In Memory

Thomas Erwin

Thomas Erwin



 
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08/12/19 03:08 PM #1    

Susie Memory (Baird)

I am saddened to hear of the passing of Tom Erwin.  The main thing I remember about Tom was how smart he was.  We were both in Mrs. Peacock's 12th grade English class, and he was always saying things that delighted her for being so original and so "on point."  I remember one occasion when the class was asked to discuss something I had written.  I don't recall what it was, but I remember that I had tried to include all of Miss Penney's points about transitions between paragraphs and things like that.   Miss Penney's suggestions were well taken, but including them all tended to make papers longer and more repetitive than they would otherwise be. 

Anyway, Mrs. Peacock asked the class for comments on my paper.  No one raised his hand, so Mrs. Peacock called on Tom.  I can see him now, leaning back in his chair and saying with a slow smile, "Well, the machinery creaks a little."  Mrs. Peacock's face lit up with joy--she loved that comment.  And he was right.  There was too much emphasis on getting from one paragraph to another and not enough emphasis on content.  I took that suggestion to heart in the things I wrote after that.  Keeping the machinery well-oiled is an important task in writing things that people will want to read.   

 

 


08/13/19 06:50 PM #2    

Karen Engard (Allen)

Susie, what a wonderful tribute to our friend. He will be missed.


08/14/19 10:48 PM #3    

Rusty Britt

Awesome rememberance .....


08/16/19 04:59 PM #4    

Laura Grosch

Thomas Erwin gifted his Charles and Ray Eames Wood Lounge Chair , ca. 1955 to the Gregg Museum of Art and Design on the NCSU Campus, which was exhibited in August 2017 as the Museum reopened. “ Hailed by TIME magazine as the greatest design object of the 20thCentury …. the 1946 chair is now a modern icon” as documented by the catalogue SHOW AND TELL page 252. 

Thomas’ chair was installed beautifully and he was delighted with the chair exhibition and the whole new museum that he and his youngest son had watched being built since it was close to their home. Herb Jackson and I enjoyed being with Thomas during the opening and also later when Thomas and his son were playing pool over at the Players Retreat.

I am feeling the weight of mortality as we lose a most interesting and creative person from our impressive class.

Laura Grosch


08/17/19 10:22 AM #5    

Richard Parsons

My fellow Broughtonites will remember the Junior Class Krispy Kreme doughnut sale fundraiser. Not everyone was pleased at being forced to canvass their neighborhoods peddling doughnuts. Tom was one of those who found it distasteful. He enlisted his gradmother's aid for cash; they bought the required number of doughnuts; and then took them to the Methodist Home and gave them away. That was typical of Tom's generosity, which he manifested on both big and small levels. There is, in the permanent collection of the North Caroline Museum of History, a gigantic sideboard by the free Black cabinet maker Thomas Day of Milton. It was a partial donation by Tom. I remember the delight he took in discovering the sideboard in some junk dealer's collection in the Milton area, his delight in buying it, and his even greater delight when the Museum accepted it for their collection.


08/17/19 10:05 PM #6    

Joan Etchells (Hutchins)

Tom and I were in homeroom together due to our last names starting with “E” and we had a lot of classes together also so we became friends.I have one very vivid memory involving Tom. It seems we had gone out together on a date but I don’t remember where. At one point, late in the evening, he was backing out of someplace we had parked and his car got stuck in reverse and he couldn’t get it to go forward. No matter what he tried, he could not get it into forward gear. I can’t remember exactly what happened but seeing as how we had no cellphones we must have solved our dilemma somehow. 


08/18/19 07:49 AM #7    

John Wallace Lambert

Continuing the conversations about Tom Erwin, a friend from his first year here in Raleigh - although alas not as close in recent years as in retrospect I'd have liked.... He was generous, perhaps to a fault, and there was a time when money management was not his forte. By the end of 1961 we were exchanging gifts, and I must have given him something - a recording, most likely - for the holidays. In turn he presented me two magnificent art books - one is Berenson's 1952 volume on Italian Renaissance painters. This was surely meant to broaden my cultural interests. A note with one of them reads, "You beat me to the draw. I[t] is my part to give you this with many thanks to you. I am so glad I found my money so you could have this." One book is inscribed with a (slightly modified) quote from Pericles: "In framing artists, art hath thus decreed, To make some good, but others to exceed." The other contains a New Yorker cartoon showing an elderly couple looking at a nude in a museum. The caption is, "Spanish ladies have nice eyes." That was Tom! RIP.


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