The Letter

In my previous post, I mentioned the letter I'd written to Tom Hanks in my senior year history class requesting that he tell me about someone he wished he'd studied more about in high school. We each chose three, figuring that it'd up our odds of getting a response. The Hanx was the one person I wanted the most to hear from, and he was the one person who came through. I've moved a big handful of times since high school, and I suppose back then my admiration wasn't quite to the level that it is now, and much to my regret, I'd lost my copy of the letter. 

You can say what you want about social media (hell, I've been known to gripe about it on occasion), but it has afforded me the opportunity to keep in touch with folks I otherwise may never have spoken to again, given that I'm now living on the opposite coast of the country from where I grew up. One of those people is Tom Jordan, my high school history teacher. 

I had no shortage of great teachers in high school, but Mr. Jordan was one of my favorites. He was a favorite of the vast majority of his students, I'd wager. He was in his mid/late twenties when we had him, if I'm not mistaken, the age where he could easily have been the older brother we idolized. He had a very laid-back, easy way about him in the way he related to his students, but when it came time to discuss the War of 1812 or the Industrial Revolution, he was all business, and he got into it with such a passion that you couldn't help but hunker down and listen. You could tell he loved his job, and I think he got a kick out of keeping even the class cut-ups (of which there were at least one or two in my class that I can recall) engaged. The PWR (People We Respect) Project was just one of many tools he used to connect us with our forebears, so to speak, via the conduit of someone we admired. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but it really was a stroke of brilliance on his part.

With this in mind, I thought maybe, just maybe, Mr. Jordan might have kept his copies of the letters we'd written. I don't like to think about how many years it's been since I wrote that letter (let's just say that a child born the year I graduated high school has just graduated high school themselves, yikes), so I didn't hold out a whole lot of hope, but I asked anyway.

His answer came quickly. 

"Jacques Cousteau."

The name Tom Hanks had given in his response to my letter.

Whether he remembered offhand (which would have been tremendously impressive) or had gone through his files and pulled it up, I wasn't sure. The important thing was that he had it. And within a couple of hours, I had it. So here it is, in all its glory. I'm thrilled to see it again, and to include it in preamble to a little PWR project of my own.

"Dear Faith,
Here is Tom's response to your history class question. I hope you enjoy doing the research and presentation! :)
Best Wishes!
AmyAsst. to Tom Hanks"

(She calls him Tom. Two Oscars, two decades of hit movies, one of the most respected actors in the industry, and she calls him Tom. Because I get the feeling he doesn't let anybody call him Mr. Hanks.) 

"Not only did M. Cousteau invent, or helped invent, the SCUBA Diving apparatus, he used that marvelous mechanism to explore our world's seas and oceans, and labored to educate us all about the dangers of pollution and how we must understand the need for clean oceans. He is a great man."

From one great man to another. Cousteau was Tom Hanks' PWR. The Hanx is mine.