Retirements

by Edward G. Quattlebaum III

At 5:38 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 12, 1999, the Quattlebaum answering machine was flashing red. Five hours earlier, the U.S. Senate had acquitted President William Jefferson Clinton on both articles of impeachment. Now, the strong, cheerful voice of Tom Lyons filled our kitchen. "It was 55-45 for acquittal on perjury, and 50-50 on obstruction of justice," the voice said with a chuckle. "But that's good! He is the greatest sleazebag in the history of the American presidency, and what he did does not rise to the level of High Crimes and Misdemeanors. Have a nice day."

No single moment or volume can capture what Thomas T. Lyons' 35 years of teaching history at Andover means to the profession, the school, the department. Theresa Pease's biographical sketch "Tom Lyons: A Change of Dreams," in the Fall 1997 Andover Bulletin, perhaps comes closest. It begins in 1951, Tom's 11th-grade year at Reading High, where he was varsity football quarterback dating a beautiful and brainy cheerleader named Eleanor Coneeney who later became his wife. It takes him past Oct. 22, 1954, when as a Brown University junior he was stricken by polio, and follows him through his master's degree at Harvard and his teaching at Mount Hermon School. It shows him as faculty adviser to The Phillipian, teacher of countless imaginative courses and author of nine books since he arrived at Andover in 1963. It reflects his immense pride in his spouse's work as financial analyst and in the banking, teaching and legal careers of their children, John '78, Kathleen Fanikos '81, David '83 and Joe '89.

But Tom's phone message about the Clinton verdict is almost as revealing. In it was the restless, robust intellect of a historian, journalist, legal scholar, informed citizen of the republic. In it was the buoyant optimism in the face of unpleasantness, the concern for values and justice and civil liberties of even the least deserving.

Count yourself among the luckiest history teachers on the planet if Tom Lyons invites you to be partners in a pedagogical project. In summer 1992, colleague Sarah Igo and I joined Tom using Abbot grant funding to put together an experimental, team-taught version of the standard U.S. history survey-what trembling legions around the alumni globe remember variously as History 4, History 35, History 300, History 30. The excitement for Igo and me was in making this sausage together with Tom Lyons, using Tom's observations of colleagues' daily experiments in the classroom trenches for nearly 30 years, especially during his five-year stint as department chair. And it was in working with Tom's materials: no textbook, but instead about 900 pages of "greatest hits" documents that formed a comprehensive survey of U.S. history from 1492-1992.

It was Tom who conceived of the team approach in the first place, and it was the collegial experience that made Tom such an extraordinary pedagogue.

Tom treated colleagues like family. He was as his father, veteran WGBH commentator and Boston Globe reporter Louis Lyons, must have been to him. If a department member fell ill, Tom was at bedside or hospital before the doctor. Tom knew about our children's soccer agonies, our spouses' careers, the color of the shoes we wore to each other's weddings.

Only such a man could team up with his history teacher-son in 1998 to tour in an old maroon Cadillac the Civil Rights Deep South in 98-degree heat and find the Bryant store in Money, Miss., where Emmett Till and his aged uncle Mose Wright had stood up to their tormentors 43 summers earlier.

All roads in Lyons' sense of family, however, lead to Eleanor. "It took me weeks to work up the nerve to speak to this stunning, strong, angel of a girl at Reading High," Tom remembers. From Oct. 23, 1954, to July

1955, Eleanor visited Tom in the hospital every day. Whatever complications followed the polio, Eleanor confronted them with-and this is the key, says Tom-"no fuss." If she could do something about a setback, she did it; if no one could, she got the couple moving again, with intelligent, childlike, contagious faith.

This Gibraltar of a home base extends through Tom to his students, whom he teases relentlessly like a doting grandpa. They have all been "knuckleheads" at one time or another, and a love tap with one of his crutches refocused them on the, uh, 1816 Bank of the United States charter.

In her book No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin recounts the moment on June 21, 1942, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's White House guest Winston Churchill was handed a telegram. The Germans had taken 25,000 British soldiers as prisoners in Libya. Churchill was devastated. There was a moment of silence in the president's study. Then FDR turned to Churchill: "What can we do to help?"

The generosity of Roosevelt's immediate, upbeat response was what enabled Churchill to pull himself together and what Churchill would later remember of that night. And I, when I read Goodwin's account, thought of the buoyancy and optimism of Eleanor and Tom Lyons as they touched the troubles of generations of Andover students and families.

As Tom and Eleanor leave PA, they will be moving to a house they have just built in nearby Newburyport, Mass., a town permeated with Colonial history. Tom says they look forward to becoming involved in the life of the bustling port town. And Tom is not leaving Andover totally behind. He will be back at PA to teach his course on The Constitution and the Supreme Court next spring.

Edwin G. Quattlebaum III '60 is an instructor in history and social science at Andover.