I returned home from spending Labor Day weekend up at our cabin (now officially Aux Pinebrook Radio) to find shocking news on my message recorder:  Tom Mills had passed away on September 1^st, in his sleep, at home, of a heart attack!  A week later two dozen Aux members and 60-70 other friends and work associates held a wake in his honor.  The familiar voice of our Monday night nets, for 25 years, was silenced.  What follows are some thoughts about Tom and how much he will be missed.

I met Tom in late Summer of 1974.  Nancy and I had moved to Foster City from Southern California and were shopping for a flotilla to transfer into.  DIRAUX gave me the meeting times and places of three nearby flotillas and the first one I visited was in Redwood City.  Tom was visiting that night, to make a presentation on Auxiliary comms.  Anyway, he was the first member to greet me as I walked into the Sequoia Yacht Club.  He took the time to ask me about my participation in Auxiliary activities and seemed genuinely interested in the conversation.  He said he was involved a lot in communications and asked me if I knew about fixed-land stations and land-mobile units.    I confessed that I didn’t, although I knew they existed.  He offered to answer any questions I had about them, and to help me set up a facility if I wanted to.  That was the start of a 28-year friendship that I value deeply.

By 1977, I had fooled enough people into thinking that I was a Comms expert to be appointed DSO-CM.  I welcomed most aspects of the office, but dreaded the business of broadcasting nets.  Old-timers may remember the process back then.  You convinced someone to drive up to a mountaintop once a month, Mt. Diablo and Mt. Tam were the favorite sites; and you would broadcast an innocuous message on Channel 83 about some Auxiliary event or activity.  Then those who had copied the traffic would read it at their flotilla meeting and mail in their copy of the message to get so many “qualification” points.  Pretty silly when you think about it now, but back then, that was how things were done.

Repeaters:  Tom described repeaters for me, and how they could be used to perform the net broadcasts, without ever leaving the comfy surroundings of your home!  He had the design worked out in his head, had contacted a suitable high site and wanted my endorsement of the project to run it past the Coast Guard TTM office.  Of course he got it.

By mid-year we had an aging tube-type GE repeater up on Black Mountain, which had once been owned and used by a Taxi company for dispatching, with Tom making it work.  Only a handful of us used it at first, and truth be told, we were a little less than “official” in what we chatted about.  Which is one of the things I so admired about Tom and his administration of the repeater.

Others might have let the success of the system go to their head, gotten possessive, made it hard for some to access it, difficult to use or heavily burdened with restrictive usage prohibitions, like “Auxiliary official business only”.  Tom would have none of that.  He intentionally encouraged a relaxed operating style on the repeater, providing needed on-air time for new members, and permitted its use for a variety of Auxiliary purposes.

Early land-mobile radios:  Another aspect of Tom’s leadership in land-mobile operations was his recognition of the fact that limiting our activity to hams would jeopardize its success.  And non-hams didn’t have 2M rigs to access the system.   So Tom took the lead in visiting ham fests, garage sales and the DOD Tracy Defense Depot to help those of us without ham rigs access the system.  I treasure the first Handi-Talkie Tom got for me.  A 33-pound, two channel, ¾ watt back-breaker that had served the Army and the Forest Service for years.

 Mt. Diablo repeater:  Although I know Ted Dunbar headed up the effort to get funding for the new machine, and wade through the morass of Coast Guard red-tape to get us up on the mountain, it was Tom who assembled it, programmed it, and got it all working.  Sadly the last email I got from Tom was only days ago, specifying the codes to activate the new system’s remote-base unit.  25 years have elapsed between installation of the Black Mountain and Mt. Diablo repeaters, and I for one will think of Tom every time I hear the distinctive “ca-thunk” squelch tail of both systems.  It’s so sad that now that we have a machine that can reach 90% of the district, we won’t have Tom around to guide us in how best to use it.  But then its coverage is so wide, and Tom’s dedication is so great, I suspect he’ll be listening in for each week’s nets and SAR cases.

Copyright © 2002,  R. M. Peterson,   USCGAUX

The opinions expressed are the author’s.  Reproduction in Coast Guard and Auxiliary publications is permitted and encouraged, with proper editorial acknowledgment.