January 22, 2025 • 31 mins
On this episode Dennis Lee speaks with guest Thomas Maclachlan. They start by talking about the big decisions we make in our lives that might seem unlikely – starting with his own experience choosing to become a minister in 1966 rather than serve in Vietnam – before grappling with how to limit loneliness as we age.
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Hosted by Dennis Lee
Edited by Bobby Falco-Killoran (A.K.A. DJ Vibe Wise)
Produced by Alex Audette in the Teaching and Learning Innovation Center's Multimedia Studios at Greenfield Community College
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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Welcome to Backyard Oasis, a podcast designed by and for older adults living in the beautiful
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Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts and produced in the tech studios at Greenfield
Community College in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Backyard Oasis reaches out to older adults who seek knowledge to help them live more
thoughtfully, healthily and happily, who hope to inspire others with their ideas and who
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serve their communities in the interest of their greater good.
We hope you join us frequently in our pleasant Backyard Oasis for wide-ranging conversations
with a diversity of people who are growing older and want to talk about it.
Hi, this is Dennis Lee. Welcome to the Backyard Oasis podcast.
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My guest today is Thomas McLaughlin. We met while he was ordering food in a diner. He
was really pondering what to order and for some reason, keep in mind I didn't know him,
I said I hope you make the right decision. Well, we started the gab and I just knew that
Tom would be a wonderful guest for our podcast. Tom, nice to see you today. I know it's not
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a diner, but it's nice to run into you. You've given me a lot to live up to.
I don't know. Oh my goodness, but I'm really glad you're here
today. I know you graduated from UMass in 1966 and Andover Theological School in 1970.
Now I think it's really interesting to figure out how you decided to join the clergy. Tell
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us about that. Well, it was pretty simple really because
those dates might register with a lot of folks. They were kind of crucial dates and so I had
a choice to make. I could either go to Saigon or I could go to Newton Center, Massachusetts.
So I thought about that for a couple of minutes and I thought Newton Center sounded pretty
good. Well, let's talk a little bit though about
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the decision to get as a minister. Not everybody can do that for a lot of reasons. I'm not
everybody wants to be a minister. Some people wouldn't even think about it. Did it take
a long time to actually say I want to be a minister?
But under those circumstances, choices were being made at that point that maybe weren't
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the most rational, but they were choices that really were outgrowths of how people had
spent their lives. And so for me, as a young person, my family was always oriented toward
a church. I grew up in Beverly, Massachusetts and both my parents were first generation,
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they were immigrants and so I'm first generation American. And when they came to this country,
one of the churches in Beverly took that on as a service sort of project. And so right
from the very get go before I was even born, I had a connection with the church. And some
of the experiences there were really good. When I got to UMass, at that point, there
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was a lot going on. It was really civil rights stuff and so on. And so the church had been
very informative and active for me in that regard. So it was a pretty easy thing to say,
well, what are my choices? And I had known several ministers personally, spent the summer
in Connecticut with a minister friend of mine and so on. So I'd known ministers, I knew
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who they were. They knew who I was. And it seemed like a real choice. I will say though,
and this is a comment on me is that I had a close friend who was a minister and was a
chaplain at UMass. And so he wrote a recommendation for me to go to seminary. And I bet him $5
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that I wouldn't get in. So I had to pay him $5 because I got in. And then later, when
I was ordained, he was at the ordination and he gave me a framed $5 bill back and he said,
this is the $5 that I won. But my bet at the time is you'd never finish. And he says, now
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you're finished, so I have to pay off. And what was that education like? What was the
process? How long did it take? You were UCC minister, I believe? That's right. I think
you and I talked about this a little bit before. And really, my fascination was not so much
the sort of public ministry and stuff and preaching and that kind of stuff, although
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I have done that. But my focus and End Over Newton was the perfect place to do this. My
focus was on counseling and doing pastoral counseling particularly and working on a sort
of a psychological level with people. And so that's what I did when I got ordained as
well. I served a church in Wisconsin and I had a connection there and they wanted to
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start a counseling center. So I started the pastoral counseling center in Wisconsin. I
was on the faculty at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. And that was wonderful. And
in fact, the tip to that story is that a friend of mine's son went to Lawrence and so he
went out for his son's graduation and he thought he would stop in at the church and see what
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was happening just so he could update me. And it turns out that the counseling center
that I started 45 years ago is still in operation, which I was amazed by.
Wow. But that's quite a legacy. I mean, just to have that...
You know, I guess at this point, yeah.
That's something, right?
At this point, I'm looking for legacy.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, we all want... I mean, every time we talk to people about their lives in doing
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Backyard Oasis podcasts, we originally started talking about transitions, how people started
in one thing and then over their life, how they did something else and then in retirement.
That was the original idea. Sometimes we do that, like we're doing some of that with you.
Sometimes we just try to find some interesting people that have a story about their life.
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But that... I mean, we all want to feel like when we get out of here eventually that we
made a difference.
The legacy thing is really is very important to people, I think. And, you know, in our conversation
before, I would just say one of my most fulfilling rules, I guess, is that I was in the ministry
for seven years and then started teaching. And so I spent almost 30 years teaching in
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a community college.
Right.
So it's great to be back here at Greenfield because this community college is one of the
15 in Massachusetts. And probably most of our listeners know that one of the best deals
that college kids can make, and I've been selling this for a while, is that at this point,
you can go to a community college. And that, you know, this year for the first time, it's
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free to go to a community college. So you can go to a community college. If you have
some success there, you can transfer to almost any school you can think of anywhere. We've
had students transfer to Harvard and Yale and Wellesley and Vassar and all kinds of places.
