In June 2026, Falk alumnus Tom Pears traveled to Pittsburgh with his wife, Kim Samara; daughters, Elizabeth and Emily Pears; son-in-law, Kevin Williams; and two grandchildren, Thomas and Palmer Jane.

Now a resident of New Hampshire, Tom says the trip was a way to celebrate his 80th birthday and honor his hometown roots. The Pears family has a long history in Pittsburgh, beginning with Tom’s great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Pears, who came to Pittsburgh to work in the glass industry. 

Tom’s great-great-grandfather, John Palmer Pears, and his family gathered in their backyard in Point Breeze 

While exploring the city together, Tom and his family decided to stop and ring the doorbell at Falk, resulting in a half-hour tour with Falk’s director, Jill Sarada. According to Tom, the school was “so much the same, so much excitingly new,” sparking countless memories of a fun, if slightly mischievous, Falk experience that spanned kindergarten to sixth grade in the 1950s. 

Editor-In-Chief 

As a student, Tom remembers carpooling to school from the East End with his classmate and birthday twin, Lessie Klein. During free class time, he and his friends would use pencils to knit at their desks, and during the polio outbreak, Dr. Jonas Salk visited the school to administer some of the very first vaccines to students. 

Tom Pears, Lessie Klein, Eileen Halpern, and Ralph Shapira during a class performance at Falk 

Another memorable aspect of Tom’s Falk education was writing. “Mrs. Green got us into writing our own short stories,” he says. “The ones I remember always had a trick ending, like the characters turned out to be mice instead of people.” 

“The whole story writing exercise is a great example of the strength of private schools,” he adds. “I learned as much from the other students as from the teacher.” This was equally true when Tom moved on to high school at Shady Side Academy, where he says the atmosphere was similarly collaborative and exploratory. 

Tom was also a driving force behind the school newspapers at Falk, inspired by his father, Thomas Pears III. Pears III worked as a printer in the ’50s and had edited his own school newspaper as a fifth-grade student. Following in his footsteps, Tom created a fifth-grade paper at Falk, complete with jokes, short stories, and news updates. 

For every issue, Tom and his father created cartoons and printed the paper using a press “the size of an automobile” in their home cellar. “I was very proud of that,” Tom says. “[We had] a block with rubber on it, and my father showed me how to etch lines out so that when you ran ink over it, the ink went into the lines or didn't go into the lines, and that's how he got [it] to print.” 

One of Tom’s block-printed cartoons 

By sixth grade, Tom was considered a prolific newspaper editor by his classmates. He was voted the editor-in-chief of Mrs. Green’s paper, which featured school news, student profiles, Falk athletics updates, and a “foreign correspondent” section that published letters from Janice Richman, a classmate spending time abroad in Paris and Rome. 

A page from Mrs. Green’s sixth-grade paper, “The Falkon” 

At some point during the year, Mrs. Green broke her leg and took time away from the classroom to recover. “The substitute was not good,” Tom recalls, “so we were all working on, ‘How can we get Mrs. Green back?’” 

By his memory, she agreed to return under one condition: that Timmy (aka Tom) would behave! 

The Invention of the Spreadsheet 

After finishing high school, Tom studied political theory at Princeton University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1968. He then attended Oberlin, where he earned an MAT in 1969. Afterward, he taught math and computer classes for Princeton Day School and Milton Academy, private K–12 schools in New Jersey and Massachusetts. 

Tom during his teaching career

When his days in the classroom were over, Tom entered the software industry, where he had the joy of witnessing several exciting tech innovations. “I got to work for the people who invented the spreadsheet. We were involved in the entrepreneurial phase, where the guys that invented the spreadsheet, the guys that did the first databases, the guys that did the first things, were there and came through our offices. It was just fantastic.” 

Years later, Tom says it’s been exciting to watch computers evolve throughout his lifetime, most recently with the rapid development and expansion of AI. 

Seeing the World 

Now retired, Tom splits his time between Boothbay, Maine, where he spends his summers; Weld, Maine, where he serves as a curator at Camp Kawanhee; and his full-time home in New Hampshire. He can also be found biking around the world in the winter and spring months, returning to favorites like Cancun and Lagos every year. 

Tom on a recent cycling trip to Lagos 

“[It] provides me with a wonderful focus and exercise to go and [bike],” Tom says, adding that he’s always loved to travel and experience local gems, even when his daughters were in diapers. 

For more photos, family history, and stories, visit Tom’s personal website, https://tompears.com/wp/.