Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (13 page)

Long after Tommy had gone off to college, a friend saw the family up close and remembered him even then “getting these unwavering messages from his parents that he really was good and that what he did was good, that he could do it really well. It was all mixed up with a lot of affection. He thought his mom was the best mom in the world and he would say it, and his dad was wonderful.”

Of the four children, Tommy was the youngest, a child always building something or fixing something or tearing something down to build over again. Even at night, with the lights out and a plea from his parents to get to sleep, he would take a flashlight under his covers and continue building with Tinkertoys. Phyllis said he was the most sleepless child she had ever seen. Patty frequently brought her little brother a bedtime glass of water, then found herself for the next two hours listening to his ideas and answering his questions.

In high school, Tommy’s older brother, John, lettered in football, basketball, and track and was president of his class for three years. But
sports and politics did not interest Tommy the way working with his hands did. In the evenings and on weekends he was in the basement or the garage with his father. Together, they built young Tom’s hot rod, three little wheels from a coaster wagon powered by a lawn-mower engine. When he wore that out, they built a bigger hot rod, using heavier wheels from a wheelbarrow and a little help from welders down at the plant. Then they rebuilt the engine of an old English Austin. As they worked, Tommy asked a lot of questions, like, “Why is it they call this alternating current?” His father would stop and draw him a picture and say, “Well, see, the voltage goes up here, and then it goes past the zero, and then it goes down again, and it does that sixty times a second.”

John Thompson encouraged the questions. He once told his son, “The only reason the engineer is good at what he does is curiosity.”

Tommy loved it all so much he never wanted to quit, even as a little boy. He would be working with his father on one of the cars or the hot rod and it would be ten o’clock at night, and his father would be tired and suggest that maybe they should hit the sack, and Tommy would say, “Oh, come on, can’t we just do a little bit more here?”

When Tommy reached the third grade, his teacher discovered that he couldn’t read, that he had only memorized what the children reading before him had recited. So Phyllis bought him fourth-grade-level books on science, and Patty and Sandee taught him phonics, and within weeks he was reading the science books and
Popular Mechanics
, lying on his bed, going through them page by page, combing the experiments and studying the how-to’s. Before long he had built a control panel in his room, an electrified collection of old switches and wires. One switch turned on the light in the closet, another turned on the light overhead, another turned on the radio. It looked terrible, but it all worked. He had the whole room wired. “It was kind of makeshift,” recalled his mother, “junk that he picked up somewhere. He never spent a lot of money on things. He never spent any money.”

On trash day every week, Tommy would borrow a screwdriver and a pair of pliers from his dad’s toolbox and slip them into his back pocket, and when he walked home for lunch he would pull old motors or solenoid valves and other parts out of broken fans, radios, record players, and the occasional washing machine, freezer, or television set sitting on
the curb. When his father asked him what he planned to do with all of those old parts, he’d say, “Well, we might need those.” The Thompsons had a basement full of electric motors and other parts Tommy had brought home. “We thought he was going to be a junk man,” said his father.

One day when Tommy was no older than eight, a man from the telephone company knocked on the front door of the Thompson home. When Phyllis answered, the man told her it was against the law to have two telephones unless she paid for both of them.

Phyllis said, “We don’t have two phones.”

“Yeah, you do,” said the man. “Come here.”

Phyllis went outside and saw a line coming off the telephone pole and looping down into the window of Tommy’s room. “Wait a minute,” she said, “I’ll call Tom.”

A little boy in the third grade came out the front door, and Phyllis said, “Tom, this man wants to ask you something about that wire going out of your window.”

Tommy took the man into his room while Phyllis waited outside. When the man came out, he said, “That kid’s made a telephone.”

Tommy had wired the phone inside an old jewelry box Phyllis had given him, and although he couldn’t dial out with it, he could open it up and listen when the phone rang. He liked to hear what Patty and Sandee said to their boyfriends.

The phone man told Phyllis, “This kid knows more about the telephone than I do. Why don’t you just let him play with it.”

