Tom Powers – 50th Reunion Essay

Tom Powers

1 Reynolds Court

Normal, IL 61761

tpowers@ilstu.edu

Education: La Salle High School, Yale (BA), San Francisco State University (MA), University of Iowa (ABD.)

Career: Film teacher, author, magazine editor, academic advisor

Avocations: Travel (harder now), Texas Hold ’Em

College: Branford

“So, you growing that beard to cover up your zits?” Actually, I was, though I was embarrassed to admit it. My tormentor that first week in Wright Hall turned out to be a good guy, a member of a Connecticut political family I had never heard of. (That would change later.)

Coming from California, I had never met guys who didn’t wear socks with their loafers, who couldn’t swim or drive (New Yorkers!), and who didn’t know what a taco was. (Hard to believe, no?) I didn’t understand the cartoon caption in The Yale Record in which a man hanging from a boat’s mast says, “It only hurts when I luff.” (I did appreciate RL Miller’s great cartoon caption a few years later: “It’s stuffy in this ivory tower, but when I step outside I feel a draft.”) As a freshman I failed the mandatory pull-up requirement and was placed in a remedial phys ed class with a big fellow who couldn’t do 30 push-ups (ask him) but later would break through the Crimson line and star for the Dallas Cowboys.

In 1965 my facial hair was a sign of rebellion (as well as insecurity). Four years later our class book showed only a dozen of us with beards. The counterculture came late to Yale; in the meantime I dove into that other culture. I studied Shakespeare with Alvin Kernan, modern drama with dapper Robert Brustein, classical comedy with a sweat-soaked Erich Segal, anthropology with Margaret Mead (Yale’s largest class ever), plus the “poet’s physics,” Chaucer and Spenser with (not yet notorious) ED Hirsch Jr., world history with Charles Garside Jr., the obscene poems of Ovid and Catullus (banned from my high school Latin curriculum), and a class on Alexander the Great that challenged us to read between the lines of history. I read late into the night (with breaks for basketball games in the basement squash court), missed most breakfasts, but extended dinners as long as the coffee and conversation were flowing. Snatching a forbidden second slice of pecan pie and being chased the length of the Branford dining hall by the dessert lady remains a fond memory. (Except that she got the pie back.)

Most of all, I found movies during my college years: screenings in Linsly-Chit, classes with Jay Leyda and Standish Lawder and Howard Suber (during a junior year at UCLA). Movies became my passion; as a graduate student and beyond I saw 300 films a year. I taught film classes at a half-dozen universities, edited an independent film magazine in San Francisco, and authored four movie books for young readers. A favorite memory is having a class explain to me a movie I had misunderstood (Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love); it made me feel like a teacher. During my final dozen years teaching and academic advising at Illinois State University, I would tell incoming students that I never had a bad class as an undergraduate. And I wished them the same.