Thomas C. Hanks (1944 - 2024)


Ord Elliott sent the news that "Tom died Tuesday evening, March 5. He experienced a stroke Tuesday morning was taken to Stanford Hospital where he was in a coma. His daughters Molly and Julia brought him home before he passed. Of course it’s not an easy time for them as Tom had been recovering his strength recently and they did not expect this. Fortunately both Molly and Julia had been with Tom in the days before.

 

Tom came to Princeton from Washington, DC, where he was one of 8 Landon School graduates to join '66 (Frank Nuessle, John Slidell, Ord Elliott, Ed Lee, John Laughlin, Bill Koplovitz, and Frank Kilpatrick were the others). Tom was a member of Cottage Club at Princeton and majored in geological engineering. After receiving his PhD in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology, Tom had a distinguished career at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, CA. He lived in Palo Alto with his wife Peg, who passed away in 2020 after many years of struggle with corticobasal degeneration.

 

Nassau Herald

Tom's Life and Career as a Geophysicist

 

Tom did not write in many reunion books; he just didn't like writing about himself. All we have is the basics. From the 55th reunion book, we know he lived in Palo Alto, CA and was a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park following the completion of his PhD at California Institute of Technology. His contributions to the field were significant and include being the co-developer of the standard measure of earthquake size (the "moment magnitude scale") which replaced the Richter Scale. His Wikipedia biography provides a brief summary, and the January 25, 2006 PAW profile below provides more information.

 

Quake watcher

Thomas Hanks ’66 strives to predict the earth’s violent shudders

 

When the earth shakes, the media report how high the temblor registered on the Richter scale. But despite its frequent use, the famous rating system created by Charles Richter in 1935 is no longer how seismologists gauge the size of earthquakes. They actually use a scale invented in 1979 by Thomas Hanks ’66 and a colleague, Hiroo Kanamori, known as the moment-magnitude scale.

 

Like its better-known counterpart, the scale developed by Hanks and Kanamori rates earthquakes by their size, or magnitude, but the moment-magnitude-scale calculations are far more reliable for large seismic events. The U.S. Geological Survey adopted the moment-magnitude scale as its standard in 2000.

 

Because the new system sounds just like the old scale, most reporters don’t know they are citing the wrong scale. “Every magnitude you see these days is a moment-magnitude,” says Hanks.

 

For Hanks, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., the moment-magnitude scale is just one of a series of quiet contributions made over a 33-year career that have helped scientists understand why earthquakes occur.

 

A geological engineering major at Princeton, Hanks developed his fascination with quakes after witnessing firsthand, as a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, the devastating 1971 San Fernando earthquake in Los Angeles — which leveled buildings and claimed 65 lives.

 

Since then, Hanks has studied the causes and effects of earthquakes in New Zealand, Mongolia, Mexico City, China, and miles deep in South African gold mines.

 

In 1981, Hanks and another colleague also developed a more accurate way to describe how a quake’s energy will materialize as strong ground motion, helping engineers design buildings that can withstand the most vigorous shaking they can expect during the buildings’ lifetimes.

 

The most important location Hanks has analyzed for seismic safety is the designated federal site for nuclear-waste disposal at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. For two years, he chaired a committee whose job it was to predict how much the ground around the repository would move when very rare earthquake ground motion occurs — that is, ground motion that might happen once in 100 million years.

 

“A hundred million years is a long, long time,” Hanks says, “and we are only beginning to understand the things that the earth can do over such time intervals.”

 

When the next earthquake takes place, and the media scramble to report the latest readings on the “Richter scale,” Hanks won’t mind letting his credit go elsewhere. “Charles Richter is one of the great saints in the field of seismology, and I don’t want to get in his way at all,” Hanks says. Besides, the “Hanks-Kanamori scale” just doesn’t have the same ring.

 

Tributes and Memories

 

Tom's brother John Hanks '69  and daughters Julia '01 and Molly:

Tom died at home in Palo Alto, CA on March 6 after a courageous fight with an aggressive prostate cancer. He was surrounded by his loving family, daughters Molly and Julia.
 
