Tom Lathrop: A Life Well Lived

“The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.”

—Cicero

These words from Cicero’s Philippics aptly describe the life and legacy of Tom Lathrop, who passed away on Monday, 17 February 2014 at the age of seventy-two while on vacation with his family in Anaheim, California. Tom was a man for whom the words carpe diem reflected a philosophy of life. It would not be hyperbole in the least to call Tom a Renaissance man, who will be remembered for being a loving husband, a doting father, a scholar, an athlete, a musician, a world traveler, and a sports aficionado. Academics around the world are appreciative of his many contributions; yet, Tom will be remembered for so much more than his academic achievements and scholarship. His gregarious personality, generosity, wit, and intellectual curiosity made a lasting impression on the many people in his life. I am very grateful to have this opportunity to remember him and his extraordinary life, but I write this essay as only one of many, many voices with fond and lasting memories of Tom, whose life made a difference.

Tom was born and raised in Los Angeles. The best source of information on his life is, without a doubt, his “swashbuckling”(Tom’s own word) web page.¹ Here you will see photos of the house he grew up in; Tom at age 9; Tom performing as a gymnast; Tom as a vaudevillian; Tom as a member of the musical trio, the Tri-Tones, which included his wife Connie (unfortunately, the Tri-Tones never performed, because Tom and Connie decided to take advantage of an opportunity to live in Spain); and, among others, photos of Tom and Connie’s daughter Aline, who, in 1999 married Ben Glick, a cellular biologist at the University of Chicago. Tom describes Ben’s work as “inconsequential nonsense such as the essence of life and the nature of disease, but he seems to know very little about major movements in Latin American poetry and the exceptions to the verb être.” Each of the photos on the website illustrates a different period of Tom’s “swashbuckling” life and a brief narration explains in further detail these important moments.

Following Tom’s graduation from John Marshall High School (Los Angeles), where, according to his e-mail signature, he was “in the top fifty-one percent of his graduating class,” Tom studied at Pepperdine University for one year, on a sports writing scholarship, before he transferred to UCLA. He completed a double major in Spanish and French and participated in UCLA’s first study abroad program, which was in Bordeaux. While there, Tom was a member of the city chorus and sang in Bordeaux’s opera house and cathedral. He returned to UCLA as a PhD student in Romance Languages and Literatures, working as a teaching assistant in Brazilian Portuguese. He met Connie, a French graduate student at UCLA, and they married in 1969. When Tom and Connie returned to the United States after their eighteen months in Spain and Portugal, Tom accepted a teaching position at Transylvania University (Lexington, Kentucky), where he taught for three years. Their daughter Aline was born in Lexington. They then moved from Lexington to Easton, Pennsylvania, where Tom taught for four years before beginning his twenty-six year tenure at the University of Delaware in 1980.

As a teaching assistant at UCLA, Tom dedicated his summers to working in different printing shops, hoping to enter into the publishing business one day. His dream became a reality when he founded LinguaText, Ltd. in 1974. Its first foreign language textbook publication was Tom and Eduardo Dias’s Portugal: Lingua e Cultura. Since then, LinguaText, Ltd. has published textbooks and other pedagogical tools for students of Spanish, French, and Dutch. Tom is probably best known among Hispanists, however, for Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, which he founded in 1978. His love for Hispanic studies and the profession to which he...