And so you're sitting next to a person two years later. That person's got the same degree
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you have, but you've paid one half the cost because you went to community college for
two years. That's a good deal. And the community colleges are trying to really capitalize on
that in the sense that many people who come to community colleges don't know anything about
college. Nobody in their family has been before, whatever. So being at a community college
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is a very good way to get oriented, to learn how to study, to learn how to manage your time.
And so people who transfer to four year schools from community colleges often really go at
it much better than if they had just went, if they had just gone as freshman students.
They come in with a lot of experience. It's a really good training from community colleges.
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So that's a great thing. How long was the training to become a minister?
Well, it depended on who you were, but because I wanted to specialize in counseling, I spent
another year. So it was actually four more years in Newton Center. And over Newton had
a specialty in doing pastoral counseling because the person who was running it had been a student
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of Carl Jung. And of course, Carl Jung was the originator of one of the main streams
of doing therapy and so on, worked with Freud and saw through Freud a little bit. And so
those of us that were there really got a good, strong orientation. We did field work and
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we did all kinds of things that would help us make the transition into doing counseling.
I only know one joke about counselors or psychiatrists or psychologists.
So I suppose we're going to hear that now. No, I probably shouldn't because I never
said I was a classy guy. No, that's what you're saying. So this is a podcast. They
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asked me to be here. No, a guy goes into a psychologist's office and he said, doctor,
doctor, everybody thinks I'm ugly. And the psychologist says, lay face down on the couch
and tell me all about it. And there's one more which relates to a guy goes in and says,
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doctor, doctor, everybody dislikes me at work. He said, where do you work? He said, I'm
a car mechanic. He said, get under the couch. Okay, that's enough. This is not the gong
show or maybe it should be. My poor engineer's got to listen to this. Alex is our engineer
and he has to sit. He knows all the technical stuff, but he has to, I'm his ticket to heaven
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because he has to listen to me. So he can say, at some point, I had to listen to Dennis
Lee on a podcast and they say, come on in. Well, I haven't known him for long, but he
seems like a great audience. No, he is. He's a really good guy. He makes me sound good.
And that's an effort. So thanks, Alex. I appreciate that. You mentioned that you traveled a lot.
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Let's talk a little bit about you while you were in Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
So I'm wondering if you found a difference in people or are people just people or did
you notice differences from, let's say, Wisconsin to Massachusetts or anywhere else?
But when you use the term travel a lot, I was, I married to a woman who is a history
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major at Wellesley College. And so when you're studying history, you learn a lot of geography.
So you know, early on, the two of us did a lot of traveling. We had the adventure of
buying two French cars. They were both made in France and very good cars and traveling
all around Europe and so on. So that was the basis of kind of feeling comfortable doing
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that kind of thing. And then, you know, I had leads in different places about what I
was going to do for a living. And sometimes it just worked out in a very different way.
The church in Wisconsin was looking for a director for the counseling center. And then
Lawrence University was looking for some people who would work on the dean staff there. So
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that combination of things meant that for the time we were there for three and a half
years, we lived in a dorm at Lawrence and I was working with kids at the church and
so on. One of my kids, in fact, I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, but I was
amazed because one of my kids was a very, very creative kind of kid and so on, you know,
and I got to know him pretty well. And then he left and went to college and we sort of
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got out of touch. The next time I saw him, he was interviewed by Charles Gibson on The
Morning Show. And his name is Willem Dafoe. So he was one of my early kids that I just
thought was a great human being. And, you know, people joke about this, but one of my
kids actually made it to becoming Christ.
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Wow. That is amazing. I think it's interesting when you talk to teachers and I'm always talking
to out and about the community. I do some photography and I run into athletic directors
and other teachers and I always realize how much of an influence they have on people.
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But as a teacher, you don't really know at the time whether or not you have made a difference,
but I've had things in my life that happened to me that somebody gave me a way of doing
something that changed my entire life. And I don't think he realized at the time he was
going to be a great teacher. He didn't do it for that reason. He just kind of did it.
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There are examples. I think of one. I don't know if we talked about it, but there was
a young couple out there in Wisconsin who wanted me to officiate at their wedding service.
And that's something I always use those terms carefully because people introduce me and say,
oh, this guy married my daughter. And I say, no, I didn't marry her. I just did the wedding,
you know. But anyway, I did this wedding service and they were a great couple. But I sensed
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that there were some issues there. And I really tried to be careful about helping them to
understand it and so on. I did his funeral six months later.
Oh, no.
And he was a suicide victim.
Oh, no.
So those kind of things don't just fly by. And another instance that I haven't think
about is I had a student who was new to me. I had no idea who she was, but she was sitting
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in a classroom and we were, it was a gerontology class. We were talking about elderly people.
And the issue came up about nursing homes and how nursing homes sometimes hire people
who are very caring people, but later they confess that they're gay or they're this or
that, something. And she really sounded off in class about, oh, my gosh, don't tell me
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those people are working in nursing homes and so on and so forth. I couldn't just let
that go by. I could see that some people in the class were really kind of disturbed by
that. So I gave her an assignment after class. I said, I'd like you to do a little brief
research paper for me on homophobia. She came in next week and said, I never heard the word
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before and I think it's important to be understanding and so I will apologize to the class and so
on and so forth.
Several years later, I ran across a student, she was married to a woman and she had been
to seminary.
Wow.
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Wow.
So you never know.
You never know.
But you made a difference. I mean, you didn't think of it, when you went to work that day
in the class, you didn't know that was going to happen.
That's right.
And you just reacted to what you heard.
Correct. And the difference was something that she made, obviously. She confronted herself
and that's the hardest thing anybody does, seems to me.
