Life and Adventures of Tom the Bomb

By Tom Ryan

"This book is not a biography. I consider them to often times have too much dull material in them. Instead, this is a compilation of dozens and dozens of interesting, even spell binding events in my life, so much so, that readers tell me there isn't a dull paragraph in the 221 pages of my book!





In addition to being very readable, I actually believe that any thoughtful person who reads this and wants to, can easily learn how to become physically stronger, mentally more serene and courageous, and even adept at becoming more spiritually oriented."





So I say to you, "Read and enjoy!"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 31, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465321220

Tom Ryan

Tom Ryan served as publisher and editor of the Newburyport, Massachusetts, newspaper The Undertoad for more than a decade. In 2007 he sold the newspaper and moved to the White Mountains of New Hampshire with miniature schnauzer Atticus M. Finch. Over the last five years, Tom and Atticus have climbed more than 450 four-thousand-foot peaks.

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Life and Adventures

of

Tom the Bomb

53476-RYAN-layout.pdf

Tom Ryan

Copyright © 2008 by Tom Ryan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any

information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright

owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

53476

Contents

Acknowledgement

Things I Enjoy

Writing About

Things I Enjoy Writing About

Why Do I Write So Much?

What Is It Like To Be A Writer?

It Can Pay to Have

a Large Vocabulary!

What’s the Answer?

Many Reasons to be Grateful

Have you Ever?

What a Pleasant Surprise

I Don’t Understand

How Customs Do Change

Good News!

Stories Involving Tom

Have Any of These Things Happened to You? If So, You Are One Lucky Dog!

The Life, Loves,

and Works of Tom Ryan

Looking Back at a Major Event

in My Teenage Life

I Give a Large Audience

Their Money’s Worth

An Innocent Tale of Affection

Can Curiosity Get One in Trouble?

Tom Ryan, Fifty Years Ahead

of his Time!

This May Sound a Little Bit Looney

One’s Philosophy on Life

A Close Call in Florida!

A Multitude of Experiences

I Have Relished!

The Austere Monastery

Complaints from the Monks

After the Monastery

Some Spiritual Thoughts

Why Me Lord?

Holy Smokes! Eternity with God!

Good and Evil,

What Is the Difference?

I Am Who Am

Jesus and One Devout Woman

of Today

Can You Believe This?

The Nancy Fowler Farm

If You Have Faith,

You Won’t Be Disappointed

One Life to Live

Wow!

A Message for Whomever It Concerns!

All About Tom

and Deloris

A Treasure to Behold

Deloris and I Have Been So Lucky

A Moment of Fear for My Wife

For a Livelier Change of Pace

You Have to Catch Them First

Books and Stories

on Courage,

Success and Failure

Courage and Cowardice

Two Books for the Brave

and the Generous of Heart

One Man’s Police Work

Courage Has Many Faces

The Combat Zone

The Army Is Concerned

about Morals

Prisons I Have Visited

and Prisoners I Have Talked To

Defend or Die!

Christmas Time

A Murderous Weekend

in any Major US City

Miscellaneous

Stories of Interest

Interesting People.

What Makes Them That Way?

Interesting People…

and the Things They Ask

Examples of Terrific People

Just Plain Wonderful People

Would You Say She Was

a Good Samaritan?

Who Is This Norman?

Three Down and One to Go!

Some Strange Men Today

Some Men Today Are Just Strange

Some Differences Between Conservatives and Liberals

Europe Versus the U.S.A.

People Tell Me I Have Led

an Interesting Life

Fatima, Portugal

What’s That All About?

Unusual and Amusing Stories

Ever Do Any of These Things?

No Injuries Yet!

How to Scare the Hell Out

of Two Teen Bullies

Has Your Life Style

Ever Frightened Anyone?

