Thomas: You Can Row Home Again

Tom Thomas: Coaching city kids is his passion

Rowing. That’s what William C. "Tom" Thomas Jr. really loved -- even as he married, raised a couple kids, worked in college administration and as a lawyer for 27 years.

That and coaching young people.

So Tom was in his element on the Schuylkill River as I watched him coach city youths a few weeks ago in a non-profit program called Philadelphia City Rowing.

You can find him working by the river almost every afternoon. He makes sure the boats, housed in a narrow shed at the end of clubby Boathouse Row, are shipshape. He encourages the teens to erg on rowing machines, do push ups and jump on and off a balance beam to strengthen all the muscles in their bodies --virtually every one of them is used in the strenuous sport of rowing.

Philadelphia City Rowing: sweating and erging

And, you’ll see him out in the coach boat with his megaphone, urging his charges to swing their bodies in rhythm with the pull of their oars in the exquisite choreography of sculling.

As I tried to hear him over the buzz of the outboard motor on the coach boat, Tom told me how he had come to help city kids get onto the river and learn a sport for which they would otherwise have little access.

Throughout the history of Boathouse Row, the high schools that have dominated rowing were the prep schools and the Catholics -- and more recently suburban public high schools. With only a few exceptions, the city’s public school kids haven’t had a crack at this sport, which involves costly boats and boathouses, unaffordable in a city that barely supports music or libraries.

Philadelphia City Rowing, funded by foundations, private donors, and a handful of dedicated staff and volunteers, is finally making it happen. Besides the rowing, the students are expected to keep up their grades, so PCR coaches them academically, as well, and gives them college counseling. So far, every kid who stuck with rowing through his or her senior year has made it to college.

Every muscle gets used

Tom said that as a student at Washington-Lee High School, in Arlington, Va., he had the luck to row for legendary coach Charlie Butt. He also spent summers as a lifeguard at the Jersey shore in Ventnor “under the watchful guidance of Stan Bergman,” who coached at Holy Spirit High School and was later head coach at the University of Pennsylvania. Tom later rowed four years at Rutgers. Still, he knew he would never be the athlete his father was. “My dad was extremely competitive, a national caliber runner, all-state football in high school.  Very accomplished.”

With his son rowing, his dad, too, became excited about the sport and bought a double scull after retiring from a 30-year career as an Air Force pilot. Father and son competed together in the Head of the Charles in Boston in the 1980s. “In his 60s, when I’m rowing with him, I’m trying to keep up with him and I’m in my 30s! My dad inspired me. Though I had his shadow to kind of walk in,  I always felt it was an encouragement, not an ‘I can’t measure up.’  I didn’t worry about it. I just did the best I could.”

Time passed. Suddenly Tom was in his late 50s. With his kids grown and a law career that left him unsatisfied and wanting more, he circled back to his first love.

“I’m here all day, every day. It has to be done,” explains Tom, who works as director of PCR’s rowing program.

Tom: working to create opportunity

This fall about 80 city high school kids from very diverse backgrounds came out, a record for the five-year-old program, though the number is likely to settle somewhere in the 60s.

How does he feel about his post-vocation avocation?

“In almost any non-profit you don’t get what you’re worth. By the same token it’s a matter of trying to make this program do something and you can’t do it with 20 or 30 hours a week. You’ve got to put more in.”

Before the kids arrive from school,  Tom's out in the sliver of land PCR has wrested from Boathouse Row, fixing boats, getting practice plans together, watching coaching videos and keeping abreast of the sport. “I can’t sit on my laurels,” he says.

His reward? ‘Just watching these kids work harder and grow into rowing.”

Avery Rome: Call it a "Gap Year!"

Avery Rome: On a 'Gap Year'

I ran into a former colleague a few months ago – a woman who for many years held a top editing job at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Avery Rome had decided to take a buyout about a year after I did, and I asked her what she was doing.

She said she was trying out all kinds of things – working in a community garden to raise fresh crops for a local food cupboard, studying Russian drama, taking Coursera classes (on movies, ancient Greece and the modern novel)  --  and loving it.

“I’m really curious about things I haven’t done,” she said.