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That's a great story.
See, this is interesting because when we were sitting at the diner and we started talking,
I knew after talking to you for five minutes, you were going to be interesting. And we ended
up at the diner, we both had eaten at that point. We were there for a good hour. It took
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us about 20 minutes to eat and the rest of the time we just kept talking and I knew you
had some stories. I didn't know even the few that you've given today. I didn't realize
those stories, but those are wonderful.
That's a theme that I think has been with me for most of my life and it's a theme right
now that has some real push to it because it seems to me that a lot of what's going
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on right now is that people have made a decision that relating to other people is just too
hard.
I want to be with my own tribe. I don't want to get into any arguments. I don't want to
see things very differently from other people and so on. And to me, that is a very big tragic
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situation that I think needs to be encountered because I don't think that the human species
has done much of anything that just was related to one person. I think when we do stuff, it's
because groups of us get together and have an idea about what should be done and learn
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how to cooperate and learn how to get it done. And those are the things that get done in
history. They're not individual things. They're things that we do for each other, with each
other, as people who care about each other. And that's a tough assignment, but it's a
very crucial critical assignment. When I was in the classroom, and there's probably teachers
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that are listening to this might be kind of horrified, but I always thought my role was
to enable students to talk to each other. I didn't think that I had the last word or
any great wisdom or anything like that. I would get discussions going, but particularly
when you're teaching gerontology, there's some people there who are in their 20s and
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there's some people there who in their 40s or 50s. If you can get those people talking
to each other, you can get those people learning in that classroom what that process is like
and how fulfilling it is, then it seems to me you've really done something quite good.
I heard somebody say last week, I can't remember who it was, but that we're all into our own
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areas. In other words, now it's politics, but I guess that's the best example, but
without talking specifics about the politics, but we go to, let's say YouTube, and we go
to people that are expressing our point of view. We're not listening to somebody else.
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We don't have a commonality. They mentioned, and I thought this was interesting, one of
the few times people have some commonality, he used the example of a Super Bowl, or when
the Red Sox are in the playoffs, I live in a condo, you go by, everybody has got that
on, and you can say to your neighbor who you don't even know, hey, boy, that was a great
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base hit, but that's commonality, but if we don't do that, and somebody goes to YouTube
and they watch somebody way on the right, and the other person goes to somebody way
on the left, we're not talking, we're just going into our own echo chamber.
Precisely, and if you consider that the only time we've done very worthwhile things has
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been when we worked together, then that whole phenomenon is really something we need to
address, and we need to address it in no uncertain terms, and we're not doing it.
It's a tough subject, I think, it's a tough time. I'm wondering, I started before, and
I don't think we got to, I'm curious about difference in people. I asked before, is there
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a difference in people from different parts of the country, from Wisconsin to New England?
Do you notice big differences or are they very subtle differences?
I think they're subtle, and also I think, I have not really in my life focused, and I
don't think you have either, on the differences. What I've focused on is the similarities,
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and particularly when you get a group of people, it seems to me that the similarities are always
there, and the differences are always there. So addressing those differences and staying
together to get something done or to care about each other or whatever, that's the assignment
right there. So sure, I think there are regional differences. I think that we hear a lot about
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that in terms of pollsters and so on, finding out what people's attitudes are. People on
the coast, people with college education as opposed to people without college education,
I think it's unfortunate to really focus on those differences to some degree. I mean,
it's important to understand them, but to focus on them doesn't get us where we need
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to go, I don't think. I was listening to Yvonne Harari this morning. He's one of my favorite
philosophers and so on, and he was talking about the fact that this day and age really
does present issues that we have never really dealt with before. They're existential issues.
If we don't come to terms with this in small ways and larger ways, we have threats at this
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point from the environment and from warfare and so on and so forth. There could be existential
threats for the species, and I think he's absolutely right about that. I mean, we have
to find ways to, if not cooperate, at least allow each other to be who we are and not
say that because you don't see this the same way I do or that the same way I do that you
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don't have a right to exist. But the question is how, right? We can define the problem,
but the question is how do we get there? And I don't think that's a mystery either. I think
we know how to get together. I think we know how to cooperate. We know that you have to
be patient sometimes. You just have to listen sometimes, and you have to not talk sometimes.
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You have to allow the other person to be who they are.
Interesting. I want to talk about some of your other experiences. You participated in the
Selma, Alabama march, so you got to tell us what that was like. I mean, that's historic.
It seems like another lifetime though. It seems, but some of the issues, you know, I
just got a book by John about John Lewis. There's been a lot of attention being paid
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to John Lewis. He was there with us, of course. And I guess the story, I mean, my historical
story is that there were three of us from UMass that went down there. And as we drove
further south, we found that it was more difficult for us to get somebody to wait on us to pump
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gas, to do whatever, you know, there was some alienation there because there we were in
a red renault with Massachusetts license plates on it, you know, even south.
Even then, right? Yeah, right.
So it was an adventure getting there. And when we got there, we were in front of Brown's
church. Probably everybody knows where that is. It's very iconic because that's where
Martin Luther King Jr. gave some of his most notable speeches and so on. But we parked
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the car in front of that church and we got out and this very tall, very black guy came
in and his eyes were very wide. And he said, you got to take that light out. And I said,
what light are you talking about? He said, that light that comes on in the dome of the
car when you open the door, that light comes on. That's when they shoot you.
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Wow. I thought that's a pretty good welcome. That's a good warning.
How old are you, by the way, at the time? I was 20. And that's a good question because
I thought to myself, I'm 20 years old. I'd like to live a little longer than this. And
people were sacrificing their lives there. We got to know Viola Luiso, who brought her
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Volkswagen van down there. And she was taking people around after dark and so on and so
forth. She was shot to death two weeks after we left. And James Reeb had been killed.