If Outdoorsmen Knew

Just One Survival Secret

A Lovely Christmas Tale

Climbing Old Flat Top

Back to School

Some Advantages

of Selling for a Living

Hello, I’ve Heard of Trusting People but This Is Ridiculous

My Travels in Mexico

Adventure South of Our Border

Getting to Know Mexico

Getting Deeper into Mexico

Mexico City, Here We Come!

Exploring the City

My Biography

In Conclusion

Acknowledgement

Two terrific people, Connie Weng and Tim Riff deserve a huge amount of praise for their patience and the computer skills they used in down loading all of my writings onto a disk for the publication of this book.

They are two outstanding friends for whom I am extremely grateful.

missing image file

Connie Weng, photographer

missing image file

Tim Riff, my good college friend who downloaded the stories

Things I Enjoy

Writing About

Things I Enjoy Writing About

I’ll tell you a bit about myself. I enjoy seeing others being happy. I enjoy hearing about their successes in life. I don’t feel jealous of the good fortunes of other people. I just rejoice right along with them.

For years, friends have been asking me to write a book because they think I’ve led an interesting life and apparently I have. I’ve done a huge amount of bold and unusual things and many strange things and wonderful things have happened to me that don’t seem to happen very often in the lives of ordinary people, so I’ll tell you about some of them. Right now, I’ll tell you about a number of them and things I have learned from others and some of these you may never have heard about before.

By reading this book you’ll learn how to do the following:

1.   How to walk up to a deer in the wild and touch it!

2.   How to light a roaring fire in a rain storm using wet wood!

3.   How to increase your upper body strength without spending a single cent!

4.   How to increase how fast you can run!

5.   How to easily throw an opponent over your head with just the use of your right hand and arm!

6.   Using just your fists, how to win a street fight in seconds and never get hit yourself! I don’t recommend that you get in one, but sometimes it’s hard to avoid. Once I had the strongest guy in my high school class challenge me to go outside and fight him! I finally did and soundly whipped him in front of a crowd of teens without him throwing a single punch! How strange is that?

7.   How, much to their surprise, to knock a mugger or an unarmed gang leader out with just one blow to his jaw!

8.   How to take the first important step in increasing your annual income!

9.   How to easily begin overcoming any shyness you may have!

10.   How to strike up and enjoy a conversation with a total stranger!

11.   How to become a crack shot with a .22 caliber rifle, to the extent that you can consistently hit a target not much bigger than a postage stamp at 30 yards! And with a high powered rifle you can hit a larger target at 500 yards!

12.   What it’s like to live in an austere Trappist Monastery where little talking is allowed. I enjoyed my five years and eleven months in one!

13.   Again, on the spiritual side, I can give you information that makes it easy for me to stand in awe and adoration of my God and it may work for you, too.

How do I know about the thirteen things listed above? Because with the exception of touching the deer, I’ve done them all with very little difficulty and some of them I’ve done many times.

I have a feeling that you won’t find this book to be at all boring. I have a whole host of unusual things not mentioned yet to tell you about. I hope this book will prove to be one of and possibly the most interesting collection of memoirs and experiences that you’ve ever read.

If my life has been more interesting than that of most people, I owe it all to the Grace of God and the very brief influences when I was very young of two nuns, two priests, two uncles and my dear mother. None of them spent more than fifteen minutes talking to me. Three of them only said two sentences to me! Apparently, I was a quick learner and I listened with interest to what adults said to me. I believed them and I carried out exactly what they recommended. In other words, I was a very obedient kid and I owe that to the influence of those nuns.

We had no Catholic school in Pender, N.E. where I was born on August 23rd 1928. By the way, Pender is on the Winnebago Indian Reservation in northeastern Nebr. but I’m not an Indian. I’m 50% Irish, 25% Scottish, and 25% Jewish which is a story in itself and I’ll get into that later.

In order for us kids to learn a little more about the spiritual side of life, two delightful Dominican Nuns came for two weeks to Pender each year. My parents volunteered to have the nuns live with us for those two weeks. Sister Geraldine had the biggest effect on me. I was so young I couldn’t properly pronounce her name. I called her Sister Jelly Bean and she was amused by that.