When she told friends who were still working what she was up to, they didn't say much. Maybe they couldn't connect. And so, Avery explained, “I’ve recently come up with the phrase for what I'm doing. It's ‘a gap year.’ That,” she said, “people can relate to.

“Sometimes I think people who are still working scroll through what you’re telling them and ask themselves, ‘Would I do that? Would I do that?’ If what you’re doing doesn’t interest them, they change the subject.

“Starting a new career or teaching literacy might explain my not being a journalist, but lollygagging is hard to understand.”

Here’s some of what Avery is loving about her gap year.

Gardening, for one.  “I find it a great meditation and I think about all kinds of things. I just love getting that close to nature, learning about bugs and plants. I love using my hands now. A part of me just wants to do physical things.”

Less stress is another. Like so many of us, she poured herself into the survival of her company. “I like not worrying about how to hold the paper up,” she said.

Having what she calls “loose days.”

“Loose days mean you can go and help out your kids or your grandkids. I have a friend whose husband is ill. I spend time with her. I show up. That freedom to be charitable, if you will, to be giving rather than receiving is a great joy.”

Giving herself permission to indulge in ways she hasn’t before. Like not necessarily getting up early. And having time to read the paper before the day starts. Or watching movies any time.

“The Coursera movie course, called The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound and Color, was great. It gave me license to watch movies in the middle of the day,” she said. “You can’t drift like this when you’re raising kids or paying off a mortgage. This leisure is a gift of this time of your life. I see daylight more than I have in the last 34 years. I’m much more aware of the weather. My life now would be really boring to someone who is driven, someone who’s a high achiever. So I back off in those conversations and I just ask them about themselves.”

What’s next for Avery when her gap year ends, if it ever does?

Avery says she might get involved in politics, supporting candidates who could do a better job. Or study to be a master gardener. And she has by no means abandoned her craft. She will be teaching a writing course this spring at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has long taught. And she wouldn't walk away from a big project.

“The whole thing is finding the balance. If you float too much, you think why aren’t you busier? I don’t know what we’re measuring ourselves against.”

Of Breasts and Bravery

Politicians beware! The uproar prompted by the Susan G.  Komen Foundation’s decision to cut funds to Planned Parenthood is a glimmer of the power of women who don’t want to see their health issues – their freedom of choice issues – abrogated by the politics of abortion.

Some of us, like myself, were not allowed to speak up on this issue in the past because of our jobs. As a newspaper editor,  I had to sign an ethics agreement each year, promising that I would not embarrass the paper by taking a public stance on an issue which I might cover in my job.

It’s a good policy, journalistically, and I was careful to stay clear of stories where I had a strong emotional involvement.

But now, in my unretirement, I can tirelessly speak out. And quote others who speak out.

Cece Citron, an academic counselor at the University of Pennsylvania who herself has marched in the grueling, but exhilarating three-day, 60-mile walk for breast cancer, is angry. “I am absolutely appalled about Susan B. Komen and  my feeling about it is that they’re hurting young women and low income women. …If I were registered now [for the three day walk] I’d pull out. I’d rather have my efforts and fundraising go to Planned Parenthood. I am terribly appalled.”

I’ve witnessed women’s despair in the face of pregnancy.  In college at a time when abortion was  illegal, I saw the agonizing routes young women took to find secret doctors in distant or disgusting places. Then, as a Fulbright scholar in Santiago, Chile, I volunteered in a low-income clinic where a pioneering physician, Dr. Jaime Zipper, was designing inexpensive IUDs to allow women to plan their families.

I doubt the Komen organization that worked so hard for so many years to build its reputation and raise millions to fund its mission to cure breast cancer will quickly, if ever, rebound from this decision. Even though it has already backpedaled and rescinded its decision. Which is tragic.  Because either way, it is women who are hurt.

But perhaps some good will come of it.  The uproar “lets people know the good work that Planned Parenthood does beyond abortion," said David Broida, whose late wife, 

Susan Broida was a much loved  advocate of sex education and family planning.

As Susan Broida once said, ‘It’s the silence that is the problem. The silence is deadly.”