Thomas Allan Dunn (1938-2005)
Ben Rapaport, December 30, 2025. Originally appeared in Pipes & tobaccos magazine: Spring, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2008.
Last December the pipe-smoking community was stunned to learn that Tom Dunn, who had been valiantly battling cancer for almost a year, died peacefully just after 5:00 p.m., on December 11, 2005, at Calvary Hospital Hospice, Bronx, New York. As soon as this news spread by telephone, pipe-specific Internet Web sites, Web logs, and chat rooms were immediately swelled with an overwhelming outpouring of condolences and expressions of sympathy from near and far. There was also one very moving collective reaction: as an expression of their affection, and to celebrate his life, the Board of Officers of the Chicagoland Pipe Collectors Club will dedicate the May 6-7, 2006 International Pipe & Tobacciana Show, at Pheasant Run Resort, St. Charles, Illinois, to Tom; and throughout this two-day rendezvous of pipers, several special events and activities in his name have already been programmed. This avalanche of near-instantaneous emotion is a convincingly visible testament to an individual who has earned the adulation and respect of everyone familiar with his name or his unique contribution to pipe lore.
Many, as young as he, die of this tragic disease, but Thomas Allan Dunn, or TAD, as he was also known, was no ordinary mortal. He was a larger-than-life luminary, a legend, and a loyal correspondent-friend to any and all who puffed a pipe. It was my privilege to have personally known him, and with the permission his brother, Frank Dunn, it is my distinct honor to write this brief tribute about Tom for the singular publication that serves our community, Pipes & Tobaccos.
So who was Tom Dunn? A few relevant biographical details are in order. Tom was the fourth of eight siblings—five girls and three boys—born to Alice and Lawrence Dunn. He attended St. Fidelis, a parochial school, in College Point, New York, then Flushing High School in Flushing, New York. He joined the U.S. Army Reserve in 1957, attended a course of instruction at the U.S. Amy Engineer School, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and achieved the rank of Specialist 5 (Sergeant), prior to his discharge in 1964. He graduated from Washington Square College of Arts and Sciences, New York University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1969. Following in his father’s footsteps, Tom began his career at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in Manhattan, became a Fellow of the Life Management Institute (1977), and rose through the corporate ranks to be MetLife’s Manager, Group Staff and Support Services, Group Human Resources. Rather than be transferred to a MetLife New Jersey office, in 1991 he took early retirement at age 54 to care for his mother and father during their final years of ill health. He continued to live in the College Point house where he and his siblings grew up until he died.
Tom was an introspective, cerebral, self-effacing, unpretentious, and somewhat shy individual who relished his privacy. He was slight of build, but very big of heart. Gene Umberger, whom Tom introduced to hiking the Adirondacks 30 years ago and who spent many summers there in an annual retreat with Tom and two other friends, Breck and Julie Turner of With Pipe and Book, Lake Placid, New York, reminisced that “he had a sense of humor, something not really evident in the pages of the Ephemeris.” Tom’s interests were many and varied: photography, including developing his own pictures during the early years; gardening; hunting, nature and the outdoors (hiking, back packing, mountain climbing, trail clearing and maintenance). He was an avid reader with many literary passions beyond pipes and tobacco: the Adirondacks, books about books, and more. He was the quintessential book lover.
It is hard to comprehend that although his name and fame are world-renowned, on a personal level, he was close to very few of his dedicated following. He avoided the limelight, shunned public appearances, and was a reluctant celebrity who declined honors and awards for his good works. Two examples suffice. In 1988, three years after the International Academy of the Pipe was founded in Paris, Tom was nominated and inducted as the first American “Membre Correspondant”; although appreciative of the recognition, he informed the Academy that he would never participate in its annual convocations. In 1998, the Chicagoland Pipe Collectors Club selected him as one of the first two recipients of its lifetime achievement award, the degree of “Doctor of Pipes”; Tom did not attend the ceremony. Hence, it is somewhat paradoxical that so many loyal followers never met him, yet to one and all, Tom Dunn has been a household name for close to a half century, and TUCOPS and TPSE, his product line!
I had introduced myself to him by letter in 1967, after having read something, somewhere about his particular interest in pipes. We maintained letter contact until 1971 when we met at Keen’s Chop House in New York City, his favorite restaurant, and we dined on mutton, his favorite dish at the time. We would meet again, often, in the intervening years between then and February 2005 when I made my last visit, and on each occasion, I strived to learn more about what made Tom tick, what drove him to invest his time, energy, and personal finances to found The Universal Coterie of Pipe Smokers (TUCOPS). Membership in TUCOPS was free, because Tom declared that financial contributions were welcomed, but “[t]here are no dues, no obligations, no meetings… .” TUCOPS was an apt name, because, in time, the Coterie did become ‘universal,’ as membership grew exponentially. You can’t take the following statistic to the bank, but I think Tom once told me that membership eventually peaked at around 3,000. As proof of membership, every subscriber received a lapel pin and a wallet-size membership card.
Tom needed a medium to communicate with the membership, so he decided to craft and distribute what he described as an irregular quarterly, a (then) offset-printed tabloid—no other word could have described the initial issues of The Pipe Smoker’s Ephemeris—to anyone who had even a remote interest in pipe smoking or tobacco lore. The content of TPSE, as The Ephemeris was informally called, expanded and evolved into an information clearinghouse, and a copy was mailed to Coterians living in every corner of the globe. Tom two-fingered the first issue of TPSE on a manual typewriter, one double-sided page dated December 19, 1964; with time, it grew into a hefty, slick, magazine-size publication of, as Tom recounted to me, “no more than 116 pages” that he fashioned using the same two fingers on his computer keyboard. And, he also found time to catalog member names by their collecting interests, publishing the results as Collectors Directory; the first edition was published in 1981, and the last (eighth) edition was released in June 2004.