Tom was an internationally known and revered geophysicist whose seminal work on earthquakes published years ago with his colleague, Hiroo Kanamori, as an analysis of Moment Magnitude led some in the field to propose renaming the Richter scale as the Hanks Kanamori scale. Tom spent his entire career at the U.S. Geological Survey, which became his second home. He enjoyed his work immensely and felt privileged to work with such talented and interesting colleagues. In recent years, he spent much of his time mentoring and working with younger scientists, which he found extremely rewarding.
 
Tom was a devoted father, spending many hours on various athletic fields as a coach, cheerleader, and occasional heckler. He delighted in his two granddaughters, Jane Doyle and Mae Shoaf. He is preceded in death by his beloved wife of 52 years, Margaret Taylor Hanks, for whom he cared selflessly during the last years of her life.
 
Tom graduated with high academic honors from Landon School in 1962 as captain of the football and baseball teams. He earned his BSE in Geological Engineering at Princeton in 1966 where he ate at Cottage Club. After graduating from Princeton, he received his PhD at Caltech in Geophysics with a special emphasis on Seismology.
 
Tom followed his brother, Jim ‘64 at Princeton and preceded his brother, John ’69, and daughter, Julia ‘01.
 
Tom was recognized by Landon as an Outstanding Alumnus, receiving the Anthony Kupka Award for his outstanding achievements in 2019.

 

Rick Bowers:

I had the good fortune to spend two years seeing Tom on a regular basis, when I was in at Stanford University from 2018 to 2020. Tom and I would meet after work, often at his favorite haunt, MacArthur Park Restaurant and Bar, for a few glasses of wine, before he hustled home to be with his wife, Peg. She was a huge part of his life. He was devoted to taking care of her. Sometimes we would sit in his back yard, under the trees listening to birds and talking about seismic events in lives and faults. At Christmas time, he would proudly show me the electric train set he had been putting up for years. He was a quiet, thoughtful, humble man. Those hours with Tom are good memories I’ll always treasure.

 

Frank Nuessle:

Frank's long tribute to Tom includes three photos, one of which shows Tom's beloved 1953 Chevy Truck, survivor of Tom and Frank's 1966 Christmas road trip to Mexico, loaded with flowers for his 45th wedding anniversary. Click here.

 

John Lumpkin:

I have been calling Hanks about every 30 days for, perhaps, the last year just to talk. My last conversation with Hanks was actually last Friday. One of his daughters, Julia (she is a Princeton grad '01) with her young daughter, Tom’s granddaughter, were visiting with him for a few days. He was in good spirits, and we had a delightful conversation-including some FaceTime with him, Julia and his granddaughter. Among other subjects we touched upon was the recent Alumni Day and our Class Dinner. I sent him email where I attached a number of the photos I took during the Class Dinner (see the "Classmates in the News" page). ....  I know that Ord Elliot-who lives not too far from where Tom lived-and Tom saw each other on a fairly regular basis. PS: I think Julia and her husband, John Shoaf, are attorneys in Nashville. In the conversation, I learned that John is a Sewanee graduate as is our daughter, Frances Webster.

 

More about the monthly calls with Hanks...These calls actually originated over two years ago and were originally set up as Zoom calls which included probably his closest friend, Ord Elliott, as well as Bill Koplovitz and John Slidell, all classmates of Hanks at Landon;  and, of course, PU. Later another Landon/Princeton classmate, Frank Nuessle joined in. And there was even one when another Landon classmate, Pierce Smith, a Yalie, participated. You can imagine the memories and stories those guys recounted during these Zoom calls. At some point, the organization of these Zoom calls fell off; which was when Hanks and I continued to have a monthly call. And I am sure that, in addition to Ord, some of these other Landon guys kept up their own individual communications with Tom. Again, Tom and Ord-in addition to having attended both Landon and Princeton together-were ‘neighbors’ for many years out in California.

