Tom Aims: wily cherub, bard
Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of weekly articles
which profile University students selected at random.
By RICHARD DYMOND
Collegian Staff Writer
Four scenes in the life of Thomas William Aims
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: It is sometime in 1961, A ten
year-old blond boy has just received a gift from his parents;
the Gilbert Science Kit is added to a bedroom already filled
with Golden Books, rock collections, cameras and lenses,
microscopes and chemicals. The boy’s father, a field service
engineer, sits in the living room watching. He decides his son
will go to MIT...
Lackland Airforce Base near St. Antonio, Texas: It is May
of 1970, and a blond airman with a crew-cut walks into the
office of his squadron sergeant without knocking or an
nouncing himself. He looks at the sergeant. “I want out,” he
says. The Sergeant looks at him and says, “I’ll make sure
you’re in here until you die.” The blond boy leaves the
Sergeant’s quarters and plans to have a friend catch him when
he faints on the stairs...
Eden, North Carolina: It.is fall of 1971. A boy and a girl, both
with long blond hair, are standing in the office of the town’s
Justice of the Peace. Outside, townfolk are sitting on orange
■ crates in the noon sun. The minister, a Southern Baptist, looks
at their hand-crafted silver rings (bought in a head shop up
North for $1.50) and the girl’s flowers (picked right there in
.Eden in a field behind the Hardy’s restaurant) shakes his head
and begins,the service...
BEAVER TERRACE Dishwasher
UNIV TOWERS refrigerator
FOSTER AVE. APTS
• air conditioned
carpeting
OFFICE OPEN draperies
1 .‘OO - 4:00 P.AA. laundries
456 East Beaver Ave. efevJto-s
237-0977 238-0534 9 month lease
12 montyi lease
collegian classified ads are widely read
TUNE IN . . . to nature
TURN OFF . air, noise and emotional
- pollution
DROPOUT. .of congestion and
LOOK WHAT YOU CAN HAVE INSTEAD
Now Renting for Summer and Fall
9 month lease available : 3
• Inexpensive, unusually large efficiencies,
one, two and three bedroom apartments
• All utilities * Paid
• Free Bus Services from All Classes and Town
• Public Transportation
• No Long Corridors or Stairwells (Greatly
Reducing Crime Risk)
• Security Patrol System'
• Well-Lighted, Covered Private Entrance
from Gutside to Each Apartment
• Each Apartment Has Balcony (Upstairs) or
Patio (Downstairs)
• Beautiful, Natural Woodsy Surroundings
• Separate Buildings for Pet Owners
• Ten-Channel Centre Cable TV
• Generous tloset Space Including Walk-in
Closets''for Storage of Belongings on
Premises.
Laurel Glen
Communit
State College, Pa: It is February 1972. A young man with
ear-length blond hair sits on a woven chair in his upstairs
apartment on West College Ave. It is 12:25 a.m. His wife is
sleeping in the bedroom. The dog, Sam, sleeps on the floor
beside her bed. The curtains are open. The first snow of the
night begins falling past the bedroom window. He rises and
goes to the kitchen, pours some orange tea into a cup and adds
some whiskey. Back in his chair he begins to smell the
fragrance of tea and whisky. He turns to write lines of verse on
a sheet of paper...
Thomas Aims (4th,-education, soon' to be American
"Louise is my equal, she is not
some woman who / command around
like a slave and / am not her puppet."
studies) is alive and well and still living in State College in
summer 1973. He works for the State Theatre and also in the
Kern print'shop. His wife, the former Louise Wunder, keeps
house, cooks fabulously (she’s 1 Pennsylvania Dutch), applies
her skills to woodworking, sewing aridmacrame. She keeps
company for Sam, and generally makes life bearable for
Thomas while he is under the strain of writing poetry. Louise
is away visiting her sister in California this week, so Tom is
eating canned com and cold chicken.
“She’s been gone a week now, and I’m beginning to realize
just how much of a team we are. We never needed a marriage
license to prove that. Our lives together are equal to our lives
as individuals, Louise is my equal. She is not some woman I
command like a slave, and I am not her puppet. Overall,
marriage is a fine thing if you are going to try and make it out
there. If we weren’t trying to make it I could have seen not
getting married, but I wanted to start worrying about bills for
the first time in my life.” »
Out there has always been Tom’s battle. In high school he
gave up prepping for his MIT future and became his high
school’s first hippie radical freak with long blond hair and the
credo: “I am committed to being different, to living out what
we’re supposed to be able to live out in this country. To having
a good time.” He was kicked out of school three days before
graduation because of a riot he had nothing to do with.
“I was writing poetry at that time, infatuated with little
ideas, reading F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and even
Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach” which really stands out in my
mind because I was stoned and a friend gave it to me because
I had been such a science nut.”
After higfr&chool, Tom went to Cincinnati with his parents,
but in December of 1969 he had some problems his parents
decided to break up, aftd Tom could see no life for him in
Cincinnati. He came back to Pittsburgh, “where I found all
my friends were changing from what I was changing into.”