So people were giving their lives. And I said, well, I'm 20. And then I thought to myself,
well, what the hell did I think I was getting myself into here? I mean, this is really,
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this is life and death. Right. How did that change you? Or did it change you?
It did. I think it's a theme that, that I will say, I think I've tried to operate on
that for a while. You know, I've tried to be careful in choices I make and so on. It
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affected me another way too, though, because many people know that, including people in
my family. So if I was being outrageous or something like that, you know, more than once
a brother or a sister or somebody close to me has said, Hey, are you the same guy that
went to Selma?
Wow.
You know, and that always stops me short because I have to say, yeah, I am that person, but
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I'm not acting that way right now.
Interesting.
Interesting stuff. I want to talk a little bit about what's what's happening or what
did happen with regard to you teaching at North Shore Community College. You were there
for 28 years in the gerontology program. I know that was a big part about what you did
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there or or being in that program, I should say. Tell us a little bit about what you did
there and how you got into gerontology.
Good. I don't know if you've looked around lately, but if you go to churches, there's
a lot of folks that are older people, you know, and so gerontology is something that's
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good to know about. And so I had done some reading about that. I also was interested.
It was right at the time when Elizabeth Kubler Ross was doing a lot of writing and she happened
to be a midwesterner. So I met her a couple of times. She invited us to come down to her
her farm there.
Explain who she is quickly.
She was the one who wrote on death and dying and she became the expert and she had a tough
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time. She was a psychiatrist. She had a tough time with her professional career because
she'd go into a hospital to talk to the dying patients and she'd ask this one and that one
and they'd say, oh, they're all getting better, you know. So she finally figured out a good
strategy. She would look for the person that was mopping the floors and she'd say, I'd
like to talk to somebody who's going through the dying process. Room 302, room 341, they
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knew what was going on in a hospital and they were willing to talk about it. But some of
the folks that were professional there did not know. So that was kind of revealing to
her and revealing to everybody. It became, you know, a phobia people had, didn't want
to talk about it. So she broke through that. And so that was interesting to me. And for
28 years, every spring, I taught the death and dying course at North Shore Community
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College and it was wonderful because people would relate in various ways to each other
and to me that another topic would not cause as much conversation and so on. So that was
great. The other thing that happened was that I got a call one day and I think I may have
mentioned this to you that I had been sort of active nationally because they were looking
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for community college program directors and so on in gerontology. The call was from a
guy named Tony Lenzer who was the head of the gerontology program at the University
of Hawaii. And at first I thought, well, my dean was Hawaiian and I thought, well, this
is a mistake. I shouldn't be talking to you. But then he said, I'm the director here and
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we just want to grant and we'd like you to participate in the advisory committee for
a program that we're doing for PBS, a series. We just won the grant to do this and it's
going to be 14 episodes. And he said, you'll have to take some time because you're going
to have to travel back and forth to Hawaii a few times. I said, Tony, how many seconds
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do I have to think about this? So I did become a member of this four person advisory committee.
We produced the series. It was on PBS, very successful. It's called Growing Old in a New
Age and it's still available. Let me ask a little bit about, or maybe we can help some
people. If somebody is listening today and dealing with aging issues for themselves or
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a loved one, how about some do's and don'ts or maybe misconceptions about aging? Good.
I have a very simple answer to that because it's a very complicated question. So it's
going to take some time and some energy. But I think the first thing to do is to find out
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where the local council on aging is, where the senior center is. Because in every community
in the country, there is a person and there's a senior center. And those are, you know,
underrated, very, very helpful locations because they have to deal with what's going on in
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their own community. It's not a matter of theory. They're seeing elderly people every
day who need services and have issues that are coming up and so on. So, you know, there's
a little group of people at every senior center who have over the years gotten some expertise
and some education and are great resources. And as I said, you know, I think my problem
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with it is that they're underutilized. I mean, people really should call and they know the
doctors, they know the psychiatrists, they know the home health people and they can make
good referrals and they can help by understanding what's going on in this situation.
Wow. It's a huge topic.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah. There's no doubt about it.
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The other thing I guess I would say is that you have to consider that it's sort of, I
mean, I mentioned before, people use the death and dying course for conversations that they
should have had earlier or that they would like to have had earlier. So, I think the
first question is, okay, what baggage am I coming into this with and how can I deal with
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myself in terms of my own aging and my own issues around this? You have to let go of
some of those defenses because we all get into it. I turned 80 last year and this year
I turned 79. I don't know if that's really how it's supposed to go.
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So obviously you've taken some of your own advice or what you learned.
Obviously my own advice is something I should take more of. That's right.
Listen, this has been wonderful. I'm so glad I ran into you with the diner. If I didn't
go in there that day, I wouldn't know you. You'd just be another guy in the community.
And this has been wonderful. Thanks, Tom. And thanks for being with us on Backyard Oasis.
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Thanks very much for the invitation. It's been great.
This concludes today's podcast. We're always looking for new ideas, so feel free to reach
out to Judy Raper, Associate Dean of Community Engagement at Greenfield Community College
at 413-775-1819. If you have an idea, you'd love to share. Special thanks to the creators
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of Backyard Oasis, Denise Schwartz, Chad Fuller, Dennis Lee, and Christine Copeland.
Have a great day.
Welcome to Backyard Oasis, a podcast designed by and for older adults living in the beautiful
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Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts and produced in the tech studios at Greenfield
Community College in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Backyard Oasis reaches out to older adults who seek knowledge to help them live more
thoughtfully, healthily and happily, who hope to inspire others with their ideas and who
(00:31):
serve their communities in the interest of their greater good.