 

While I was not one of the Landon ‘mafia’, Tom and I were dear friends while at Princeton and pretty much ‘kept up’ post-graduation. One Princeton memory our Junior Year, one post Princeton memory in the mid-1980s and some recollections over these past 12 months:
  1. Tom and I were clubmates in Cottage. Shortly before the Class of 1965 graduated, Tom and I hatched an idea that we would write a couplet about each ’65 Cottage Club graduate. Well, not unlike the pre-exam ‘all nighters’ some of us pulled throughout our 4 years, Hanks and I - fortified with almost a half-gallon of some off brand rot gut - somehow produced no less than 50 couplets. And at, I think, what was the last dinner before graduation which our seniors were enjoying at Cottage that very evening (yes, we saw the sun rise that day), we gathered most of this group together at the Club and recited the couplets - one by one. Ps. Tom sent me the original of this masterpiece about a month ago!
  2. On August 30, 1986, our home phone rang here in Columbia, SC (and remember this was before cell phones). It was Hanks who had just arrived in Charleston SC on the eve of the anniversary of the Charleston earthquake of 1886. Turns out that Tom, a pretty renowned internationally known seismologist, was slated to deliver the keynote address in Charleston to a large crowd who had come to Charleston from around the world to commemorate one of the worst earthquakes ever to hit the east coast. Skipping out on a dinner that evening in Charleston, Tom drove to our home (2 ½ hours) to visit, spend the night and make it back to Charleston to deliver the 11:00am keynote. While no couplets were penned that particular evening, we pulled yet another all-nighter just ‘cause. And he received a standing ovation around noon in Charleston August 31, 1986.
  3. Tom and I made a point to connect by the phone at least once each month over about these last twelve months . The highlight was over the December holidays when Tom had set up his model trains (built in the 1940’s) in his living room primarily to entertain youngsters in and around his neighborhood. On this occasion his audience was yours truly and 3 of our grandchildren via FaceTime.

Ord Elliott:

“Keeping Democracy Safe from Earthquakes.” That was Tom’s pithy response when asked what he did for a living. You’d never know he was a world-renowned  geophysicist. Tom was smart, outrageously smart. Those of us who were at Landon knew that, but Tom never wore his accomplishments on his sleeve. He had a wry sense of humor about the work he never advertised. When I moved to California in 1982 and spent more time with Tom, I recall asking him when the next big one was going to happen. He said sometime in the next 30 years. In 2012 I asked him again when the next big one was going to happen. He said sometime in the next 30 years, then laughed. Not that Tom wouldn’t share his knowledge. When we took a boat trip the length of Lake Powell, he explained interesting landmarks in “geology for dummies” English. But his fame and success were never on the table.
 
Tom was strong, tenaciously strong in his commitment to his family. When his wife, Peg, suffered a debilitating disease leaving her completely paralyzed, he was all-in taking care of her in their home, talking to her as he always had before. She couldn’t speak but perhaps she could hear him and know that despite the devastation she was enduring, Tom was with her every day, by her side.
 

I miss my long-time friend. There’s a special comfort that comes when you started school together at just twelve years old. You know your buddy at a deep, deep level. Sometimes you don’t even need to talk.

 

John Slidell:

Tom was one of several of us who came to Princeton from the Landon School in Bethesda, Maryland where he’d been an excellent athlete who was always at or near the top of our class academically.
 
We were never roommates at Princeton, but we spent time together and went on several memorable road trips. One was when he and I, and my wife-to-be Mary Mac, drove down to Florida for spring break in my Studebaker Hawk. The car windows wouldn’t open, it had no AC, and the heater was stuck on, which was not great in the Florida heat. But those things didn’t deter us. We slept on the beaches, had fun together and he and Mary became lifelong friends.
 
On another occasion, she set him up on a date with a friend of hers at Connecticut College and he brought along a bottle of gin made from distilling Juniper berries in the Princeton Chem lab. Luckily some of it spilled on the floor before anyone could drink it because it ate a hole through the girl’s bedroom
carpet.
 
And this was a guy who would become the world’s greatest expert on earthquakes!
 
