Tom
never took his final exams at McGill. He moved to a commune in
the eastern townships in 1970 and spent the winter of 1971-72 in
Edmonton. He went to Newfoundland then and enrolled in St.
John’s but never attended any classes. He went back to
Rockford for a visit and was arrested by the FBI for draft
evasion. He was sentenced to two years in the army or two years
in jail. He gladly enrolled in the Army to raise hell. He
deserted from a base in Baumholder, Germany. He editted an
anti-war journal in Paris called Zero with a collective of draft
dodgers and deserters until he took Jimmy Carter’s bad-discharge
amnesty in 1977.
His first wife Françoise is from Paris and swept him up from the
streets to divert him from a life of crime (we have been married for
over 30 years). His first daughter Emilie teaches English and
French and has continued the family tradition of world-wide aimless
wandering. His first son Julien works in the supermarket
downstairs. They live in Paris near the Bastille where Tom heads
the neighborhood Buddhist discussion group. As Pierre Bourdieu
has analysed: He hs successfully made the transition from the
ruling classes to the petite bourgeoisie thanks to his accumulated
cultural capital which is a marketable commodity.
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(Photo: at the
2004 French Finals of baseball in Montpellier. Tom is the President of
the National Commission of Baseball Umpires in France for the past
eight years (He makes all the assignments and pays all the bills in the
first two divisions).
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