The chronicles of a Gem City showman: Tom Burnett’s tales of life in Speedway, love of Spam and ‘this sh*t disease’

PRELUDE

QUINCY — On the morning of a blisteringly windy day in November, Tom Burnett slowly lowered himself into the passenger seat of my car. Tinkering with the temperature and radio dials, I asked if he had any requests.

“Yeah,” Burnett said without hesitation. “‘What I Like About You.’ The Romantics.”

He bobbed his head as the familiar riff of the 1980 hit spilled out from the speakers — much too softly for his liking.

“Crank it,” Burnett said with a furrowed brow.

HEY! 

Uh, huh!

“Louder!” he insisted. 

We pulled into the parking lot of Quincy Senior High School just as the harmonica solo started, shuffled through the stage doors and made our way backstage. Splattered paint, plastic pine needles and boxes of late 19th-century paraphernalia littered the floor as the fine arts department made their transition from “Hello, Dolly!” to Vespers, the annual holiday concert performed by the department’s orchestra and various choirs. 

It was a familiar scene for Burnett, who watched the stage transform countless times as the department’s executive theatre director from the early 1970s until the early 2000s. He started his career at a place that was equally as new to the community as he was; QHS’s current location at 3322 Maine opened in 1973 — Burnett’s first year in town. 

His craft evolved in tandem with the department. 

“The first year, there were no seats, no lights, no nothing,” Burnett recalled in an interview.

Instead, it was a blank canvas of an empty room and a handful of young and creative educators ready to make their mark. However, this story does not begin in that empty room. 

It begins in Speedway, Ind. — “where burnt rubber and death linger heavily in the air,” he said.

ACT I

Speedway is home to Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the oldest operating racetrack in the United States, and its iconic annual Indianapolis 500 race, which Burnett has attended nearly every year since he was 12. 

Burnett’s childhood was as mid-century, Midwest American boy as it gets. He fished and swam, dug forts, shot things with guns, stood on a stool to watch his mother cook and helped his father tend to their backyard garden. His father was known for his tomatoes, which grew so wildly they reached the roof and needed two-by-fours for support.

At some point in the early 1960s, while sitting with his classmates on folding chairs in the Speedway High School gymnasium (home of the Sparkplugs), he witnessed his first theatrical performance — “Teahouse of the August Moon,” a comedy about the occupation of Okinawa after World War II. The set’s flowers, lights and rice paper panels enamored him at first glance.

“They opened the curtain on the ‘Teahouse’ set, and there it was. I thought (it was) the coolest thing I ever saw,” Burnett said. 

He was a daydreamer. That wasn’t the most ideal asset for inside the classroom, but it was his biggest asset in the theater world.  

“You have to be a daydreamer to do plays,” he said. “You have to picture them in your mind … Imagine what everything looks like, and what the people look like, what they sound like, what they do — and then you have to try to bring that to life.”

Donald Johnson, a man known for his sense of humor and knowledge of his craft, was Burnett’s high school theater instructor. Johnson inspired him to pursue a career in education, and Burnett attended Indiana State for a year before transferring to and eventually graduating from Indiana University. 

The university’s job placement bureau scored him an interview in a town called Quincy in the faraway land of Illinois, where Burnett had been once before. After getting grilled on “ridiculous questions” regarding his use of the Gratowski method and previous fencing training, he was sure it would be the last trip to Illinois for a while.

“But the next day, they called and offered me the job,” Burnett said. “I said, ‘OK, I’ll take it!’”

ACT II

The fine arts program was a product of the free school movement of the 1960s, a campaign to diversify educational opportunities and pathways for students in public schools. QHS was listed in a 1974 directory of public alternative schools as having seven optional educational paths available to students as part of an “education by choice” initiative: traditional, flexible, individualized, career, work-study, special education and, of course, fine arts. 

“It was very exciting because it was a brand new school. It wasn’t even finished that first year we were in there,” Burnett said. “They had hired some young guys to come in and teach, and we had a lot of fun.”