The best road trip with Tom was also the longest. I picked up him and fellow classmate Mason Young at a geology camp in Red Lodge, Montana. From there, the three of us drove to the California coast, staying with friends and classmates along the way. We were on the road at least ten days and I don’t remember paying for a room the entire time. Needless to say we had many fun experiences that aren’t suitable for public dissemination.
 
One which does pass the test, was the time when we stopped to see Dave Van Horne at his family’s ranch near Carmel. He and his parents graciously offered to, “put us up for a night” in their ranch bunkhouse.
 
Several days later we were still there, and I remember Dave’s mother asking, “What would it take to persuade you guys to leave?”
 
Never at a loss for words, he quickly responded, “A nice roast beef dinner might do it.” Coming from someone else that might have seemed cheeky, but Tom was always polite, had a disarming smile and we got the dinner and left the next morning.

 

Bill Koplovitz:
We spent 6 years together at Landon Prep School in Bethesda, MD, as well as 4 years together at Princeton and the Cottage Club. We also played 4 years together as the starting shortstop second base combination on a powerful high school championship team as well as several years on Landon's varsity football team.
 

Tommy matched his academic prowess with his athleticism in sport. At Landon Prep School he became a 4 year starter at shortstop and was a major force in leading them to 50 wins and 2 conference championships. As a teammate on the Varsity football team, I personally watched one of the most outstanding individual performances I have ever witnessed when, at 165 pounds, playing free safety, he made 12 solo tackles against a Catholic League football powerhouse and a 6' 3" 215 pound all metropolitan [10.8 sprinter] halfback, to keep his team in the game. He obviously passed on some of these genes to his daughters, both of whom excelled academically, and I believe Julia helped lead her Princeton rugby team to an Ivy League championship. To Tommy success and achievement came calmly and naturally and I already deeply miss our journey together.

 

Jon Holman:

I didn't have the good fortune to know Tom back in the day, but starting in 2017 when we started having '66 lunches in San Francisco, he was a pretty regular attendee. I say "pretty regular" because he lived in Palo Alto (about 45 minutes away) and he was a full time caregiver for his late wife Peg, so going to a lunch and being gone for four hours required lots of planning and help. But he did it whenever he could. We typically had a class speaker, and Tom was a world expert on earthquakes (career at the US Geological Survey, co-invented the earthquake measurement formula that replaced the Richter scale), and he was our speaker at one lunch. Terrified all of us about when "the big one" might hit and what it would look like. But mostly I'll remember Tom as just a good guy, glass is half full view of the world, super smart with no irritating ego, philosophical about his own terrible ailments and his difficulties getting around. I spoke with him just a few months ago and he had lots of issues but was confronting them with humor and grace. I wasn't as close to him as guys like Ord Elliott and Frank Nuessle, but he had become a friend. I miss him.

 

Mark Levine:

I’ll never forget Tom’s presentation on earthquakes where he was asked what earthquake insurance he had. He sheepishly answered that he didn’t have earthquake insurance.

 

Bill Kelley: A Belated Tribute to Tom Hanks and the Lesser Known Heroes of Bear Creek

Tom was a buddy of mine back in the day. We hung out at Cottage Club where we took our meals, Guyot Hall for geology classes, and the Engineering Quad for our engineering course work. We were two of only four ‘66ers majoring in Geological Engineering at Princeton, the other two being Mike Robinson and Mason Young. It was a unique major and a tight knit department. Tom was indeed the best and brightest of our lot. He obviously made the highest marks while I was always proud to be supporting the “curve” from the bottom. He was generous and thoughtful, ready to assist with difficult courses and had helped me with a couple critical tedious calculations in finishing my senior thesis involving a gravity study of the Crazy Mountains, MT. Sadly, I was unable to reciprocate as his thesis involved a collaboration with Prof. Bob Phinney in selecting the optimum site on the moon’s surface to establish its first seismograph.

 

But I had bested him in at least a few occasions in our time together. It was 1964 just after sophomore year when Tom, Mason and I attended Princeton’s geology field camp at Red Lodge, MT along with a dozen or so geology students from several other eastern colleges. The six week course was truly remarkable for those involved , particularly me. Imagine studying field geology in the greatest outdoor classroom and laboratory perhaps in the world -- the Rocky Mountains surrounding Red Lodge and including Yellowstone Park.

