Bob Dylan's high school principal got down on his hands and knees to show Penn State associate English professor Toby Thompson the welded piano petal Dylan had broken off in his first public performance in the school's talent show.

He had been hammering away, singing Little Richard songs.

Thompson was 24 when he first made a trip to Hibbing, Minn., a small mining town where the radio waves caught only spurts of rock 'n' roll, even in 1968.

He set off for Bob Dylan's hometown as one of the first journalists who looked into the personal life of the legendary poet and musician.

On Sept. 20, director Martin Scorsese released the Dylan two-DVD documentary No Direction Home. Thompson bought the film and watched the entire three-and-a-half-hour set later that night in a university classroom.

The film focuses on Dylan's earlier years, until 1966, and Thompson found that he had spoken to many of the people included in the documentary. "Maurice Zimmerman [Dylan's uncle who picked up Thompson's first call] had allowed me one big fat foot in the door of journalistic opportunity; if I played according to the rules, anybody's rules, I should have a story, " Thompson wrote.

After visiting Hibbing several times, Thompson published a six-part series in the Village Voice and a book, Positively Main Street: An Unorthodox View of Bob Dylan, in 1971.

Positively Main Street is a compilation of his adventures with some of Dylan's first influences, such as his mother, brother and high school sweetheart.

This was 37 years ago, and the birth of the professor's writing career. "I like to brag that I didn't have a real job until I was 40," Thompson said.

Prior to landing a job at Penn State, Thompson was, and still sometimes is, a freelance writer. His work has appeared in publications such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, GQ and Vanity Fair. Most recently, he has contributed to Big Sky Journal in Montana.

He often drives though Hibbing on the way to his summer home in Montana, claiming that the main street has hardly changed and Dylan's house looks the same. The footage of the parades shown in No Direction Home is classic, he said. "One of the really smart things that Scorsese did was he made it kind of a generational story," Thompson said, noting that Scorsese referred to pertinent issues of the time including atomic warfare, rock 'n' roll and television. "He also focused on Dylan's artist development. I found that very moving."

To celebrate his own birthday last year, Thompson stood dressed in black in front of his nonfiction writing class strumming Johnny Cash and Dylan on his guitar. The assignment was to watch a man turn 60. "It was an episode of VH1 Storytellers," Silvi Alcivar (graduate-English) said of her professor's assignment.

She said Thompson doesn't tell students what to write and speaks from experience. "He picks up the direction where the student wants to go and helping them get there," she said.

Thompson saw Dylan in concert last summer for his fifth or sixth time. The two have never met. "That boy ... this fellow, Toby ... has got some lessons to learn," Dylan said in a 1969 interview with Rolling Stone, a quote that Thompson uses as the epigram for his book.

The associate professor endures those lessons in Positively Main Street -- lessons in the responsibility a journalist has toward the secrets of somebody's life and the responsibilities in revealing those secrets, Thompson said. "My book was really trying to get to the heart of what shaped a major cultural force in the world," he said.