December 11, 2009
To Tim’s family and friends,
I have been waiting and thinking, as I read the wonder tributes to our Tim, about what I could add. I met Tim’s on some picket line or at some meeting probably in the early 1980s, and then got to know him when he became my “student” in the Labor Studies Program at UMass Boston, when the College of Public and Community Service was still downtown, and still working as a free space for activists to connect and learn from one another. It always made me smile, and still does, to refer to Tim as my “student.” We were about the same age and he had a much broader and richer set of political experiences and intellectual interests than I did. I think of the relationship we had (we also taught together) as an ideal of what folks call popular education: the students teach the teachers. I learned a great deal from Tim about how to think outside some of the intellectual and political categories I worked him. He was a man of unfailing good cheer even when everything around us spelled doom and gloom for the “left” and “labor.”
I guess this was based on his intellectual confidence and his understanding of the wellsprings of popular power. He was the most cosmopolitan Teamster I ever met and I will miss him very much.
Tim’s so-called teacher,
Jim Green