She encouraged me to say little short prayers and one was to my guarding angel. I said them daily for many years and to some extent, I still say them today. The sentence of hers that had the biggest effect on me was this. She said, Tommy. All authority comes from God. So when your parents or teachers tell you to do something that’s totally lawful, what you are really doing when you obey them is you are carrying out the Will of God! And I understood what she meant and it made obeying a very easy thing for me to do for all of my life. I can remember thinking to myself, Holy Smokes, who am I to disobey the Will of God?

Other adults that I’ve told this to have surprised me by saying, Those words of that nun wouldn’t have had any effect on me, because my attitude for many years was totally different from yours. Everything had to be My Way. I would have thought, Who are you to tell me what to do? This is my life and I’ll live it the way I want to." And these same people made big mistakes by running with the wrong crowd when they were in their teens and making terrible choices in whom they married.

By the Grace of God, I never thought that way and I think I owe it all to that cheerful, pious nun who encouraged me to be obedient and prayerful. Partly because I have little fear of anything, I’ve done a lot of wild and dangerous things but I usually said a tiny prayer before doing them. I’d say. I know Lord this is a crazy thing to do, but you know I’m a curious person and I love to try new things so I’m asking please keep me from getting hurt or getting into trouble! And apparently He has because I never got injured or got into trouble doing those wild things and I’ve never been seriously injured in my entire life. It goes without saying that I’m a very grateful person.

I’ve taken a lot of chances and have gone to a lot of places and done things that the average cautious person wouldn’t think of doing. To give some examples, I’ve thought nothing of being the Detonator Man on a dynamite crew in a rock quarry near the monastery, or after I left the monastery of walking alone into a crime ridden part of Chicago at night just to experience the place. Three times, there some one tried to mug me, but they didn’t succeed. If I would hear of a rough bar in Chicago called The Bucket of Blood, I had to go there that same day just to see how rough was it and I’ve never been injured doing those sorts of things, but I’ve had a lot fun doing so and then telling my friends about it. It’s because of all these things and some things I haven’t mentioned yet that my friends call me The luckiest person they know!

My mom was the next big influence in my life. She was a physically strong, attractive, bright courageous woman, who before she married my dad a lawyer, she enjoyed dating a professional boxer named Toughie Griffith. In the movie The Cinderella Man, Toughie is one of the boxers mentioned. He fought in Madison Square Garden against Gentleman Jim Braddock, the World’s Heavy Weight Champion

Mom’s younger sister Grace married Pete Loch who became before WW1 The Light Heavy Weight Champion of the World and made a large amount of money in doing so. I’m thinking it was her love of boxing that made my mom value courage as much as she did. One summer day when I was only nine years of age my mom said something important to me that probably not one woman in a million in this country has ever said to her son and it was this. She said, Tommy, I don’t ever want to see you run from a gang the way your cousin Richard does. If you do, I’ll beat you when you get inside!

I was a little surprised to hear her say this and I thought How in the world am I supposed to stand up to four or five guys? but I was a very obedient kid and I didn’t argue with her. She must have told Uncle Pete to teach me how to defend myself because a few days later, he did just that and it took him only about fifteen minutes to do it.

We were visiting him in his home in Omaha, N.E. about 90 miles south of Pender. I was standing in his living room looking intently at a large photo on the wall of a huge tiger just ready to spring forward. Uncle Pete was seated a few feet away. He looked at me and said, Tommy, would you like to be stronger than you are? I replied, Yes He said, "Then just do isometric exercises like this. They’ll increase your upper body strength. Do twelve repetitions a day of each one. He demonstrated one where you clinch your fists, extend your arms away from you, tighten up the muscles and slowly draw your hands in toward you. I found those so easy to do that I’d perform them in the morning as I got dressed and in the evening as I got ready for bed. Within three months, I was the strongest kid in my class.

