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Tom Jr.
In high school, Tom Jr. began to show the leadership skills that marked him for the rest of his life -- a gift that reached a climax on September 11. A talented football player, he stopped bullies, more than once, from harassing less popular students at school.He had a close relationship with his father -- later the best man at his wedding -- who took him hunting for deer and pheasant in the forests and fields of their home state. And he had a particular admiration for his father's brother Jack, who'd been a B-25 pilot in World War II.
Because of that admiration, and because his father wanted him to, Tom Jr. accepted an appointment to the Air Force Academy, where, in his first weeks, he stepped in to stop the hazing of a fellow classmate. He quickly realized military life wasn't for him, and transferred to Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. He was in line to become SJU's starting quarterback when a shoulder injury ended his football career. He transferred again, graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in finance, earned his MBA at Pepperdine, and continued a career that would take him, in the span of just ten years, to the position of senior vice president and chief operating officer of Thoratec, a California medical devices corporation. In the last year of his life, his income was close to a million dollars.
During the early stages of this rise, he met, courted, and married Deena Burchfield, a pretty flight attendant from Halley, Arkansas, who was herself an accomplished skeet shooter with a sweet golf swing. In 1996 Deena gave birth to fraternal twins, Halley and Madison, and, two years later, to a third daughter, Anna Clare. Says Deena: "Tom loved being a father. He took more satisfaction in the girls' accomplishments than in his own."
It was a challenge balancing his demanding job and the desire to spend time with his children. Tom had joined Thoratec in August 1996, moving his family to San Ramon, California. As his close friend and Thoratec CEO Keith Grossman puts it, Thoratec, at the time, was "a pretty pathetic little company" with about 40 employees. By 2001, the firm had grown into a major player in the medical devices field, employing 750 people. Weeks that stretched to 60 hours were not uncommon for Tom and Keith.
On September 7, 2001, they flew to Los Angeles to encourage press coverage on a Thoratec product. Tom returned home that night to have dinner with Deena and the girls, then caught a 10 p.m. red-eye east. As he often did when business took him to the other coast, he built in some time with his parents, stopping in Bloomington, en route. On this, his final visit home, he spent all day Saturday with his father, building a hunting stand at the farm they'd bought, just across the Minnesota border near Siren, Wisconsin.
"All the way up there and back, he was on the phone, doing business," his dad says now. But he took time to have a long conversation with a friend of a neighbor, a man named Larry Swanberg, who was waiting for a heart transplant. In a letter sent to Tom and Beverly a year after 9/11, Swanberg wrote: "That such a caring and concerned man would take his time to visit with some old guy up in the middle of nowhere is unbelievable to me."
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