We hope you join us frequently in our pleasant Backyard Oasis for wide-ranging conversations
with a diversity of people who are growing older and want to talk about it.
Hi, this is Dennis Lee. Welcome to the Backyard Oasis podcast.
(00:57):
My guest today is Thomas McLaughlin. We met while he was ordering food in a diner. He
was really pondering what to order and for some reason, keep in mind I didn't know him,
I said I hope you make the right decision. Well, we started the gab and I just knew that
Tom would be a wonderful guest for our podcast. Tom, nice to see you today. I know it's not
(01:21):
a diner, but it's nice to run into you. You've given me a lot to live up to.
I don't know. Oh my goodness, but I'm really glad you're here
today. I know you graduated from UMass in 1966 and Andover Theological School in 1970.
Now I think it's really interesting to figure out how you decided to join the clergy. Tell
(01:43):
us about that. Well, it was pretty simple really because
those dates might register with a lot of folks. They were kind of crucial dates and so I had
a choice to make. I could either go to Saigon or I could go to Newton Center, Massachusetts.
So I thought about that for a couple of minutes and I thought Newton Center sounded pretty
good. Well, let's talk a little bit though about
(02:06):
the decision to get as a minister. Not everybody can do that for a lot of reasons. I'm not
everybody wants to be a minister. Some people wouldn't even think about it. Did it take
a long time to actually say I want to be a minister?
But under those circumstances, choices were being made at that point that maybe weren't
(02:29):
the most rational, but they were choices that really were outgrowths of how people had
spent their lives. And so for me, as a young person, my family was always oriented toward
a church. I grew up in Beverly, Massachusetts and both my parents were first generation,
(02:51):
they were immigrants and so I'm first generation American. And when they came to this country,
one of the churches in Beverly took that on as a service sort of project. And so right
from the very get go before I was even born, I had a connection with the church. And some
of the experiences there were really good. When I got to UMass, at that point, there
(03:16):
was a lot going on. It was really civil rights stuff and so on. And so the church had been
very informative and active for me in that regard. So it was a pretty easy thing to say,
well, what are my choices? And I had known several ministers personally, spent the summer
in Connecticut with a minister friend of mine and so on. So I'd known ministers, I knew
(03:41):
who they were. They knew who I was. And it seemed like a real choice. I will say though,
and this is a comment on me is that I had a close friend who was a minister and was a
chaplain at UMass. And so he wrote a recommendation for me to go to seminary. And I bet him $5
(04:04):
that I wouldn't get in. So I had to pay him $5 because I got in. And then later, when
I was ordained, he was at the ordination and he gave me a framed $5 bill back and he said,
this is the $5 that I won. But my bet at the time is you'd never finish. And he says, now
(04:25):
you're finished, so I have to pay off. And what was that education like? What was the
process? How long did it take? You were UCC minister, I believe? That's right. I think
you and I talked about this a little bit before. And really, my fascination was not so much
the sort of public ministry and stuff and preaching and that kind of stuff, although
(04:46):
I have done that. But my focus and End Over Newton was the perfect place to do this. My
focus was on counseling and doing pastoral counseling particularly and working on a sort
of a psychological level with people. And so that's what I did when I got ordained as
well. I served a church in Wisconsin and I had a connection there and they wanted to
(05:10):
start a counseling center. So I started the pastoral counseling center in Wisconsin. I
was on the faculty at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. And that was wonderful. And
in fact, the tip to that story is that a friend of mine's son went to Lawrence and so he
went out for his son's graduation and he thought he would stop in at the church and see what
(05:35):
was happening just so he could update me. And it turns out that the counseling center
that I started 45 years ago is still in operation, which I was amazed by.
Wow. But that's quite a legacy. I mean, just to have that...
You know, I guess at this point, yeah.
That's something, right?
At this point, I'm looking for legacy.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, we all want... I mean, every time we talk to people about their lives in doing
(05:59):
Backyard Oasis podcasts, we originally started talking about transitions, how people started
in one thing and then over their life, how they did something else and then in retirement.
That was the original idea. Sometimes we do that, like we're doing some of that with you.
Sometimes we just try to find some interesting people that have a story about their life.
(06:21):
But that... I mean, we all want to feel like when we get out of here eventually that we
made a difference.
The legacy thing is really is very important to people, I think. And, you know, in our conversation
before, I would just say one of my most fulfilling rules, I guess, is that I was in the ministry
for seven years and then started teaching. And so I spent almost 30 years teaching in
(06:44):
a community college.
Right.
So it's great to be back here at Greenfield because this community college is one of the
15 in Massachusetts. And probably most of our listeners know that one of the best deals
that college kids can make, and I've been selling this for a while, is that at this point,
you can go to a community college. And that, you know, this year for the first time, it's
(07:05):
free to go to a community college. So you can go to a community college. If you have
some success there, you can transfer to almost any school you can think of anywhere. We've
had students transfer to Harvard and Yale and Wellesley and Vassar and all kinds of places.
And so you're sitting next to a person two years later. That person's got the same degree
(07:28):
you have, but you've paid one half the cost because you went to community college for
two years. That's a good deal. And the community colleges are trying to really capitalize on
that in the sense that many people who come to community colleges don't know anything about
college. Nobody in their family has been before, whatever. So being at a community college
(07:51):
is a very good way to get oriented, to learn how to study, to learn how to manage your time.
And so people who transfer to four year schools from community colleges often really go at
it much better than if they had just went, if they had just gone as freshman students.
They come in with a lot of experience. It's a really good training from community colleges.