 

Tom and several others of us had begun a competition early on that summer to see who could go the longest without changing their jeans. After four weeks Tom and I were the only ones still in the running but during the fifth week Tom had fallen in a rock slide and ripped the seat out of his pants. Now uncontested, I was able to finish the entire summer without changing my pants. That dubious distinction never impressed my mother much. Tom’s jeans never made it home, but mine did. Mom took one look at those pants and chucked them in our farm burn barrel.

 

The crowning achievement of our time that summer occurred the day our group became the “Heroes of Bear Creek”. We had taken off at dawn from the Princeton (YBRA) camp to spend a long day at Elk Basin on the Montana/Wyoming border. We were to be studying this small operating oil field with its underlying geologic anticlinal structure in the arid sagebrush country south of Red Lodge. As we sped south along a little used highway with our entourage of four carryall vehicles, 16 students and two profs, we entered the small valley of Bear Creek and the site of the 1943 Smith Coal Mine Disaster. The mine was closed and the town itself was barely hanging on. Perhaps only half of the 30 old weather beaten homes were occupied in 1964, most of those by pensioners.

 

The smoke rising from one of the old houses was hard to miss and our group raced off the highway and into the little town. Eighteen geologists baled out of the vehicles and surrounded the house, the rear side now engulfed in flames. We had a few buckets and axes from our vehicles, and each one of us had our own personal geologic pick. Luckily we found a couple of garden hoses and two outdoor spigots. None of the locals were out yet so we set about attacking that fire best we could. The fire had started in an outbuilding at the rear of the house but now the flames were crawling up the back wall.

 

Several students entered the house, grabbed the old lady living there and proceed to remove her and many of her possessions to the center of the dirt street fronting her home. The rest of us were making fire breaks and trying to douse the flames. The outbuilding now totally destroyed was knocked down by several gleeful students while some of us were wetting down the walls of the house. Tom, not to be outdone, jumped up on the roof with his axe and began chopping a hole in the roof at the back and as I handed him a garden hose, proceeded to hose down the attic. All this time the old lady sat in her armchair, center of the street, watching the mayhem swirling about her. The Red Lodge Fire Department arrived just as we had extinguished the blaze so we handed off “the mop up duties” to them and proceeded on to Elk Basin. We were certainly a proud lot that day. And later in the week we got a mention in the Red Lodge newspaper. The County Commissioners even sent a letter to the YBRA camp thanking our group for its quick action in saving the house and perhaps the town. Later that fall , back in class in Guyot Hall, Prof Erling Dorf (renowned Paleobotanist) who had been leading our group that memorable day shared the following: “after you young men had left for the summer, the County Sheriff visited me at camp – that old lady/home owner had been arrested for arson. She had started the fire in the early morning in the outbuilding knowing it would catch the house on fire and the Red Lodge Fire Department would not get there in time. She figured she could collect the insurance but hadn’t figured on all you geologists showing up just as the blaze got going.” Dr. Dorf was chuckling and remarked – “can you imagine how nervous and angry she must have been sitting there in her front row seat watching all you crazy geologists flying about her property and extinguishing the blaze.”

 

I have thought about that day many times in the years since. It has occurred to me that Tom, prior to ever beginning his distinguished career as a geophysicist for the USGS fancied himself a fireman. I’ll always remember Hanks that day in Bear Creek up on the roof chopping a hole through the shingles. He was “lovin it!”.

 

Rest In Peace Tom Hanks. You’d have made a great fireman!


Additional Photos

John Scully, Tom Hanks, Rick Bowers in 2018

after speaking to the San Francisco lunch group about earthquakes

 

Landon School Senior Year Class Photo sent by John Slidell. Tom is Second Row, Left.

See the Caption Below for Other '66 Classmates

 

If you have additional photos or memories that you wish to share, please send them to the '66 Memorial Team (66_MemorialTeam@tiger1966.org). We will add them to this page.