Biographies of Officers

Tom Feller, Secretary
Nashville, Tenn.
tomfeller[at]aol.com
http://members.aol.com/tomfeller

Tom was born in St. Clare’s Hospital in Monroe, Wisconsin on September 28, 1954. His father was a dairy farmer living near Monticello, WI. When Tom was twelve, his father switched to hog farming exclusively and farmed happily until his semi-retirement. (His evenings were not occupied with the nightly milking.) Tom’s mother was a farmwife until Tom went to college. She then studied to become a real estate agent. After serving stints with various firms including Century 21, she has become a partner in her own firm, affiliated with Better Homes and Gardens. She sold her firm in 1998. The parents retired to Florida in 2000, although the father returned to Wisconsin this spring to help with the planting and plans to return again in the fall to help with the corn harvest.

Tom has one younger brother who stayed on the farm. The brother is divorced and has one son and one daughter. Tom’s nephew is farming with his dad, and Tom’s niece attends Madison Area Technical College.

Tom’s ancestry is a mixture of Swiss, Norwegian, Pennsylvania Dutch (German), Welsh, and English.

Tom graduated from Monticello High School in 1972 and then attended Ripon College in Ripon, WI. He received his BA in 1976, spending one semester of his junior year in Bonn, West Germany. He majored in philosophy with the equivalent of minors in political science and German literature. He spent the next two years as a graduate assistant in the philosophy department at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Graduate school did not work out, so when the assistantship expired, Tom got a desk clerk job at one of the Holiday Inns in Baton Rouge. For some mysterious reason, the managers liked his work and promoted him to night auditor and, finally, to front office manager. In 1981 he was once again promoted, this time to the position of internal auditor with the operator of the BR Holiday Inns, Mississippi Management (now called MMI Hotel Group). This promotion required a move to Jackson, Miss. Tom lived there until 1997 until he moved to Nashville to marry Anita Williams. MMI allowed him to become a remote worker. His current position is Director of Special Projects, and it requires a lot of travel.

A few years after moving to Jackson, an event occurred that led to Tom’s primary leisure time activity. Up until then, he had not been successful in forming a circle of friends in Jackson. Then he read the Mid-September 1983 issue of Analog, a science fiction magazine. Among the classified ads for ordained ministers and university degrees was an ad for a science fiction club in the Jackson area. Out of the 100,000 or so readers of the magazine, Tom was the only one to answer the ad. He discovered it was for the Chimneyville Fantasy and Science Fiction Society. This was Tom’s introduction to science fiction fandom. Since then, he has been a member of more organizations than he can remember, president of two clubs, chairperson of two conventions, and the editor of three fanzines.

In 1995, Tom broke into professional writing when he contributed two essays to Magill's Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy, published by Salem Press. Since then he has sold more than two hundred professional pieces.