Tom Gibson
Radio Operator
Treasurer Emeritus

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Thomas R. Gibson, a World War II merchant marine radio operator and long-time Project Liberty Ship volunteer, died July 30, 2010, of cancer at the age of 86.

Tom, the son of a Northern Pacific railroader and a homemaker, was born and raised in Minneapolis, where he graduated from high school. His interest in ham radio began during his high school days and continued when he worked at a radio station in Green Bay, Wisconsin. By 1941, he had earned his radio license from the Federal Communications Commission.

While attending the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1942, Tom read an article in the ham magazine, 'QST,' about the Gallops Island Radio Training School in Boston harbor, which trained merchant marine radio operators. He signed up.

Because he already held a radio license, he didn't have to attend seaman's school and was accepted into the nine-month school at the U.S. Maritime Service Radio Training Station at Gallops. He graduated in just six weeks and was assigned as a radioman aboard the Liberty ship SS IRVING M. SCOTT, which sailed in 1943 from San Francisco with a cargo of war materiel for Australia and several other ports.

Tom saw wartime service aboard ships in the Atlantic and Pacific. Even after a particularly powerful storm pounded his ship, loaded with 38 fighter planes on deck, for a week, he was "too stupid to be scared."

When the war ended, Tom returned to the University of Minnesota, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1949 in electrical engineering. From 1950 to 1955, he worked in Seattle as a communications engineer for the Northern Pacific Railway. He then moved to Decatur, Illinois, when he took a similar job with the Wabash Railroad. From 1960 to 1968, he lived in Peekskill, New York, where he was chief signal engineer for the New York Central Railroad's Harlem division. In 1968 he joined Westinghouse Electric Corp. in Pittsburgh, where he was named project manager of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System in San Francisco. He came to Baltimore in 1971 when he went to work as a project manager for Kaiser Engineers, which was involved in building the Baltimore subway system. He retired in 1986.

In 1988 Tom attended the first meeting of Project Liberty Ship, whose intention was to bring to Baltimore and preserve and reactivate SS JOHN W. BROWN, which was then languishing in the James River Reserve Fleet. He was elected treasurer, a position he held for the next two decades.

In addition to overseeing the BROWN's finances, Tom and several other volunteers faithfully restored and made operational the BROWN's radio room as it was built in 1942.

In 2008, Tom relinquished his treasurer's job and his position on the Board of Directors after being diagnosed with cancer. Tom, whose radio call letters were W3DJ, continued to enjoy being a ham radio operator.

Tom's wife of nearly 60 years, the former Virginia Louise Tuttle, died in 2008.

Following Tom's wishes, his remains were buried at sea in late September during the JOHN W. BROWN's voyage to Providence, Rhode Island. His son, retired Coast Guard Capt. Roger Gibson of York, Pennsylvania, was aboard to help bury his father.

Tom is also survived by three other sons, Thomas R. Gibson of Rescue, California, Douglas Gibson of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and John Gibson of Margate, Florida, a daughter, Laura Sonberg of Greensboro, Maryland, and eight grandchildren.