(08:14):
So that's a great thing. How long was the training to become a minister?
Well, it depended on who you were, but because I wanted to specialize in counseling, I spent
another year. So it was actually four more years in Newton Center. And over Newton had
a specialty in doing pastoral counseling because the person who was running it had been a student
(08:40):
of Carl Jung. And of course, Carl Jung was the originator of one of the main streams
of doing therapy and so on, worked with Freud and saw through Freud a little bit. And so
those of us that were there really got a good, strong orientation. We did field work and
(09:00):
we did all kinds of things that would help us make the transition into doing counseling.
I only know one joke about counselors or psychiatrists or psychologists.
So I suppose we're going to hear that now. No, I probably shouldn't because I never
said I was a classy guy. No, that's what you're saying. So this is a podcast. They
(09:23):
asked me to be here. No, a guy goes into a psychologist's office and he said, doctor,
doctor, everybody thinks I'm ugly. And the psychologist says, lay face down on the couch
and tell me all about it. And there's one more which relates to a guy goes in and says,
(09:44):
doctor, doctor, everybody dislikes me at work. He said, where do you work? He said, I'm
a car mechanic. He said, get under the couch. Okay, that's enough. This is not the gong
show or maybe it should be. My poor engineer's got to listen to this. Alex is our engineer
and he has to sit. He knows all the technical stuff, but he has to, I'm his ticket to heaven
(10:11):
because he has to listen to me. So he can say, at some point, I had to listen to Dennis
Lee on a podcast and they say, come on in. Well, I haven't known him for long, but he
seems like a great audience. No, he is. He's a really good guy. He makes me sound good.
And that's an effort. So thanks, Alex. I appreciate that. You mentioned that you traveled a lot.
(10:36):
Let's talk a little bit about you while you were in Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
So I'm wondering if you found a difference in people or are people just people or did
you notice differences from, let's say, Wisconsin to Massachusetts or anywhere else?
But when you use the term travel a lot, I was, I married to a woman who is a history
(11:00):
major at Wellesley College. And so when you're studying history, you learn a lot of geography.
So you know, early on, the two of us did a lot of traveling. We had the adventure of
buying two French cars. They were both made in France and very good cars and traveling
all around Europe and so on. So that was the basis of kind of feeling comfortable doing
(11:28):
that kind of thing. And then, you know, I had leads in different places about what I
was going to do for a living. And sometimes it just worked out in a very different way.
The church in Wisconsin was looking for a director for the counseling center. And then
Lawrence University was looking for some people who would work on the dean staff there. So
(11:49):
that combination of things meant that for the time we were there for three and a half
years, we lived in a dorm at Lawrence and I was working with kids at the church and
so on. One of my kids, in fact, I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, but I was
amazed because one of my kids was a very, very creative kind of kid and so on, you know,
and I got to know him pretty well. And then he left and went to college and we sort of
(12:12):
got out of touch. The next time I saw him, he was interviewed by Charles Gibson on The
Morning Show. And his name is Willem Dafoe. So he was one of my early kids that I just
thought was a great human being. And, you know, people joke about this, but one of my
kids actually made it to becoming Christ.
(12:34):
Wow. That is amazing. I think it's interesting when you talk to teachers and I'm always talking
to out and about the community. I do some photography and I run into athletic directors
and other teachers and I always realize how much of an influence they have on people.
(12:54):
But as a teacher, you don't really know at the time whether or not you have made a difference,
but I've had things in my life that happened to me that somebody gave me a way of doing
something that changed my entire life. And I don't think he realized at the time he was
going to be a great teacher. He didn't do it for that reason. He just kind of did it.
(13:17):
There are examples. I think of one. I don't know if we talked about it, but there was
a young couple out there in Wisconsin who wanted me to officiate at their wedding service.
And that's something I always use those terms carefully because people introduce me and say,
oh, this guy married my daughter. And I say, no, I didn't marry her. I just did the wedding,
you know. But anyway, I did this wedding service and they were a great couple. But I sensed
(13:43):
that there were some issues there. And I really tried to be careful about helping them to
understand it and so on. I did his funeral six months later.
Oh, no.
And he was a suicide victim.
Oh, no.
So those kind of things don't just fly by. And another instance that I haven't think
about is I had a student who was new to me. I had no idea who she was, but she was sitting
(14:08):
in a classroom and we were, it was a gerontology class. We were talking about elderly people.
And the issue came up about nursing homes and how nursing homes sometimes hire people
who are very caring people, but later they confess that they're gay or they're this or
that, something. And she really sounded off in class about, oh, my gosh, don't tell me
(14:31):
those people are working in nursing homes and so on and so forth. I couldn't just let
that go by. I could see that some people in the class were really kind of disturbed by
that. So I gave her an assignment after class. I said, I'd like you to do a little brief
research paper for me on homophobia. She came in next week and said, I never heard the word
(14:52):
before and I think it's important to be understanding and so I will apologize to the class and so
on and so forth.
Several years later, I ran across a student, she was married to a woman and she had been
to seminary.
Wow.
(15:13):
Wow.
So you never know.
You never know.
But you made a difference. I mean, you didn't think of it, when you went to work that day
in the class, you didn't know that was going to happen.
That's right.
And you just reacted to what you heard.
Correct. And the difference was something that she made, obviously. She confronted herself
and that's the hardest thing anybody does, seems to me.
(15:34):
That's a great story.
See, this is interesting because when we were sitting at the diner and we started talking,
I knew after talking to you for five minutes, you were going to be interesting. And we ended
up at the diner, we both had eaten at that point. We were there for a good hour. It took
(15:55):
us about 20 minutes to eat and the rest of the time we just kept talking and I knew you
had some stories. I didn't know even the few that you've given today. I didn't realize
those stories, but those are wonderful.