He joined forces with theater director and English teacher Bill Euwer, choir director Dan Sherman and orchestra director Wayne Pyle for his first of many successful show seasons, starting with the Rogers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific” in 1973. With the addition of Herb Schwomeyer, the kind of guy who’s impossible to classify by just one title, the group was rolling and they “just kept going,” Burnett said. 

(Other department icons like Kathi Dooley joined the team later.) 

1978 was not as kind to him as the previous years had been. His car was T-boned and totaled as he was driving home after receiving the news that he’d been laid off due to budget cuts. He was condemned to a year of restaurant life as the first manager of Pinocchio, a restaurant opened by another teacher who’d been laid off. The regular 15-hour shifts weren’t his jam.

“It was a b****,” he confessed. “I decided I was going to quit because I was about ready to lose my mind.”

After nearly pursuing a job in Dubuque, Iowa — a town with a welcome sign that simply said “Dubuque: A Place to Live” — he got his job back at QHS. It was smooth(er) sailing from there.

Out of more than 100 productions throughout his career, “The Nerd” was Burnett’s favorite comedy. It’s a story about all the crazy things a trio of friends does to get an awkward, inappropriate and unexpected houseguest to leave, including but not limited to a cottage cheese dinner and a Pagan ritual.

“Sometimes you get groups that you really enjoy being around,” Burnett said with a chuckle as he recalled cast members chucking cottage cheese across the stage at one another. “I remember looking forward to rehearsal every day because you knew it was going to be a riot.”

One of those cast members was Rob Conover, a 1989 graduate. After Burnett gave him his first lead role during his sophomore year of high school, Conover played the lead in every single production he starred in at QHS. 

“I have said it before, and I will say it again and again and again — I give all credit to Tom Burnett,” Conover said. “He gave me a passion for live theater. He encouraged me to just go for it, and I made a decent living.”

Conover is one of several former students who have gone on to successfully pursue careers in theater after high school. He initially wanted to pursue acting after graduation, but the comprehensive skillset he gained in Burnett’s classroom allowed him to fulfill a variety of roles in show business. He has held positions at places like Ballet Chicago, “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and various on- and off-Broadway productions.

“He probably gave more people — honest to God — careers in what he was teaching than any basketball coach ever turned (their students into) star players,” Conover estimated. “I feel I was absolutely incredibly lucky to have met him and to have had him as a teacher … I will always be forever grateful to him for just being him.”

Another standout production was “Grapes of Wrath,” a drama chronicling one family’s journey westward during the Great Depression. It was an ambitious endeavor. The mature characters were difficult for most students to take on, and the scenery of the Dust Bowl and railroad cars were challenging on a technical level. However, it proved successful in the face of a teary-eyed gentleman in the audience who told Burnett it was the best thing he’d ever seen.

“My objective was always to teach (the students) as much as I could, but (I) wanted to teach the audience too,” Burnett said. “Make them feel, cry, laugh.”

Students and bystanders did all the above when the annual Iron Belly competition rolled around. 

It was a years-long theater department tradition spawned by a scene from the comedy “George Washington Slept Here” in which a character was asked to fetch a pack of hot dogs from the store — but seeing none, the character returned with pickled pig’s feet. What began as a year-end picnic soon evolved into a fierce competition to see who could consume the most outrageous and unappetizing food items, including those brought in by students’ post-world travels that may or may not pass through customs today. 

“It was hilarious,” Burnett said. “We don’t want to go into too much detail on that. I’ll get arrested.” 

Conover echoed the sentiment.

The supreme level of reverence for Spam in the fine arts department, thanks to Monty Python and former student Jeremy Beck, hasn’t been forgotten.

What started out as a catchy jingle evolved into annual Spam breakfasts on the last day of school, where calls were made to Hormel to personally thank them for their “so processed and meaty” product. (Spam is actually an acronym for “Shoulder of Pork and Ham.”) In return, the company sent hundreds of dollars’ worth of Spam merchandise, ranging from slippers to light switch covers — many of which are still on display at the Burnett home today.

“But then, after many years and 100 or so plays, I was going to leave,” he said. “I was lucky to find somebody to take over — Meghan Buckley. She’s done a great job.”