He remained in Pittsburgh for a few months;, then joined the
Air Force in May 1970. But after three days he found the whole
idea of marching and learning weaponry disgusting. He.ap
plied for a discharge on the basis of a knee problem (which the
drilling had really aggravated). He was refused and later
teamed with a friend to get out.
“After I fell they rushed me to the hospital in an ambulance.
The sergeant came over and said, ‘lf you’re faking this
you’re dead.’ They put me on a medical hold, but I found out
that once you’re on M.H. they have to discharge you if you
haven’t been in for six weeks. I floated the information around
that I knew this and soon I got my papers. ”
After the Air Force, Tom went back to Pittsburgh and to a
professional job placement se:
crime-risk areas
All These Features Under One Roof
• Washer-Dryer Area
• Pinball Machines
• General Store £
• Indoor Heated Swimming Pool
• Basketball-Tennis Courts
• Maintenance Man Living on Premises
• individual Thermostatic: Control for Heat
and Air Conditioning,
• Ample Free Parking Almost Two Car
Spaces for Each Apartment
• Large, Bright Airy Rooms Laid out for
Maximum Livability
• Efficient, Modern Kitchen
• Wafl-fo-Wall Carpeting
• Esthetically Landscaped into the Woods,
237-5709
Directions:
Free bus from campus
North on 322 (1 mi.), right
on Suburban at Miller-
McVeigh Ford, veer left at Y,
continue to sample house
• 4fiX^K |TcH EN appliances!
*^@/GENE RAL ELECTRO •
PLAYLAND
Fun and Relaxation
World's latest
electronic tun games i
5 cents to 25 cents
FESTIVAL OF
AMERICAN THEATRE
Little Mtirders
By-Jules Feiffer
THE KEYSTONE COMEDY OF THE 1980 s!
A comedy for adults by the world-famous cartoonist whose
cynical view of the "American dream has a convincing
perceptiveness.
Directed by Gene Feist of New York's Roundabout Theatre
The Pavilion
July 25-29; August 1-5, 7-11
Matinees August 4 and 11
Damn Yankees
By. George Abbott, Douglass Wallop, Richard Adler and
Jerry Ross
All hit, no error that’s the score on this rollicking, warm
hearted . musical about America's favorite pastime;
baseball!
The Playhouse
August 1-5, 7-11; Matinee August 11
For ticket reservations call 865-1884,
Sixteenth Professional Season
The Pennsylvania State University
State College, Pennsylvania
He worked a month, then moved to State College to live with
his sister. j
‘T lived in seclusion for five months —.jsut writing and
thinking. Finally I decided to go back to school as an adjunct
in December got a job in the theater and met some people
living in a co-op. There I met my wife Louise and we began
living together. We went back to Pittsburgh to look for a job
but didn’t find anything. One night, we just decided to get
married. We left and drove (through foggy mountains in
Virginia to a little town called Eden, N.C. and at noon we
arrived. !
“I remember the ceremony was about to begin when in walk
these two young people and an older : lady. The guy looked
about 17 and the girl about 21 and six months gone. They sat
and watched us get married.' The kid looked scared shitless.
The paster wanted to ignore them, but he was real fascinated
with us our rings and Louise’s long blond hair and tlje
sheath of poems by John Donne that I wanted him to read for
us.” j
The living room we sit in has a ceiling that slopes down on'
each side like a tent roof but is made to seem roomier by tlje
placement of round photographs and paintings that go all
around like stars in a.planetarium. The room is anchored by
three or four finely made antique pieces induing a pigeon
holed writer’s desk with a glass cylinder door over the book
shelf inside, a pair of hundred-year-old tapestries of George
Washington that a relative brought back from England after
World War 11, and an old silvertone gramophone with a metal
crank set outside the pegged box. The mechanism no longer
works, but the piece still has a quiet dignity. !
“The antiques give us the feeling of getting back, of the
infusion of many elements of the past that we still hold to lie
worthwhile, like craftsmanship and style. Take the chair
you’re sitting in. It-came from my grandmother-in-law js
house. We took it apart and re-upholstered it, re-tied the
strings and re-did the seat. Louise learned woodcraft from ja
book. She’s the real craftsirfan. i
“I think we’re “getting back” in a lot of ways today. We're
beginning to pull classic form into our music. We have rock
operas like “Tommy,” plays like "Godspell” and “Hair,” jazz
and blues, and even people like Zappa who are doing a bit of
everything. So our antiques are simply a form of that
process.” j
Tom sits in this sanctuary and writes poems. He published
‘in Focus, in spring 1973 a little poem called “Scarecrow” and
■has a few of his compositions picked for a student anthology
called Spectrum (Idlewild Press), to be published soon. He
loves -to say the names of writers. He pronounces each
carefully, paying each proper respect. J
- “I want to go into American studies because I’m interested
in the American culture. The exciting thing about it is that we
might read John Steinbeck writing about the Depression
compared to Kesey writing about movements in the 60’s. Then
there’s Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. I enrolled in
American studies 403 last spring, then I realized you had to bje
tenth term to take it. Professor Daniel Walden was teaching.
