Tom Slick

For the fictional character, see Tom Slick (cartoon).

Thomas Baker "Tom" Slick, Jr. (1916–October 6, 1962) was a San Antonio, Texas based businessman and adventurer who made a fortune in oil. Slick's family moved to Texas to follow the oil boom of the 1920s.

Early life

Tom Slick graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1934 and Yale University in 1938. At Yale he was a pre-medicine biology major and earned Phi Beta Kappa honors. During his Yale years, Slick and some of his classmates travelled to Scotland to look for the Loch Ness Monster. The group found nothing, but Tom's search for unknown animals had begun. After he graduated from Yale, Slick became a consultant to the War Production Board during World War II and served in the Navy. He later pursued graduate studies at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Career

During the 1950s, Slick was an adventurer. He turned his attention to expeditions to investigate Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and Yeti. Slick's interest in cryptozoology was little known until the 1989 publication of the biography Tom Slick and the Search for Yeti, by Loren Coleman. Coleman continued his study of Tom Slick in 2002 with Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology. That book mentions many of Tom Slick's adventures, in politics, art, science, and cryptozoology, including his involvement with the CIA and Howard Hughes.

Tom Slick was a friend of many celebrities, including Hughes and fellow flier Jimmy Stewart.

Slick founded several research organizations, beginning with the forerunner of the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SwFBR) in 1941. His most well-known legacy is the non-profit Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), which he founded in 1947 to seek revolutionary advancements in technology. SwRI continues to advance pure and applied science in a variety of fields from lubricant and motor fuel formulation to solar physics and planetary science. He also founded the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio in 1958 to do consciousness research.

He was an advocate of world peace. In 1958 he published the book, Permanent Peace: A Check and Balance Plan. He funded the Tom Slick World Peace lectures at the LBJ Library, and the Tom Slick Professorship of World Peace at the University of Texas.

Slick died in 1962 in an airplane crash near Dell, Montana at the age of 46, the same age his father died.

Nicolas Cage was to have portrayed Slick in a movie, Tom Slick: Monster Hunter, but the project stalled. ^*

Foundation activities

Notwithstanding Slick's interest in peace, SwFBR is now involved with biological warfare research. Their research and safety practices have come under criticism from the watchdog group Sunshine Project which has filed numerous complaints.

The lab is also a source of Fusarium fungus, part of a proposed American "Drug war" strategy to use bioherbicides to eradicate illegal Colombian crops^*. DEA stopped funding Fusarium research in the United States during the early 1990s after it learned that the fungus can be deadly to immunocompromised people but in 2006 the plan to use it in Colombia was approved by the House of Representatives.

Biographies

Loren Coleman, Tom Slick and the Search for Yeti, Faber & Faber, 1989, ISBN 0571129005
Loren Coleman, Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology, Fresno, California: Linden Press, 2002, ISBN 0941936740
Catherine Nixon Cooke, Tom Slick, Mystery Hunter, Paraview, Inc., 2005, ISBN 0-9764986-2-6 (author is Slick's niece and former director of the Mind Science Foundation)

External links

Patents

, Brush Puller, filed August 1947, issued December 1950
, Apparatus for erecting a building, (lift-slab construction), filed July 1948, issued August, 1955