Windsor
“I’m sorry, sir,” he informed the skier. “You can’t cut in line.”
“Do you know who I am?” the man replied a bit incredulously. “I’m Charles Bronson.”
“You’re still going to have to get to the end of the line,” Rhoad responded.
It’s a pretty good bet that even before their brief talk, Rhoad knew he was dealing with the famed Hollywood tough guy who had bought a horse farm in West Windsor in the early ’70s. Still, it didn’t matter.
“He was an easy-going guy, but there was no set of double standards with Tom,” said Shelley Seward, who worked on the ski patrol with Rhoad. “He treated everyone the same. He had an incredible sense of fairness.”
No place was that more evident than at Windsor High School, where Rhoad taught history and psychology for 34 years before his retirement in 2004.
In the ’70s and ’80s, a high school diploma was still a ticket to a decent-paying factory job at Cone-Blanchard and Goodyear in Windsor. Rhoad recognized that college wasn’t a priority for many of his students, but he didn’t think less of them for it.
“He treated all of his students equally,” said his son, Bob, a 1985 Windsor High graduate. “If you didn’t try in class, he’d be disappointed, but if you tried, he’d work with you.”
Rhoad, 75, died Oct. 6, 2016, from complications of Parkinson’s disease, including pneumonia, but not before leaving an indelible mark on his hometown.
Growing up in Windsor during the 1950s, Rhoad was something of a golden boy. A three-sport athlete who stood 6-foot-4, Rhoad, the son of a physician, was a talented enough student to earn his way into Dartmouth College, where he was elected student government president as a senior.
With the war in Vietnam heating up, Rhoad entered the U.S. Navy Officer Candidate School in Newport, R.I. Later, he taught at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.
“He gave up teaching at Annapolis to come back to Windsor to teach high school,” said Andy Lory, a close friend and Windsor High teaching colleague.
Windsor was also home for Anne Pascarelli. Rhoad and Pascarelli were high school sweethearts who eloped after he had graduated from Dartmouth. They were married for 52 years.
Rhoad quickly became a fixture at Windsor High, serving as adviser to the student council and rarely missing a sporting event. At halftime of basketball games, he’d pick up a custodian’s broom to sweep the court.
“He did whatever needed to be done,” said former Windsor High Athletic Director Bob Hingston. “No job was beneath his dignity.”
During teachers’ contract negotiations with the School Board, Rhoad was the faculty’s voice of reason. Lory, who was also involved in the bargaining, said Rhoad reminded his colleagues from time to time that Windsor was a working-class town.
“Let’s get what we can for ourselves,” Rhoad would say, “but let’s be fair.”
In the wintertime, Rhoad worked weekends on Mt. Ascutney’s ski patrol. It was far from lucrative, but as a perk his wife and children could ski for free. In summer months, Rhoad joined his his older brother, David, on West Windsor builder Red Eastman’s carpentry crew.
“I’m not sure he had many carpentry skills, but being a teacher in Windsor, he needed to work in the summer,” said his son, a corporate attorney in Washington, D.C.
Rich Cummings is thankful to this day that Rhoad chose carpentry as a second job. Cummings, whose father was general manager of the Goodyear plant, went to work for Eastman after college.
In the mid-’70s, Cummings was teamed up with the Rhoad brothers on a large building project in Walpole, N.H., when a scaffolding bracket broke loose.
Cummings, the only worker on the scaffolding at the time, fell 30 feet onto a concrete wall, landing on his chest. With Cummings unconscious and not breathing, the Rhoad brothers put the first aid skills they had learned as ski patrollers to good use until an ambulance arrived.
“I don’t remember a thing, but from what I was told it was pretty scary for everybody,” Cummings said.
Cummings, who will be the first to tell you that he’s not fond of speaking in public, made an exception at Rhoad’s memorial service at Old South Church in downtown Windsor.
Near the end of the service, Cummings rose from his pew to tell the large crowd that Rhoad had “saved my life. I wouldn’t be here today if not for Tom and his brother.”
Rhoad was also a “great mentor” to Cummings’ stepdaughter. Lucinda Walker, now the director of the Norwich Public Library, was among Rhoad’s students in the early 1980s.
Walker hoped to take a class in modern European history that Rhoad had taught in previous years. When only three students signed up, however, the administration decided to drop the class.
In stepped Rhoad.
“If it was something we really wanted to study, he was willing to teach us,” Walker said. “We didn’t have a classroom, so we moved around to wherever we could find an empty room.
“Without him, it never would have happened. He had an ability to make history come to life.”
Walker went on to major in history at Oberlin College in Ohio.
Rhoad retired from teaching at age 63 — several years earlier than he had intended — after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s around the time he turned 60. “He loved teaching, so to retire when he did was a difficult decision,” said his son. “But he felt that with the Parkinson’s, he wasn’t going to be able to teach any more in the way that he wanted to teach.”
Anne Rhoad, a teaching assistant in Windsor, retired, as well, so they’d have more time together. In retirement, Rhoad remained a huge presence in town, bopping around in the red convertible Fiat that he had restored. He stayed active in Old South Church, a historic landmark on Windsor’s main street, where he headed the finance committee for years.
“He devoted so much of his life to keeping this building in shape,” said the Rev. Amanda Lape-Freeburg at his service.
The Rhoads were regulars at Sunday morning church service. Even during ski season, Tom and Anne wouldn’t let their kids skip a Sunday. “I’d wear my ski clothes to Sunday school,” said Bob.
From his family’s pew near the back of the church, Tom Rhoad would sometimes have a little fun when the collection plate came his way, tossing in a candy mint.
At the memorial service, John Sinclair, a childhood friend, said Rhoad “was the most intelligent person we all knew, the best listener we all knew, and my wife would add, ‘he’s handsome, too.’ ”
Along with the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s, Rhoad suffered a spinal infection in 2014 that left him paralyzed from below the chest and kept him hospitalized for eight months. In 2015, another infection required the amputation of Rhoad’s right leg.
After his lengthy hospital stay, friends assumed that Rhoad would need to go into a nursing home. But Anne Rhoad wouldn’t have it.
“My mother was a saint,” said Bob Rhoad. “She was with him 24/7.”
His daughter, Suzanne Ambrose, who lives in Windsor, also insisted that he remain at home. “He didn’t want to burden us, but we wanted to do it, and it worked,” she said.
Rhoad always seemed up for visitors, relishing the opportunity to talk politics, town developments, and the Red Sox. “He’d watch all 162 games,” said his son.
“Tom never lost heart,” said Lape-Freeburg, who presided over his memorial service.
“Through sheer will, he continued,”said Lory, his teaching colleague. “He was the moral compass of the town for years.”
Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.