W
HEN
T
OMMY WAS
thirteen, John and Phyllis moved their family to Defiance, where John became head of the automotive division at Johns-Manville, conceiving and designing specialized machines to stamp out fiberglass hood liners. John rode his bicycle a mile every day to the plant.

Tommy and Barry and the rest of a group of boys who had dubbed themselves the Vigilantes rode their bicycles all over town and hunted for turtles in tiny creeks that trickled through the ravines. Tommy was about as smart as Barry and his friends had seen but also downright, good-naturedly goofy. He was always working on a project, or reading a science manual, or playing with a math formula, or experimenting with an
idea. One Saturday morning, his new friends found him mowing the Thompson lawn sitting on his hot rod and pulling four old rotary lawn mowers he had bolted together, two behind two and overlapped so they left no gap. Another time, they went to the country club pool and watched him sit on the bottom for ten minutes while he breathed off scuba gear he had made with a gas furnace regulator and four propane cylinders.

Tommy talked so frequently about his experiments and his projects and ideas and things he had read about, and he talked about them so fast and in such depth that Barry and his friends were never sure if Tommy was serious or if he had made it all up. When he talked, he laughed and grinned a lot, and his eyes crinkled into near slits, and they could see the wide gap between his two front teeth.

Some people thought that gap was the reason he had been nicknamed Harvey. In 1950, Jimmy Stewart had starred in a movie called
Harvey
, in which the title character is an imaginary white rabbit over six feet tall. But the audience never sees Harvey, except in a portrait, and in the portrait he has his mouth closed. The real story of how Tommy came to be known as Harvey was that after he got to Defiance, he, Barry, and the rest of the Vigilantes selected nicknames for each other; Tommy was new in town and he liked to travel around, so someone nicknamed him Harvey the Hobo, and the nickname stuck. Everyone started calling him Harvey. Later, when people discovered Harvey was not his real name, they would ask Tommy how he came to be called Harvey, and he would say, “How do you think it happened?” If he liked their version, he would say, “Yeah, that’s it!”

J
OHN
T
HOMPSON HAD
two brothers who taught philosophy; Phyllis had two brothers who taught engineering and psychology; Phyllis herself taught nutrition. John’s father was a minister, and his mother taught Sunday School to three hundred parishioners every Sunday. The teaching tradition in the family went back at least to Tommy’s great-aunt Edna, who taught in a little schoolhouse at the turn of the century and spoke seven languages and traveled around the world with his other great-aunt, Claire, who also was a teacher. Perhaps Tommy’s greatest teacher, his father, was the only one in both families not employed as a teacher.

“My whole family’s a family of educators,” said Tommy, “and I was steeped in all that kind of thinking, but I had developed my own views.”

Tommy often talked to his parents and his uncles about education theory and the philosophy of learning. He would think out loud with them about how one might educate himself, and through this process he refined his own philosophy, all the way back to how to think. Along the way he had decided that he wanted to think like no one else thought, and that confounded people, because no one knew where it came from. It just bubbled up from somewhere deep inside him like a bottomless spring, with no outward signs until he opened his mouth, but here is the crux: When he was in grade school he could not add two plus two; he knew that the answer everybody wanted to hear was four, but he didn’t care about the answer; he wanted to know why. Although he made the National Honor Society in high school, he sometimes flunked math and science tests, because he had to understand a problem conceptually before he went on. A high school math teacher once told Phyllis that Tom could get to the right answer, but it took him forever to get there. Instead of using the accepted formulas and heading in a straight line, he would go around the problem, look at it from different angles, turn it upside down, challenge the formula he was supposed to use, then give his answer. He did this with everything. Always. And he didn’t care how much time it took or what grade he got or what anybody else thought. “If you’re going to be educating yourself in this world,” he would say, “you might as well be thinking about things that will yield value all the way along.”

