In the spring of 1952, a little less than three weeks before an undergraduate troupe was to present its first outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the director quit, calling the situation hopeless.

Undeterred, the show’s producer—Thomas N. Billings ’52—didn’t hesitate: he would fill in as director himself.

Commencement was fast approaching, the Harvard Dramatic Club was desperately strapped for cash and Billings was producing the Shakespearean comedy to raise some much-needed revenue.

On opening night, the players and spectators assembled behind the Fogg Museum, which then offered a picturesque setting for a summer gathering.

Drizzle wetted the faces of the actors and audience members in the garden, and some of the light-bulbs strung in the trees to illuminate the performance exploded.

Billings stood before the audience and said he wouldn’t be offended if they left. But no one did, the show went on, and the performance received rave reviews in the Boston Herald.

That night proved to be Billings’ fondest Harvard memory.

It was also a time when he quickly took control and solved a problem—something he has made a career out of.

Billings is a vigilante, in his own way. He’s never spent much time doing one thing in particular, preferring to show up, strike and fade away. He never stayed at one job for very long, instead filling in where he was needed.

He’s spent his professional career largely as a consultant, playing fast and loose in a world of headhunters and making a name for himself on his own.

Billings has worked for both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and a counterculture magazine called the Mother Earth News. His many exploits in journalism and consulting have won him mention in no less than six editions of Who’s Who (including Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in Science and Engineering).

More recently, returning to older passions, he has started directing plays for his local theater, recording voice-overs for documentaries, writing a cookbook series, running his own publishing imprint and dabbling in the software industry.

Though it ended in Tercentenary Theater, Billings’ undergraduate career began at Deep Springs College, a small working cattle ranch in rural California that also offers a highly-regarded two-year liberal arts program.

After two years of ranch work and course work at Deep Springs, he transferred to Harvard. Here he discovered that he had already completed all the requirements for his government concentration. Freed from the pressure to specialize in one area of study, Billings explored the full diversity of classes in Harvard’s catalog.

“I had the privilege of spending my two upper-class years taking...things like geology and architecture and music,” he says. It was “really enriching stuff.”