On December 25, 2017, my husband and I were visiting Quito, Ecuador, after having spent the prior week exploring the Galapagos Islands. There wasn’t much to do that day. It was Christmas and everything was closed. Though atheists (of course!), we popped into a few churches in the historic downtown, hoping to see some pageantry or hear a choir or two, but we were roundly disappointed by the almost nonexistent celebrations on offer. It seemed that everyone was taking Christmas off—even Catholic priests. And then I remembered that this was the day we could watch Tom Flynn at work.

For as long as anyone could remember, if Christmas fell on a weekday, Tom would don a suit and tie, grab his briefcase, and come to work as if the day were no different than any other. He stopped celebrating Christmas in 1984 when he realized it was “the birthday of someone I no longer believed in.” And so my husband and I went back to the hotel room and tuned in over Wi-Fi to see Tom in his office at the Center for Inquiry (CFI) headquarters in Amherst, New York. Tom’s day was being livestreamed as a fundraiser for CFI’s Secular Rescue program.

We were watching Tom doing what he would typically do at work, which was to read submissions, answer emails, and edit pieces—or write his own—for Free Inquiry magazine. Occasionally Tom would call out a “Thank you!” to someone who had just donated or read aloud an email. If people donated above a certain level, Tom would have to sing a Christmas carol—which was painful to listen to, as you can imagine. If he needed to take a break, he’d put up a sign for the audience that he’d be back soon. I no longer remember if he was wearing his favorite black Anti-Claus Santa-type hat with the word HUMBUG emblazoned across the front. He probably was.

The whole thing was hysterically funny, a combination of performance art, self-caricature, send up, high camp, and watching paint dry.

Hundreds of people tuned in over the course of Tom’s workday, and many donated. Thousands of dollars were raised for Secular Rescue. Tom had taken his principled stand—refusing to go along with almost everyone in recognizing Christmas as a holiday—and had turned it into a force for good just by being himself on camera for eight hours. I don’t know anyone else who could have pulled that off.

And that’s the thing about Tom Flynn: he was one of a kind.

Tom had a few items pasted on his office door in Amherst, including a highly complimentary quote from Richard Dawkins on the importance and value of Free Inquiry magazine. One of the other items Tom chose to feature was a printed page from the website Tripadvisor. It declared that the best tourist destination in Dresden, New York, was the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum. It was no surprise that Tom would want to advertise this honor. The Museum was Tom’s baby and a source of tremendous pride for both Tom and CFI.

But Tripadvisor’s recommendation went on to say that the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum is “#1 out of 1 things to do in Dresden.” This could not have been better scripted for Tom’s sense of humor. He loved it and had drawn an arrow to the deflating statistic for emphasis so it would not escape the reader’s notice along with the wry directive: “Read. Weep.”

Just before Tom’s tragic and untimely death, he made certain that the RGI Museum would continue in perpetuity as a museum honoring the Great Agnostic, who was Tom’s hero. Tom credits reading The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, which he found when he looked up “atheism” in the card catalogue of a public library in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for setting the spark to his career promoting atheism and humanism.

In 2021, Tom set out a challenge to his fellow Ingersoll devotees to help him endow the Museum so it would have its annual operating budget covered on an ongoing basis. He put up $40,000 of his own funds toward a dollar-for-dollar challenge. The response was overwhelming, bringing in more than enough to secure the Museum’s future. That was the kind of loyalty Tom inspired.

Tom’s brilliance, scholarship, and humor were all part of his charm. But it was that twinkle in his eye that made us all love him. You saw it and didn’t know what was coming next—a painfully corny joke or a visionary idea that would rock the secular world.

Vaya Sin Dios, Flynnzo.