He extended his philosophy to his social life, another curiosity to turn upside down and observe from different angles. Trends did not matter to him, and he did nothing to try to fit in. He preferred to analyze the socialization process and then, not always unconsciously, strike out in a different direction to see what would happen. While the cheerleaders and the athletes hung out at Kuntz Drugstore and drank cherry Cokes for a dime, Tommy went to Kissner’s for a brain sandwich. But his teasing manner and his wackiness usually attracted a crowd.

“There was always activity going on around him,” remembered one of the Vigilantes, Mark Steiner, “and he was usually the catalyst.”

One day, sick at home with mononucleosis, Tommy read an article on vitamin C by Linus Pauling. The article so intrigued him that he
called Pauling’s office in California, got through to Pauling himself, and told the renowned doctor he was doing a high school research project on vitamin C and mononucleosis. Pauling explained to Tommy how the vitamin C worked, how to keep it in his system at the renal threshold, and how to check his urine to see when it spilled over. Tommy then took thousands of milligrams of vitamin C every four hours, until he reached a dosage of well over 20,000 milligrams a day. Five days later, he felt so good, he snuck out of his house late at night and orchestrated after-hours bicycle races on the bottom of the drained country club pool.

As he grew older, Tommy began pushing everything to what most people thought was the limit and then went way beyond that, even physically. “He would do things,” said a friend named John Radabaugh, “that showed he had no concern for the welfare of his body.” On water skis, he would fly off a ski jump, sometimes doing a flip, sometimes dropping a ski. Sometimes he would hit the ramp, his skis would explode into the air, and he’d drop down on his rear end, then shoot off the ramp with no skis. “He was tough,” said Radabaugh. “He wouldn’t shy away from that stuff.”

When Tommy turned sixteen, his uncle Jim gave him a 1948 Buick Roadmaster convertible, and he took it apart until not one piece of anything, the body or the engine or the interior, was connected to another. With help from a dozen friends, he puttied the holes, sanded the rust, fixed the hydraulic seats and windows, rebuilt the engine, painted it a royal blue, and bought a new white top for it. He loved to cruise in the Buick, to chase girls in it and get their attention; but once he had their attention, he never knew what to do next. No follow-through, said his friends.

That was the difference between Tommy and Barry. Barry was a romantic. “He’d go in for the kill, and he’d just lay it on,” said Radabaugh, “where Harv didn’t know how.” The best line Tommy could come up with was guessing their weight in kilograms, or asking for a strand of hair so he could put it into a machine he had invented that would reveal their true measurements. Barry made them twitter; Tommy made them laugh, sometimes nervously. “He was always a jokester,” said Gina Cullen, the only girl Tommy dated in high school. “But he was so smart, you thought, Maybe he can do that.”

Tommy the mad scientist and Barry the romantic shared one trait: an enormous curiosity. It took little coaxing for either of them to head off into the unknown. In January of their junior year, they left Defiance in Barry’s MGB-GT in the middle of the night and drove 850 miles to Winter Carnival in Quebec. There they surfed on sheets of plastic down the closed toboggan run, searched in vain for a glimpse of a legendary prostitute named Angie, ate sheep brains soaked in black butter, drank two bottles of sweet wine, and stopped the car in Ontario to throw up on the way home. Two teenage pals soaking up a little of the world outside the confines of that little patch of earth called Defiance.

I
N THE FALL
of 1970, Tommy enrolled at Ohio State fearing that a regimented educational system might destroy his ability to see things in ways that other people could not see them. “I had a very specific feeling,” he said, “about how I wanted to be educated and how I wanted to think.”

For years he had carefully cultivated a creative mind-set, worrying that if he ever stopped being different, if he ever stopped experimenting, if he ever stopped pushing and questioning and exploring and looking at life upside down, he would no longer think the thoughts that could lead him to ask the questions that no one else had asked, which is what made him unique, which is what allowed him to be what he had wanted to be since he was a small boy: an inventor. He wanted to take old ideas, turn them inside out, and apply them in new ways; he wanted to suck the world through his senses and exhale a vision.