That's a theme that I think has been with me for most of my life and it's a theme right
now that has some real push to it because it seems to me that a lot of what's going
(16:19):
on right now is that people have made a decision that relating to other people is just too
hard.
I want to be with my own tribe. I don't want to get into any arguments. I don't want to
see things very differently from other people and so on. And to me, that is a very big tragic
(16:42):
situation that I think needs to be encountered because I don't think that the human species
has done much of anything that just was related to one person. I think when we do stuff, it's
because groups of us get together and have an idea about what should be done and learn
(17:04):
how to cooperate and learn how to get it done. And those are the things that get done in
history. They're not individual things. They're things that we do for each other, with each
other, as people who care about each other. And that's a tough assignment, but it's a
very crucial critical assignment. When I was in the classroom, and there's probably teachers
(17:28):
that are listening to this might be kind of horrified, but I always thought my role was
to enable students to talk to each other. I didn't think that I had the last word or
any great wisdom or anything like that. I would get discussions going, but particularly
when you're teaching gerontology, there's some people there who are in their 20s and
(17:51):
there's some people there who in their 40s or 50s. If you can get those people talking
to each other, you can get those people learning in that classroom what that process is like
and how fulfilling it is, then it seems to me you've really done something quite good.
I heard somebody say last week, I can't remember who it was, but that we're all into our own
(18:13):
areas. In other words, now it's politics, but I guess that's the best example, but
without talking specifics about the politics, but we go to, let's say YouTube, and we go
to people that are expressing our point of view. We're not listening to somebody else.
(18:36):
We don't have a commonality. They mentioned, and I thought this was interesting, one of
the few times people have some commonality, he used the example of a Super Bowl, or when
the Red Sox are in the playoffs, I live in a condo, you go by, everybody has got that
on, and you can say to your neighbor who you don't even know, hey, boy, that was a great
(18:58):
base hit, but that's commonality, but if we don't do that, and somebody goes to YouTube
and they watch somebody way on the right, and the other person goes to somebody way
on the left, we're not talking, we're just going into our own echo chamber.
Precisely, and if you consider that the only time we've done very worthwhile things has
(19:19):
been when we worked together, then that whole phenomenon is really something we need to
address, and we need to address it in no uncertain terms, and we're not doing it.
It's a tough subject, I think, it's a tough time. I'm wondering, I started before, and
I don't think we got to, I'm curious about difference in people. I asked before, is there
(19:40):
a difference in people from different parts of the country, from Wisconsin to New England?
Do you notice big differences or are they very subtle differences?
I think they're subtle, and also I think, I have not really in my life focused, and I
don't think you have either, on the differences. What I've focused on is the similarities,
(20:01):
and particularly when you get a group of people, it seems to me that the similarities are always
there, and the differences are always there. So addressing those differences and staying
together to get something done or to care about each other or whatever, that's the assignment
right there. So sure, I think there are regional differences. I think that we hear a lot about
(20:26):
that in terms of pollsters and so on, finding out what people's attitudes are. People on
the coast, people with college education as opposed to people without college education,
I think it's unfortunate to really focus on those differences to some degree. I mean,
it's important to understand them, but to focus on them doesn't get us where we need
(20:46):
to go, I don't think. I was listening to Yvonne Harari this morning. He's one of my favorite
philosophers and so on, and he was talking about the fact that this day and age really
does present issues that we have never really dealt with before. They're existential issues.
If we don't come to terms with this in small ways and larger ways, we have threats at this
(21:11):
point from the environment and from warfare and so on and so forth. There could be existential
threats for the species, and I think he's absolutely right about that. I mean, we have
to find ways to, if not cooperate, at least allow each other to be who we are and not
say that because you don't see this the same way I do or that the same way I do that you
(21:35):
don't have a right to exist. But the question is how, right? We can define the problem,
but the question is how do we get there? And I don't think that's a mystery either. I think
we know how to get together. I think we know how to cooperate. We know that you have to
be patient sometimes. You just have to listen sometimes, and you have to not talk sometimes.
(21:57):
You have to allow the other person to be who they are.
Interesting. I want to talk about some of your other experiences. You participated in the
Selma, Alabama march, so you got to tell us what that was like. I mean, that's historic.
It seems like another lifetime though. It seems, but some of the issues, you know, I
just got a book by John about John Lewis. There's been a lot of attention being paid
(22:21):
to John Lewis. He was there with us, of course. And I guess the story, I mean, my historical
story is that there were three of us from UMass that went down there. And as we drove
further south, we found that it was more difficult for us to get somebody to wait on us to pump
(22:42):
gas, to do whatever, you know, there was some alienation there because there we were in
a red renault with Massachusetts license plates on it, you know, even south.
Even then, right? Yeah, right.
So it was an adventure getting there. And when we got there, we were in front of Brown's
church. Probably everybody knows where that is. It's very iconic because that's where
Martin Luther King Jr. gave some of his most notable speeches and so on. But we parked
(23:07):
the car in front of that church and we got out and this very tall, very black guy came
in and his eyes were very wide. And he said, you got to take that light out. And I said,
what light are you talking about? He said, that light that comes on in the dome of the
car when you open the door, that light comes on. That's when they shoot you.
(23:33):
Wow. I thought that's a pretty good welcome. That's a good warning.
How old are you, by the way, at the time? I was 20. And that's a good question because
I thought to myself, I'm 20 years old. I'd like to live a little longer than this. And
people were sacrificing their lives there. We got to know Viola Luiso, who brought her
(23:55):
Volkswagen van down there. And she was taking people around after dark and so on and so
forth. She was shot to death two weeks after we left. And James Reeb had been killed.