TPSE grew in content, each issue always chock-full of pipe and tobacco views, opinions, and commentary from around the world, anecdotes, poetry, short stories, features, original artwork, excerpts from literature, club news, Sherlockiana, book sources and sales, auction results, the “mail bag,” and “Broken Pipes,” his own way to acknowledge members who passed on. He found space for anything and everything that was sent his way and that made mere mention of tobacco or a pipe, often closing the earliest issues with: “Yours for better smoking, Thomas Allan Dunn, Editor/ Publisher,” or “Yours for spreading the pipe word, Thomas Allan Dunn, Editor/ Publisher.” The final issue, Winter-Spring, 2005, was at the printer when Tom underwent surgery. It may be hard to fathom, but as soon as he was released from the hospital, his first priority was not to address his declining health, but to keep a promise to his loyal readership: get this new issue of TPSE in the mail. Moreover, he had begun assembling information for another issue and had contemplated the publication of TPSE, Book III, but neither of these can now materialize… at least not under his aegis.
I never really found out why Tom did what he did for so many years without interruption, and I guess, today, it doesn’t matter. His brother Frank said that Tom loved words and puns; the genesis for TPSE may have been his penchant for lexeme and pipes. It may have also been something more rudimentary, something obvious to a 26-year old piper in 1964: by that time, three magazines that echoed his interest, Pipe Lovers, The American Smoker, and Pipe Smokers Review, had come and gone with no new consumer publication filling the void in the intervening years. So he started his own, and it was in his DNA to keep TPSE going, regardless of how many other publications came along to rival his own. In a word, TPSE was his mantra, and as of now, it is the longest-running publication of its kind on record. Fact is, only one other person in the last century worked as hard as Tom. George Cushman of Pipe Lovers ran it pretty much by himself with minor assistance from a few family members, but only for slightly more than four years (January 1946–April 1950).
What matters most is that what Tom did, he did with passion and love, capturing every odd, esoteric and arcane written or visual tidbit and ort that pertained to the pipe and pipe smoking. When Tom was not readying an issue for publication, he managed to stay busy and connected. Umberger claims that he “was indefatigable in keeping up his correspondence, even if it was only by postcard… He always thanked you for whatever you had sent him… It was a challenge to read Tom’s writing! Now and again I would receive a typed letter or postcard (oh joy, oh joy!). But even after he entered the world of computers (to the benefit of TPSE), he still preferred the personal, handwritten touch.” As the evidence indicates, TPSE was more than an avocation; it was a full-time vocation that paralleled his career at MetLife and thereafter.
And because so few know how each issue of TPSE materialized, I feel obliged to detail the process as I witnessed it in February 2005 in order that everyone understand and better appreciate his commitment and dedication to all of us. His modus operandi was, if you please, akin to that of running a ‘Mom and Pop’ grocery store… without the Mom. He assembled material in assorted piles, topically, until there was a sufficient amount of significantly useful information for an issue; he collated, scanned, typed, edited (where necessary), reproduced, laid out, and proofed a camera-ready copy that he sent to the printer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and when it was ready, he traveled the 380-mile round-trip to retrieve it; he hand-wrote the address labels, added a personal note to some—not all—copies of the issue, and stuffed and sealed the envelopes; he sorted them by zip code, and bundled them in accordance with the US Postal Service Guide for bulk mailers—as many as 300 bags or more; and, finally, he trucked all the bags to the local bulk mail facility where the bags were weighed and paid for out of his USPS account. According to him, the cycle from receipt of TPSE to delivery to the Post Office consumed at least one week’s time. That, readers, was Tom Dunn, a modern man of modest means who was really an old-fashioned, free-spirited, but very focused hands-on, do-it-your-self guy.
I doubt that his good works can be replicated today, and maybe they shouldn’t be. After all, he was TUCOPS and TPSE—this is his legacy—and this is the way he should be remembered. His final wish was that all he had accumulated—an extensive tobacco library, mountains of briars and tinned tobaccos, artwork, cartoons, many years’ worth of holiday cards illustrating Santa smoking a pipe, and more than 20 four-drawer metal file cabinets of reference material and correspondence—was to be donated to any organization or institution that promised to retain the material and make it accessible for research. That wish is true-to-form for Tom, unselfish, generous to a fault, the consummate philanthropist.
Tom always disavowed icon status, but he was, nonetheless, revered, and tho’ now lost to us, his name will be ever etched in our memory, and his singular contribution to the pipe world will not easily dim or fade. Reflecting on his life as I was writing this tribute, something brought a slight smile. Tom was in insurance, and a few insurance company slogans and mottoes came to mind that bespoke his life. One of MetLife’s own is “Have you met life today?” Tom certainly did! Two others were just as spot on: “Enriching the lives of people we touch” (Guardian Life Insurance Company of America): Tom enriched every life he touched. And “Like a good neighbor…” (State Farm Insurance Company): Tom may have not been your next-door neighbor, but he treated all Coterians like neighbors!
In closing, I’ll take issue with the oft-quoted introduction of Marcus Antonius’ funeral oration to (Shakespeare’s) Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” It is unlikely that Tom Dunn’s “good”— his name, his reputation, and a permanent historical archive known as TPSE that began in 1964 and continued unabated for 41 years—will ever be buried so long as Man smokes a pipe!
One of Tom’s last requests was that those who desired to honor him should send a donation in his memory to the Calvary Fund, Calvary Hospital, Attn: Beth Kougasian, 1740 Eastchester Road, Bronx, New York, 10461.
December 30, 2005