After graduation, Tom Flynn ’69 was a young man with a passion for storytelling. Thirty-two years later, as a seasoned journalist, he watched the skyline-defining twin towers tumble to the New York City streets in tatters.
This emotionally grueling experience Tom endured on Sept. 11, 2001 has birthed a gritty and brutal, yet ultimately inspirational, epic poem called Bikeman.
The book was released by Andrews McMeel Publishing in September 2008. In the poem’s opening lines, Tom hops on his bike, following his reporter’s instincts and the sound of a screaming plane into lower Manhattan.
Tom, then a CBS News television writer and producer, became an impromptu correspondent that day and kept detailed reporting notes—notes he would look to when he began writing Bikeman several years later.
“I started re-reading Dante’s Inferno about the same time I was looking over my notes from the day I got through 9/11,” he recalled. “As it turned out, those two—Dante’s Inferno and my notes—ended up being travel logs to hell.
“My notes and this narrative form of poetry kind of worked together, and that’s how it ended up in the format it did,” Tom added.
Ann Flynn ’93 is proud of the 70-page poem her brother wrote and sees his unique personality reflected in it.
“In the poem, Tom says ‘curiosity is my muse,’” she said. “And I can remember him always being like that.
“If we were out to dinner at a restaurant, he would eat the meal and then ask our mother if he could go look around,” Ann continued. “He’d be in the kitchen talking to the chef or behind the bar talking to the bartender. He was always out there, always curious about people’s lives.”
Curiosity, in the case of 9/11, gave Tom memories he didn’t talk much about—even when he was writing Bikeman.
But he did show the poem to other people, like his daughter, Katie. For Katie, who was a senior at Princeton University in 2001, reading Bikeman was illuminating.
“It allowed me to see another side of him, a deeper, perhaps even more truthful side,” she said. “I think his decision [to write] was borne of the fact that this tragedy was a tragedy felt by many, and was perhaps so great a tragedy that he was physically unable to keep it inside. It needed an escape, a manifestation for him to work through it,” Katie said.
In a heart-pummeling and piercing section of Bikeman, Tom describes the people he saw die. They’re people whose memories will always be with him—not just because he bore witness to the ends of their lives.
Bikeman reads:
The fallen tower carries flame-consumed human remains.
They are the ashes of ashes to ashes.
Dust of the good, dust of the evil.
I breathe from a sea of the death air.
Who of them is within me,
baked in my lungs, seared in my mouth,
dredged in my ears and in my eyes?
Those who this morning were breathing,
hearing and seeing now rest in me.
I will carry them forever.
In composing Bikeman, Tom hopes he wrote a poem that speaks to something greater than what he himself endured.
“September 11 was an experience everybody had. It was going on live on TV,” said Tom, who retired in 2004 from CBS News after 30 years, where he spent several years writing for news anchor Dan Rather. “As such, I feel this is everybody’s poem. This is everybody’s story.”
Reflecting on chapters of his own story, Tom, an Albany, N.Y. native and English student during his tenure at Union, said he remembers his former professors fondly.
“There were some wonderful teachers, some of the English teachers were great,” he recalled. “They taught me things that I still have, that I still remember.”
Tom’s father, James Henry Flynn, Class of 1931, worked as commissioner of health in Troy, N.Y.
Looking toward the future, Tom plans to continue doing freelance work for the likes of CBS News, while splitting his time between homes in New York City and Cape Cod. He also wants to continue telling stories.
“I’m writing, but it’s not poetry,” he said with a laugh. “I wrote my wife a poem when we got married 35 years ago, and then I didn’t write another until this one.”
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