So people were giving their lives. And I said, well, I'm 20. And then I thought to myself,
well, what the hell did I think I was getting myself into here? I mean, this is really,
(24:15):
this is life and death. Right. How did that change you? Or did it change you?
It did. I think it's a theme that, that I will say, I think I've tried to operate on
that for a while. You know, I've tried to be careful in choices I make and so on. It
(24:38):
affected me another way too, though, because many people know that, including people in
my family. So if I was being outrageous or something like that, you know, more than once
a brother or a sister or somebody close to me has said, Hey, are you the same guy that
went to Selma?
Wow.
You know, and that always stops me short because I have to say, yeah, I am that person, but
(25:01):
I'm not acting that way right now.
Interesting.
Interesting stuff. I want to talk a little bit about what's what's happening or what
did happen with regard to you teaching at North Shore Community College. You were there
for 28 years in the gerontology program. I know that was a big part about what you did
(25:21):
there or or being in that program, I should say. Tell us a little bit about what you did
there and how you got into gerontology.
Good. I don't know if you've looked around lately, but if you go to churches, there's
a lot of folks that are older people, you know, and so gerontology is something that's
(25:43):
good to know about. And so I had done some reading about that. I also was interested.
It was right at the time when Elizabeth Kubler Ross was doing a lot of writing and she happened
to be a midwesterner. So I met her a couple of times. She invited us to come down to her
her farm there.
Explain who she is quickly.
She was the one who wrote on death and dying and she became the expert and she had a tough
(26:04):
time. She was a psychiatrist. She had a tough time with her professional career because
she'd go into a hospital to talk to the dying patients and she'd ask this one and that one
and they'd say, oh, they're all getting better, you know. So she finally figured out a good
strategy. She would look for the person that was mopping the floors and she'd say, I'd
like to talk to somebody who's going through the dying process. Room 302, room 341, they
(26:31):
knew what was going on in a hospital and they were willing to talk about it. But some of
the folks that were professional there did not know. So that was kind of revealing to
her and revealing to everybody. It became, you know, a phobia people had, didn't want
to talk about it. So she broke through that. And so that was interesting to me. And for
28 years, every spring, I taught the death and dying course at North Shore Community
(26:57):
College and it was wonderful because people would relate in various ways to each other
and to me that another topic would not cause as much conversation and so on. So that was
great. The other thing that happened was that I got a call one day and I think I may have
mentioned this to you that I had been sort of active nationally because they were looking
(27:19):
for community college program directors and so on in gerontology. The call was from a
guy named Tony Lenzer who was the head of the gerontology program at the University
of Hawaii. And at first I thought, well, my dean was Hawaiian and I thought, well, this
is a mistake. I shouldn't be talking to you. But then he said, I'm the director here and
(27:41):
we just want to grant and we'd like you to participate in the advisory committee for
a program that we're doing for PBS, a series. We just won the grant to do this and it's
going to be 14 episodes. And he said, you'll have to take some time because you're going
to have to travel back and forth to Hawaii a few times. I said, Tony, how many seconds
(28:03):
do I have to think about this? So I did become a member of this four person advisory committee.
We produced the series. It was on PBS, very successful. It's called Growing Old in a New
Age and it's still available. Let me ask a little bit about, or maybe we can help some
people. If somebody is listening today and dealing with aging issues for themselves or
(28:28):
a loved one, how about some do's and don'ts or maybe misconceptions about aging? Good.
I have a very simple answer to that because it's a very complicated question. So it's
going to take some time and some energy. But I think the first thing to do is to find out
(28:50):
where the local council on aging is, where the senior center is. Because in every community
in the country, there is a person and there's a senior center. And those are, you know,
underrated, very, very helpful locations because they have to deal with what's going on in
(29:11):
their own community. It's not a matter of theory. They're seeing elderly people every
day who need services and have issues that are coming up and so on. So, you know, there's
a little group of people at every senior center who have over the years gotten some expertise
and some education and are great resources. And as I said, you know, I think my problem
(29:32):
with it is that they're underutilized. I mean, people really should call and they know the
doctors, they know the psychiatrists, they know the home health people and they can make
good referrals and they can help by understanding what's going on in this situation.
Wow. It's a huge topic.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah. There's no doubt about it.
(29:53):
The other thing I guess I would say is that you have to consider that it's sort of, I
mean, I mentioned before, people use the death and dying course for conversations that they
should have had earlier or that they would like to have had earlier. So, I think the
first question is, okay, what baggage am I coming into this with and how can I deal with
(30:15):
myself in terms of my own aging and my own issues around this? You have to let go of
some of those defenses because we all get into it. I turned 80 last year and this year
I turned 79. I don't know if that's really how it's supposed to go.
(30:38):
So obviously you've taken some of your own advice or what you learned.
Obviously my own advice is something I should take more of. That's right.
Listen, this has been wonderful. I'm so glad I ran into you with the diner. If I didn't
go in there that day, I wouldn't know you. You'd just be another guy in the community.
And this has been wonderful. Thanks, Tom. And thanks for being with us on Backyard Oasis.
(31:02):
Thanks very much for the invitation. It's been great.
This concludes today's podcast. We're always looking for new ideas, so feel free to reach
out to Judy Raper, Associate Dean of Community Engagement at Greenfield Community College
at 413-775-1819. If you have an idea, you'd love to share. Special thanks to the creators
(31:27):
of Backyard Oasis, Denise Schwartz, Chad Fuller, Dennis Lee, and Christine Copeland.
Have a great day.
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