I was saddened to hear (via a Facebook posting) of the passing of an old friend and teacher from my Buffalo days. Tom Trosey taught English at the boys’ Catholic high school I attended there from 1963-1967. He was fresh out of college when he arrived as an enthusiastic young teacher whose specialty was creative writing. I never had Tom as a classroom teacher, encountering him in his role as moderator of a fledgling literary magazine and of the yearbook, for which I was the editor in my senior year. Tom became good friends with my English teacher for all four years, Father Claude Bicheler. In my senior year, I began attending plays and concerts with both, and through their influence, decided to become an English major in college.

Tom helped me to come up with a theme for the 1967 yearbook. It was “Men of our Times”, and featured short prose and photo essays about William Faulkner, Dag Hammarskjold, Pope John XXIII, and John F. Kennedy. Both Tom and Father Claude gave me a lot of time and encouragement back then and helped me through my many doubts and fears.

I encountered Tom in a different context in my senior year at Fordham University in New York City. There he was in graduate school at NYU, and I remember many rich visits with him then, discussing our favorite writers, and attending a number of plays together.

After college I experienced a severe depression. I had returned to Buffalo to take care of my draft status and was very grateful to get a 4F deferment owing to my compromised vision. I started a full-time job at the Buffalo Evening News, still living at home on the working-class East Side of town.

Life was going well enough, and I even had a new girlfriend, a young woman who I’d met attending a Buffalo Philharmonic concert one sunny October Sunday afternoon. The relationship started with a lot of promise, but soon devolved into heartache after we got pregnant, and she had an abortion. We ended up breaking up. I was torn by grief and guilt.

Tom was back in Buffalo at the time, and I was able to confide in him. He was very sympathetic and helped me to find a good group therapist. It was my first exposure to therapy, and I credit it with saving me at a time when I felt sucked down into a terrible black hole of hopelessness.

Tom and I remained friends through the two years of my recovery work in therapy. We lost touch when I left Buffalo in the late 1970’s, but occasionally reached out by phone and pen.

I remember Tom as a kind, caring person with a wicked sense of humor and fine tastes in books, music and theater. He went out of his way to help me during a number of challenging times in my life, for which I am eternally grateful. It’s been wonderful reading the soulful postings about Tom from other former students on Facebook and the Legacy site. I can picture him smiling down as those who knew and loved him share their written appreciations of him now.

John Bayerl