Yearbook photo

Yearbook name: Thomas Albert Friedlander (Tom)

Tom Friedlander
3200 N. Lima Center Rd., Dexter, Michigan 48130
734-475-3365
tmfriedlander@hughes.net

Martha and I have been married for 43 years as of June 2016.

B.S., The College of William & Mary 1970 (thanks Glenn!). M.S. and Ph.D. work in taxonomy and forest botany, U. Michigan, Ann Arbor as an N.D.E.A. Scholar, serving as a Teaching Fellow in 8 different courses from first year to adult ed.  I was thrilled and lucky to work for the only botanist elected to the National Academy of Sciences, who named the new dogwood I discovered after me, Cornus friedlanderi.  I spent three summers at the U. Michigan Biological Station at Pellston, where I met Martha in 1971.

At Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, I taught science in two courses (Ecology & Evolution, Botany and Zoology).  I was honored to win the DeLay Teaching Award and to be recognized by the local chapter of Sigma Xi, also for science teaching.  I coached girls’ volleyball for a couple of thousand games at the varsity level (Coach of the Year twice and 12-time District Champions), and later, with one of my former j.v. coaches, the eighth-grade volleyball team.  Our science department won the Intel National High School Science School of the Year prize, and we were treated like royalty at the Mayflower Hotel in D.C., ate filet mignon three times a day, clad in our fancy dresses and tuxedos, and were zipped around Washington in shiny limos like rock stars.  Oddly, I started at this independent school as a part-time janitor while studying at U.Mich., and my guest lecturing then, plus assisting with the volleyball team eventually got me my academic job, all of which lasted from 1976 through 2014.  I served on twelve committees, wrote hundreds of college recommendations, and went (and still go) on many alumni outreach trips around the country.  Many former students are our friends today.

Martha and I led these same students on hiking and service trips to the Galapagos Islands and Ecuador, and to the Peruvian Amazon, as well as to Shenandoah National Park (over 12 years).  A shy “late bloomer”, I really, really appreciated my small group of high school friends, and still do, but, nerd-like, I actually did know the name of nearly everyone who was in our class back then!  So when we decided early on that our Greenhills students were going to be “our family” it wasn’t hard to commit ourselves to knowing and teaching over 2000 of them, for a combined 76 years.  I’ve been very happy, even though my students were always appalled to hear that I had been in schools my entire adult life [continuously from 1953 to 2014] and that I hadn’t been in a barbershop since a haircut cost seventy-five cents (still true).  Martha has never seen me without my beard.

I collect antique tools, having been to over 500 auctions and countless flea markets and antique stores, and am currently building the biggest wrench in the world out back on our 40 country acres (large garden, wildlife, big greenhouse, four barns).  Over 30,000 wrenches have magically accumulated, along with many thousands of axes, hatchets, hammers, screwdrivers, soldering coppers, etc….Come visit the museum!

Photos:

Martha and I at the luau on Kauai, November, 2015

Me with four of my former volleyball players, at my retirement gathering, June 2014