In addition to the exercises, morning and evenings just for practice, I would throw five or six of the straight from the shoulder Karate type punches Uncle Pete told me to use if I ever found myself in a fight for my life on one of our dangerous streets where unarmed teen gangs abounded and they did in Pender and later in South Sioux City, Nebr. where I lived until I was nineteen years of age.

Uncle Pete made it so easy for me to win those fights. In most of them, I never got hit even once! In two of the other fights, the three punches I took were weak, ineffective ones. In one of them, I actually laughed and said, Hey kid, if I couldn’t hit any harder than that, I’d quit and that’s what you ought to do.

Isometric exercises can strengthen all the muscles of your upper body and that can improve your posture and even help you avoid getting back pains as you age. You can strengthen your leg muscles as well and you can probably enable yourself to increase the speed at which you run. Just by timing yourself and practice running the 50 yard dash, you’ll find your time improving after a month or more. I think any form of strength is a marvelous thing to know because it increases your self confidence so much and enables you to more easily succeed at what ever you do in life.

Another thing you can learn from my book is how to take a big step in increasing how big your annual income will be. Just increase your reading and speaking vocabulary. It’s that simple. Tests have shown that the larger a person’s knowledge of words is, as a rule, the larger is that person’s income. That knowledge also increases your self confidence and that’s another plus.

Shyness is not a help in making a living. The easiest way, I found to lose your shyness when talking to a new person is to make friendly eye contact with that person and just ask them a gentle question that isn’t answered with a yes or no. This shows an interest in the other person and people like that.

You can also strike up a conversation with a total stranger in the same way. Just think of something interesting to ask them. You will also tend to learn a lot in this manner and sometimes cultivate a new friendship.

The next item I mentioned is how to become a crack shot with a rifle or a handgun. The biggest problem people have in trying to hit the bulls eye on a paper target is how to hold your firearm perfectly still. It’s virtually impossible. The easiest way I found to consistently hit that bulls eye is to hold your fire arm two inches or so directly below the target. Now hold your breath as you slowly raise your weapon. As the sights center on the bulls eye gently pull the trigger. With practice, you will hit your target every time and a hair trigger makes it even easier.

I said I would describe life in an austere monastery and what can make it a joyful experience. Much of it depends on one’s attitude and what led a person to leave the world and enter this place of prayer and greater serenity. I was aware of how much bad news is put out each day by the media. In addition, so many people emphasize the negative aspects of their life instead of the positive. They feel that if they tell you the positive things about their life, they will be accused of bragging, but if they only tell you, in a cheerful way of what is going wrong, then they are just being honest and you may even sympathize with them and maybe like them all the more.

I’ve never had that attitude nor have I talked that way because of the spiritual way I view our life on this earth. In the monastery, you are completely cut off from all news good or bad. Trappist Monasteries when I entered them had no newspapers, magazines, radios, televisions or telephones except in the Abbot’s office and that of the business manager.

This is austere but it’s not such a bad thing. Most people entering a monastery do so to get away from all the noise, fast traffic and various annoyances the world offers today. Life is peaceful and calm in a monastery and so are the people living there. Most, if not all of them seem to exude a joy seldom seen in the world. It shows on their face and in their smile.

Prayer and love of God account for that joy but the life itself lends itself to a happy, contented life. One has no annoying obligations, no bills to pay, no big decisions to make, no reason to argue with someone. You hear no loud noises, rarely if ever does anyone annoy you. In many ways, the place is a form of Utopia and it’s out in the country where you are surrounded by the beauties and the peacefulness of nature.

As good as it is, the life can get difficult if the monks don’t get enough sleep, are overworked, have a vegetarian diet lacking in protein, and six weeks of each year endure fasting on very little food and all those things were present when I was there. The place was crowded with 125 monks for several years but few stayed for a lifetime. After a few months or a few years, most of them left and the Abbots of the thirteen