Like Burnett, Buckley, a 2002 QHS graduate, also was inspired by her former theater instructor to pursue a career in education. When trying to decide in college which path in theater she wanted to pursue, she was asked why she decided to study theater in the first place.

“That all tracked back to the foundation that (Burnett) laid in high school,” she said. “They said, ‘Wouldn’t you want to be that for somebody else?’ I think it was because I wasn’t sure I could be that for somebody else. When you have such an awesome experience, how do you fill shoes that big?” 

Burnett fostered a kind of environment rarely found in high school buildings. He led by example, Buckley said, and “was unapologetically every character he would come up with,” giving students the confidence to step out of their comfort zone in pursuit of whatever silliness or vulnerability their character called for. Establishing the same culture in her classroom was a priority for Buckley.

Buckley officially took Burnett’s place as director in the fall of 2005, though he stayed for several years to assist.

“He really, for lack of a better term, held my hand through the first few years, and I’m so thankful he did,” Buckley said. “Had it been thrown all in my lap at once, I don’t know if I would have been able to handle it all and handle it all gracefully.”

Buckley said he’s one of two people whose feedback matters most to her. The other is her mother.

“It’s not that I need him to tell me, ‘Good job,’ each time,” she explained. “It’s that I know he’s going to be honest. He’s going to help me grow.”

ACT III

Burnett still attends every QHS production he can. He lives in the same house he’s always lived in and he still has the same undying dedication to a can of processed meat.

Aside from that, Burnett’s third act has been filled with new experiences.

“The best part (of retirement has been) traveling when we could travel, and waking up to my dear bride every morning,” Burnett said.

Since 2005, he’s followed the path of the Apostle Paul in Greece, stood in the homes of Shakespeare and Wordsworth in England and traveled to Mexico four times, among other places.

The “dear bride” he mentioned is his wife and my grandmother, Marcia Burnett, whom he married in 2010. They met back in the infancy of the fine arts program at QHS, where she worked as a secretary. She said she had an indescribable feeling when she first met him that he could be a good friend, but life had other plans for them at that time. They didn’t reconnect until a few years after Burnett retired. That’s when I learned what it looks like when my grandma smiles like she means it. 

He’s even gotten to spend more time with his two children, Ashley and Dustin, since they moved back to Quincy in 2023.

“… And the worst part (has been) this sh** disease that’s slowing me down.”

Burnett is referring to Parkinson’s, the disease his father died of. There isn’t a conclusive test for it, but he estimated the tremors have plagued him for the last five years or so. He described a gradual onset of symptoms — lack of balance, lack of control of his legs and vision issues — before things got more intense. 

“I don’t know,” Burnett said before pausing for a moment. “It ain’t real nice.”

He also suffers from a “big blob of brown crap that just sits there” in his eye, more commonly referred to as macular degeneration.

“I can see around you,” he explained. “I can’t see your face.”

There are no cures for either of his ailments, only treatments to manage their symptoms. Still, Burnett hopes researchers will come up with something soon.

FINAL ACT

When asked what he thought his legacy ought to be, the question sparked a sense of discomfort.

“A book of verse …” he began.

“A jug of wine …”

“Graduation means Pishke time.”

It was a phrase from a 19^th-century poem that had been modified by a random student at Speedway High School to use as his senior quote. Burnett saw it in the school’s newspaper as an eighth grader. “Pishke” wasn’t even a real word, he explained.

After making another joke about what he wanted on his tombstone and yet another about how he’d rather be in Cleveland, he stared pensively out his living room window as the sun was setting and questioned what a legacy really was.

“I just want people to remember that I’m a good guy who taught ’em some good stuff — some good poetry, good prose and good pizza,” he said. 

For some, Burnett is known as the one who introduced them to the prevailing perfection of Spam, the glimmering world of storytelling and the freedom of stepping outside of their comfort zones. 

For others, he’s known for being good and being good at it, with a talent for garnering rolling belly laughs, keeping gardens alive year-round and making scratch-made food better than your mother. 

And for the thousands of people who sat in the audience of his productions over the years, he’ll always be known as one of Gem City’s greatest showmen.