Thank you all for the wonderful photo collection assembled on the web page of Tom and friends. I could not help but notice so many of those photos were taken of Tom at parties! The photos remind me of his disarming leprechaun smile and twinkling eyes that fronted his quick wit and piercing analysis. I came to the Berkeley geophysics department initially as an undergraduate in physics. I was attracted by Verhoogen's intriguing lectures, but it was Tom's introductory course on seismology that snagged me hook, line, and sinker. He showed us how we could study some wiggles on a piece of paper and infer the structure of the Earth! It occurred to me at the time he found it just as fantastic and wonderful as we did.

I cherish my many recollections of graduate study with Tom in unconventional venues: a Friday afternoon balcony beer party talking about past Parkfield earthquake seismograms from antique seismic stations in Europe, performing back-of-the-envelope calculations of accelerometer sensitivities and noise floors while negotiating traffic on US-101, musings on the proper training of seismologists over a bottle of wine at the Mercury steak house, speculation over how far the water in the hot tub would be displaced (and us with it) if the Hayward fault were to...

Tom had a wonderful talent for thinking through a proposed hypothesis and designing/constructing an experiment that might actually test it. A few of his sage pieces of advice have served me well, "You have to know when to stop taking data and start thinking."

A Fond Farewell, Old Friend.