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Thomas Trebitsch Parker, an award-winning author who spent decades coaching local writers out of his downtown Palo Alto studio and his Menlo Park home, died on March 15. He was 82.
A winner of the O. Henry Award in 1969 for his short story, “Troop Withdrawal: The Initial Step,” Parker was a well-known literary figure in the Bay Area, renowned both for his books and for his influence on other writers.
His book about baseball legend Dave Winfield, “Winfield: A Player’s Life,” which he co-wrote with Winfield, earned a place on the New York Times bestseller list in 1988. He also collaborated on books about Sandra Kurtzig, the first woman to take a Silicon Valley technology company public, and Dr. Narinder Singh Kapany, who is considered the “father of fiber optics,” according to his wife, Kathy Parker.
Parker also wrote numerous business books as well as award-winning novels “Small Business” in 1986 and “Anna, Ann, Annie” in 1993. He taught writing at Stanford University, his alma mater, as well as Canada College, Foothill College and University of California at Berkeley. He also served for many years as a judge for the Palo Alto Weekly’s annual short story contest and hosted salons and writing workshops at his Ramona Street studio and at his home.
Born in Manhattan to refugees from Austria, Parker grew up on Cape Cod and attended the Dickensian Boston Farm and Trades School, where he worked as a night watchman, head of print shop and captain of the school’s tennis team, which according to Kathy Parker had no other players. He moved to California to attend Stanford University and worked his way through school through with various odd jobs, including selling madras shirts and setting up pinball machines at fraternity houses, Kathy Parker said.
Thomas Parker graduated from Stanford in 1965 and worked with Stanford’s writing professor Nancy Packer, who became his close friend and mentor. He then received a master’s degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University before joining his friend, Paul Crowley, to start a business called Media West, which created presentations for corporations. His novel “Small Business” touched on many of his experiences in the corporate world.
A born storyteller with a curious mind, Parker liked to balance his literary endeavors with work in the corporate world that allowed him to meet people and experience different types of work, according to Kathy Parker. The two met on a blind date in 1975, when they were both writing copy, and they were married for 50 years.
“He wasn’t a literary snob,” Kathy Parker said. “Though he did aspire to literary greatness, he wasn’t a snob because he liked doing the corporate stuff also.
“When you’re a novelist of a short-story writer, you’re by yourself a lot. He was definitely a people person. He just liked the various types of work that he did.”
His novels and short stories often reflected his experiences in other professions. In a 2012 interview with Ploughshares, a literary magazine, Parker reflected on the many jobs he held throughout this career, including working as a clothing salesman, a caterer, a country club chef, a baker, an editor-in-training for a small newspaper and a creative director for a Las Vegas production company. The job that he loved the most, he said, was teaching, both at Stanford and UC Berkeley.
“Over those years, I’ve worked with approximately 3,000 students in more than 200 workshops and enjoyed most every minute of it,” Parker said in the interview. “I’ve become a mentor because I get a genuine kick out of seeing writers grow and succeed.”
His passion for writing workshops was reciprocated by his many students. Some students would take his classes over and over again, Kathy Parker said.
“Then they would go outside the class and form their own workshops. It was just an amazing environment and ecosystem. It formed a lot of relationships. There were several marriages that came out of his classes,” she said.