He’s a very impressive man very well-read. I’m looking
forward to.him.” I
“In poetry, you’re working with an image of what the work
presents. You’re suggesting»— leaving a shadowy film. I like
the way that poetry acts as a dual subjective what I subject
into it and what the reader subjects into it.” j
“So there’s a middle ground never established?”
“Right, but everybody is going across it. That middle
ground is where fiction is, telling you character A did this and
Character B did that. What poetry is saying is that there is
something over there, yet the reader over here is feeling that,
but not actually ever having it told to him, just suggested. j
“One of the main reasons I write is to bridge some kind of
gap, because humanbeings are lonely and because they build
Grad student’s spouse,
experienced as a .com
mercial bank or-savings &
loan teller with exceptional
clerical facilities and
ability to meet public, must
be high school grad, plan to
work a minimum of 3 years
and type 50 correct words
per minute. Good salary
and benefits.
Qualified persons call
Jank Madore 237-4943 or
238-3343 for an ap
pointment. ,
Thrifty Bottle Shop
j ; '
Open Sundays
11:30-3:00 AM
5
35 brands of
ctild beer to go
i O
(Next to the Train Station)
'. I :
yiimiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimmiimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiu'
UNIVERSITY CALENDAR
Frid?y-Monday, July 27-30, 1973
| SPECIAL EVENTS
Friday, July 27 BOC band chorus concert, 8 p.m., Schwab. No admission charge.
Friday-Sunday, July 26-29 Festival of American Theatre, ‘‘Little Murders,” 8 p.m.,
Pavilion. (Sunday curtain, 7:30 p.m.) ' ' ,
Friday, July 27 Commonsplace Coffeehouse, 8-11 p.m.. Room 102 Kern.
' Sunday, July 29 Black Worship Service, 11 a.m., Walnut.
| FILMS
Friday, July 27 HUBjSummer Series, 8:45 p.m., HUB lawn. “The Golden Fish,”
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, (rain, HUB ballroom), followed by “Guess Who’s
Comingto Dinner.” with Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn.
Saturday-Sunday Student SF films, 7 and 9 p.m., HUB assembly room. “High
Noon,” Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly.
| OFFICIAL
Saturday, July 28 Written French and Spanish language examinations for ad
vanced degree candidates
LECTURES
Friday, July 27 The College of Education Faculty Lecture Series, 12:30 p.m., Room
112 Kern. Stanley 0. Ikenberry, professor of education, on “The Confidence
Crisis.” ' i
ill RECREATION
Sunday, July 29 Intess|Si Folk Dancers, 7:30-10 p.m., HUB ballroom.
Monday, July 30 Bridge, 6j:45 p.m., HUB ground floor lobby. Duplicate play.
| / EXHIBITS
Museum of Art Gallery A, Prints and Drawings by Penn State Faculty. Gallery C,
Permanent Collection. Gallery B, Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts
Crafts, until July 29! ;
Kern Gallery Warren’Hullow and Isabel Parks, pottery. Sandy and Philip Jurus,
jewelry. Ann Demairas, prints. Louis Marotta, paintings and drawings.
Chambers Gallery William D. Davis, assistant director University Art Museum,
recent drawings “Woven Art,” works by Barbara Hodik, Linnea Martin, David
Van Dommelen, Kent Sissel, Katheryn Mills, Nancy Harrison," Steve Grout,
Annette Hobbs.
= Zoller Gallery, Visual Arts Paintings, drawings and sculpture by Jim Finnegan |
| and David Bushmari, until August 3. |
niiiHiuiiimniimiwiiiiiiHiiiiitimiHHiimiiiiiHtiiuiiuHHiinnii»*Hinintiiimiiii(iiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiHiniiiwiiiHai(;
The Daily Collegian Friday, July 27, 1973
up these walls around themselves. I want to have my poems
crawl over walls and say there’s another person that feels the
same way you do.”
This sudden talk of loneliness has Tom looking around at his
living room, at the things that he and Louise have collected
patiently in the last years.
“Everything I have in this room is fantastic to me, but is it
really worth anything and is it going to matter what I did? You
can’t take anything w'th you. All these things are to make this
life comfortable until you pass into that life. But what if you
don’t want to pass into that life?
“I want to make enough money to get a farm and live away
from people on top of a mountain somewhere. I’d really like to
move to Montana now because I hear it’s the least populated
state. Yes, I’d really like to move to Montana. . . .or New
England. How I would love to be there.”
“Why is New England such an appeal?”
“I think it’s because you’re getting back to where you
originally started from. And you’re near the ocean and people
are so fascinated with the sea. I’m afraid of it. We went to
Atlantic City and walked on the boardwalk on a stormy night
when the waves were crashing around us. I just thought how,
if you fell off, you’d never be able to survive. And yet you go in
during the day and have fun. I guess its that whole idea of
playing with death.”
“Like Kafka?”
“Yeah, there’s a beautiful example. Think how he wrote
himself fully onto the paper. . . . Wow, do you think if you do
that you’re actually going to start determining your own
fate?”