The world lost an eccentric, brilliant man
I’ve known some eccentric people in my life, but Tom Parent takes the cake. By far. He signed to teach at Balta, N.D., after I did. All bachelors, Larry and I invited Tom to live with us.
The next morning as Larry and I ate breakfast, Tom barreled out of the bathroom in shorts with white towels draped over his arm.
He looked at us, and said, “How many people live in this trailer?”
Larry and I looked at each other, and said simultaneously, “Three.”
“Well,” Tom said, pointing at the towels, “Why are there four towels out?”
His uniqueness showed up in his science classroom. When discussing the solar system, he created a scale model of the sun and nine planets — about three miles long. “If Pluto was in this classroom,” he said, “the sun would be out at the crossroads of N.D. Highway 3 and our 52nd Street. The other planets would be in between.” I thought, what a magnificent way of giving students a sense of the size of the solar system!
After a test, Tom called students that did well that evening to tell them their grades.
Tom was unique. He traveled to
Winnipeg at the end of each month, crossing off the days on his calendar in his classroom to indicate how many days he had left before he could go there for a weekend, to the opera, museums, and for some unknown reason, buying two copies each of several magazines. He also took orders for Chinese food for people in town, as none was available anywhere in our area.
One day, he asked if I wanted some Chinese from Winnipeg. He was sitting at his typewriter and when I said, “Imperial chicken,” he flipped open a small 2-by-3-inch spiral notebook. To jot my order down, I assumed. In pen.
But I was shocked to see that each page he turned had typing on it. (This was pre-computer.) I was flabbergasted. “How do you do that?“I asked, envisioning him sticking the entire notebook somehow into the typewriter and starting to type. But how?
He smiled, unscrewed the spiral until all the pages were loose, took a blank page out, slid it into his typewriter, and typed my order. Finished, he evened the pages and screwed the spiral wire back on. I was awestruck.
He would not accept any gratuity for bringing meals back 250 miles from Winnipeg. And for Tom, a spade was a spade. If your order cost $2.89, you paid exactly that amount, not a penny more.
When the Cornerstone Café in Rugby incorrectly listed candy bars at .50 cents each, (meaning .5 cent, he asked for a Snickers, gave a penny, and asked for his halfcent in change.
Tom disliked pop music. More than once, he ordered a meal at the Wangler Café in Balta, started eating, and if pop music came on the radio, he bolted, leaving his meal steaming.
Tom did not understand snow. After a weekend of heavy snowfall, with it piled high by a truck, only a small sector was left open for vehicles. On Monday morning, Tom revved his car engine, floored it in reverse, and smacked it into the pile of snow. Got firmly stuck. Larry and I helped dig him out, figuring he had learned his lesson. But he pulled forward, and smashed full speed backwards into the snow once more. And got stuck again. We let him dig it out this time.
“I thought I could get through,” he said.
He was brilliant, with a prodigious memory. Name any movie in the past 40 years and would summarize it and tell you the names of the cast members. If a movie had been redone years later, he would name everybody in both, and compare the two.
He paid to have VCR tapes made of movies so he could fast-forward through to watch one scene that he really liked.
He was a man of many talents who left us too soon. At age 59, he took his own life.