Thomas retires after 50 years of teaching

Dr. Marvin Thomas will retire this week after 50 years of teaching history at Pitt-Bradford.

Dr. Donald Swarts, founding president of Pitt-Bradford, hired Thomas sight unseen in 1969 through a mutual friend, Marlena Reich. Reich was teaching German at Pitt-Bradford at the time and had taught at the Foreign Language Institute in Munich alongside Thomas.

Reich served as an interviewer through transatlantic correspondence with Swarts. Thomas was living and teaching at the Foreign Language Institute at the time, where he had met and married his wife.

“There were only 11 of us on the staff when I got here,” Thomas said. Staff meetings at the 6-year-old college were small enough to be held in the former Hamsher House. Classes were held at the former Emery Hardware building on Main Street (today it is home to the Main Street Mercantile), which was one of the nascent university's three buildings.

“About two years after I started, Dr. Swarts came in and announced, 'Well, it's final. We're going to stay,'” Thomas said. “I never knew there was any doubt!”

From 1974 to 1979, Thomas undertook an arduous schedule of driving to Penn State several times a week while working on his doctoral degree, which he earned in 1980.

His thesis, “Karl Theodor and the Bavarian Succession, 1777-1778,” was published by Edwin Mellen Press in 1989.

He spent 17 years researching and writing its successor, “The Saxon Aspect of the Bavarian Allodial Succession 1777-1779: The History of a Legal Dispute.” Mellen Press published it in 2016.

During his 50 years at Pitt-Bradford, Thomas taught European history as well as ancient history and some Asian history.

His favorite class to teach, he said, is Medieval European History. “It shows what happens when civilization breaks up.”

Similarly, he has perfected two favorite lectures over the years - the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

In an age of Smart Boards and PowerPoint, he teaches while seated, using his storytelling gifts and a hooked wooden stick to unfurl maps bolted to the wall.

Full of dry wit and anecdotal asides, Thomas's style has entertained and enlightened a devoted cadre of students. Scott Bell '94 was a history minor who took many Thomas classes. He said that he uses what  he learned from every single day in his job as a sales trainer.

“He taught me how to think strategically,” Bell said. “He didn't teach history by spilling facts on us and expecting us to regurgitate them on paper. He discussed the atmosphere, the effects of laws and actions of government on the people at the time.”

All of that, Bell said, taught him to ask why things happen, even in business. “It's that curiosity and strategic approach that Dr. Thomas instilled in me and that has led me to the success I have had in my career.”

Nonstudents have had a chance to appreciate Thomas lectures as well during his popular annual spring multimedia lecture - a multi-hour affair with hundreds of photographs and period-appropriate music. He began giving the lectures several years after arriving in Bradford. Topics have covered campus history, the sinking of the Titanic, wars and royalty, among others.

At Thomas' retirement reception on Monday, Dr. Steven Hardin, vice president and dean of academic affairs, said, “You will find very few who've had 50 years at one institution. Can you imagine how many lives he has affected? Marvin has influenced the future.”