It all started with my father and me standing on the steps of La Salle College High School one Saturday in May 1946. When my father’s finger left the doorbell, the door opened, and there stood Br. John Hoar. This started a 76-year odyssey in the Lasallian tradition. After graduating from high school in 1950, I went on to La Salle College (now La Salle University), Philadelphia. In 1952, I entered the De LaSalle Christian Brothers. I finished my BA in science education and an MA in theology. While in Scholasticate, I tried nursing school, and quickly realized this was not a good idea! I went on to postgraduate work in Astronomy and Chemistry at Villanova University.
During my first active ministry in 1957 at Bishop Walsh High School in Cumberland MD, I took the basketball team to the ESCIT tournament in Rhode Island. Little did I know that I was to return to Rhode Island in retirement sixty-five years later. The years between hold memories of new and exciting assignments in and out of the classroom.
While teaching at many wonderful schools, I was also blessed to moderate a newspaper and yearbooks, as well as to work with other sports teams including freshman baseball, wrestling, and rowing.
Teaching and moderating my various assignments allowed me to live and work with remarkable men and women among the Brothers and our associates. It has given a new depth of meaning to the phrase “together and by association.” We bring God to those we serve, through the efforts of the many.
Br. Craig Franz, FSC, PhD, was a student of Br. Thomas at Calvert Hall College High School. He shares that, “Br. Tom Dunn’s physics laboratory was a mesmerizing display of motion: weights sliding down inclined planes, wave tanks rippling with water, acoustically vibrating metal discs, and on and on. For juniors and seniors, physics class was a place of wonder! Students would race into the room, anxious to see what new “toy” would be displayed. Br. Thomas would first engage the curiosity of his students by showing them physics in motion, and then head to the board to explain how this could be mathematically mapped.”