Piercing the Horizon. Sunny Tsiao
back to the Bay Area, where he finished grade school in Vallejo, California, near the Mare Island Naval Shipyard.
Tough times had hit America in the 1930s. The Great Depression had sent the US and other Western countries into a deep economic tailspin. Poverty and unemployment afflicted the families of many of Paine’s schoolmates and friends. The stock market crash and the financial breakdown that followed had turned the American dream into the long nightmare of a dust-bowl for a whole generation of hardworking families. Being a Navy officer, George Paine was able to shield his family somewhat from the widespread hardship. Even with the world economy in the abyss, the US Navy was still building up its fleet and providing jobs to long lines of waiting workers.
Local shipyards, especially, looked for able boys and young men to work all kinds of odd jobs. During the summers, Paine worked as a welder in the yards around the harbor. The experience was good for the young teenager. As an apprentice shipfitter, he worked with men of all ages repairing many old ships in dry dock. From this he learned the finer points of shipbuilding and good workmanship. Long days working in the squalid conditions of the yards taught him firsthand the nuances of teamwork and the importance of getting along with those on whom he depended to get the job done.
Ocean vessels, and in particular, submarines, became his passion. Young Thomas was absolutely captivated. His father had given him a model S-boat when he was just five. (He would keep the model for six decades.) George Paine often took his son with him to the shipyard, where he would stay all day. He learned the sailor’s trade and mingled with machinists’ mates, deckhands, and stokers, gruff workers whose hands were rough and fingernails dirty. Peering into many periscopes as a Navy Junior soon sold him on the high adventures of one born to prowl the depths of the sea.5
After three years in California, the family moved back to Norfolk, Virginia. George Paine pushed his son academically. Math and science took top priority. Tom performed well enough scholastically throughout high school and graduated near the top of Matthew Fontaine Maury High School’s Class of 1938.6
Military pomp and circumstance, parades, firing of cannons, and ship christenings were all common year-round activities for him. George Paine was a career military man. From a young age, he instilled in his son a strong sense of patriotism rooted in traditional American values. Those who knew him described Tom as a personable yet not overly gregarious boy. He developed some uncommon pastimes that require one to pay close attention to details to receive their full enjoyment: book collecting, sailing, and beachcombing—leisure activities he carried into adulthood.7
His interest in sailing and seafaring had already been cemented by age ten. That was when his father gave him a first edition of the book How to Build the Racing Catboat Lark by the Rudder Publishing Company. He recalled that he easily devoured the pages even at that age. Using the simple drawings in the book, he spent a summer building a seaworthy sailboat and tested it in the currents of the Napa River by the San Francisco Bay. In Norfolk he again used it, inviting his high school friends to brave the eddies of the Chesapeake Bay with him.8
In the summer of 1938, he had a decision to make. Coming out of high school, the one and only place he wanted to go was the nearby US Naval Academy. He wanted to follow his father’s footsteps into the Navy. Having been raised and rooted in the values of military tradition his whole life, that had been his plan all through high school.
His application was proceeding smoothly until his physical screening. It was then that the medical examiner told him the bad news. While his eyesight was not poor enough to keep him out, it would probably worsen after four years of studies to the point that he might not qualify for an officer’s commission. He would not be going to Annapolis, although not by his own choice.
Tom Paine was devastated. But he still wanted to study engineering. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was not too far away, so he turned his attention to the country’s most prestigious engineering school. But George Paine thought his son, not yet seventeen, would be a bit young for the academic rigors that he would encounter there. He advised Tom to instead try his own alma mater, Brown University. There, he could get a more diverse education in the liberal arts as well as exposure to a curriculum in engineering. He could then try to go on to graduate school at MIT. Tom had not seriously considered Brown up to that point, but he followed his father’s advice.9
In the fall of 1938, the sixteen-year-old left home and went up the coast to Providence. Of the 470 incoming freshmen that year, he was among the youngest. He began a general education program in the arts and sciences but with an eye toward majoring in engineering. Classes in calculus, European history, creative writing, mechanics, and classics were all required. He later reflected quite candidly that as a student he was probably just a “little better than average.”10 It showed on his transcript. He would receive an A if the subject interested him, but failed a semester of German because he did not see the logic in memorizing vocabulary. In his third year, he refined his studies to concentrate more heavily on the discipline of electrical engineering.
Initially taught as a discipline of physics, the study of electricity as an independent field of engineering matured rapidly in the first decades of the twentieth century. Since the late 1800s, electricity had dramatically transformed the way people lived. By the 1930s, the field was an established flagship of modern engineering sciences, taught at universities around the world along with chemical, civil, industrial, mechanical, and later, aeronautical engineering. Demand for electricity was growing rapidly. The widespread, everyday use of industrial and home appliances, long-distance power transmission, lights, and radios, had made it into the high-tech industry of its day.
Tom pledged to a fraternity, as was common for all gentlemen of that era. The school’s chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon elected him over three other candidates to be the vice president. Founded in 1844 by fifteen Yale students, the East Coast fraternity, while not exclusive, was certainly prestigious, having long had a well-established reputation as a rather elite society. Members of the national organization included five presidents and three Supreme Court justices. Outside of class, he worked for the Brown Daily Herald newspaper and the university’s John Hay Library. To relax and socialize, he pursued his favorite pastime: sailing. He joined the school’s yacht club and spent many warm weekends sailing the Narragansett Bay and the sites around Warwick and Bristol. On occasion, the club would test their skills out past Nantucket Sound in the scenic surroundings of Cape Cod Bay. Tom’s four years of college were quite ordinary, by all accounts. In May 1942, George and Ada watched their son receive his bachelor’s degree in engineering.11
He was ready for MIT academically and had been preparing for graduate studies there while he was still at Brown. The country, along with most of the other industrialized nations, was finally beginning to work its way out of the mire of the great global economic depression. But the US entry into World War II had changed his plans. The rest of the world had already been at war for several years. In Asia, decades of skirmishes had exploded into a full-scale, all-out conflict after the Empire of Japan invaded the Republic of China in 1937. Two years later, the German Third Reich plunged Europe into apocalyptic war with a blitzkrieg attack on neighboring Poland. The United States assisted China and Great Britain with supplies and volunteers, all the while trying to stay out of the conflict. But December 7, 1941, changed everything, as war came unannounced to the country’s doorstep.
We’re going out to sink enemy ships, but we are coming back.—Stephen H. Gimber, Commanding Officer of the USS Pompon
The Brown Daily Herald was just about to go to press when the news hit. He took his coat off and sat back down in the university newspaper office. They needed to stay late and get the paper’s first extra edition out as soon as they could. He glanced at the clock. It was almost five in the afternoon on the East Coast. In Hawaii, it was not yet noon. The attack had already been over for two hours. By now, the Associated Press wire service out of Washington had confirmed the news.
December