A Blast From the Past

I ran the St. Patrick’s Day Dash with 12,500 of my closest friends today. I like the dash because it’s short (5Kish), there’s a beer garden, and I always run into someone I know. This year was no different: among others I encountered Tom Pritchard, a guy I worked with nearly 10 years ago in Denali Park, Alaska. Ironically, my running partner, whom I’ve only known for a scant few months, also worked with Tom at Southwestern Books, selling encyclopedias, so we chatted a while.

Tom is quite a character – one might describe him as a Northwest version of Jeff Spicoli. We asked him if he had run the race. He hadn’t. He was riding his bike to the Longshoreman’s hall looking for work when he saw the beer garden and abandoned his quest for employment.

I found this particularly entertaining since his nickname in Denali was “10-speed Tom, the Titan of the Tundra”. He bought two ghetto-ass 10 speeds of some kid in Healy for $15. He and his buddy rode them around town for the summer looking like complete fools. But who am I to judge, he had a great summer. At one point someone threw a costume party and he made a helmet out of tundra, stuffed leaves and branches in his shirt and pants and went as his nickname.

Anyway, since leaving Alaska here are some of the things 10-Speed Tom has been up to:

• Bartended at Steven’s Pass
• Spent an entire year frying on acid
• Traveled Europe, Northern Africa, Central America, Australia, and New Zealand.
• Pedaled a bike-taxi in Daytona for spring break three years in a row
• Bit a guy’s ear off in a bar fight.
• Did 2 months in jail for the bar fight.
• Ran a ceramic molding business
• Worked construction in Florida rebuilding hurricane damaged buildings
• Fathered a child in Ireland
• Developed some interesting and insightful views on Socialism and American Society
• Had his passport revoked by the State Department

And the whole time he’s telling me about all these escapades, the one I find hardest to believe is that he went door to door selling encyclopedias!