As we were leaving the memorial service for my friend Bruce Thomas, his son Sam handed me an envelope. “We found this file in Bruce’s drawer. It had your name on it. We thought you’d like to have it.” The contents proved to be a real gift, which I’ll tell you about shortly after I explain what a gift Bruce himself was.
The memorial service revealed a number of things about Bruce’s life that were new to me, despite the fact that I had known him for more than fifty years. Bruce first appeared at our door in Orford, New Hampshire in 1972 on a mission to recruit me for a position at the small Montessori school his children attended in Chicago. Rona, my Chicago sister-in-law, had told him about me. At least I think that’s how the visit came about. Although his mission failed to move me from New Hampshire, it was the beginning of a long friendship.
Bruce himself grew up in New Hampshire, where his mother supported him by working as a school nurse in private schools in the state after his father’s death. He used those schools as a springboard to Harvard. The photographs at the memorial showed him in his Harvard hockey uniform, a sport that brought him a small measure of fame on campus. There was also a useful timeline on display which revealed that he had dropped out of school for a couple of years to work on an ore-carrying boat traveling the Great Lakes. I had heard a bit about that adventure from him. I also knew that he returned to Harvard to graduate and to win a Rhodes scholarship to attend Oxford, an honor he wore lightly and modestly as was his way.
I was familiar with several other stops along the timeline. He was on the team in Massachusetts that designed the early efforts at deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals, which recommended release of patients who would be served by outpatient community agencies. It was an admirable concept, especially considering the deplorable conditions in most state facilities. In fact, it led to a flood of new problems because the community services either didn’t exist or were overwhelmed by the task. Homelessness increased.
One of Bruce’s proudest assignments was a staff position on the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson to study the causes of the race “riots” in the late sixties. The bold findings of the Commission pointed to racism as the prime cause, which was leading to two societies, one white and one Black. The report recommended large-scale federal programs to improve conditions in Black communities.
In the early 70s Bruce founded a small progressive school in Colorado, inspired by the work of Sylvia Ashton-Warner, to which he returned briefly in the early 90s to teach. It was our shared interest in teaching and learning that brought us together when Rosellen and I moved to Chicago in 1995. I’m fuzzy about what brought him to Chicago. Perhaps it was a multi-year involvement with the MacArthur Foundation about which I had not known until it appeared on that useful timeline. Bruce and I started meeting regularly for breakfast at Valois, a Hyde Park cafeteria made famous by Barack Obama who could be found there often meeting with key Chicago political figures. We were just a few months apart in age and had come to our interest in education through reading the same books and pursuing similar innovative ideas. We could refer to these sources with the assurance that not many of our younger colleagues would recognize names like Francis and David Hawkins who shaped so much of our thinking about how children learn.
Bruce was one of the most intellectually curious people I’ve ever known. He read widely and when he came upon a book that he thought others should know about, he typed up a one or two page summary of its key ideas and circulated it among friends. However, he was not an egghead. He volunteered at a South Side school, where he offered to work individually with some of their most difficult kids, a project that grew into a collaborative effort with the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute.
Over the years our breakfast of two grew into a gathering of five or six educators, mostly retired, who were looking for ways to improve the system we knew best – the Chicago Public Schools. Bruce was eternally optimistic and always stood ready to research innovative practices in areas like student assessment that showed promise in other cities.
Bruce was diagnosed with leukemia in 2024. He moved to Milwaukee to spend what he knew were his final days to be cared for by his daughter, Erin. Frequent blood transfusions helped him extend that time for almost two years. Whenever I visited or spoke on the phone with him, he had questions about the latest in Chicago education. He was very much himself till the end and his friends at that Valois table will always miss his unique presence.
Still wondering what was in that envelope? You’re going to have to wait till next week to find out.
