Thomas William Hagan Jr.,  was born Aug 23, 1943 in Washington, D.C. (Sibley Hospital), and died about Aug 27, 1991 in Temple, TX (at home). He was a physicist in the aerospace industry.    

The following is a remembrance we received from Tom's brother Mike Hagan.
 
TOMMY

I was not a serious student. I preferred to play, climb trees and run with the wind. My mind wandered in class. By the time I realized that I was somewhere else, I had missed the lesson. I would decide the homework assignments were not meant for me. The next day, I would cower behind the kid in front of me in hopes that the teacher would call on one of my classmates.

 My brother Tommy, 16 months older than I, was not only a serious student he was quite a bit smarter than me.  Oh, I was smart enough to get by, but Tommy was super smart. He thought of himself as a genius.  He would say so. And actually, he may have been a genius.  He was way ahead of his classmates in the sciences, in languages, in math and in just about any subject in which he took an interest.  In the mid-sixties, he obtained a bachelor�s and a master�s degree in Physics, took a job with one of the aerospace firms that dotted the Washington D.C. area at the time and went to work helping to put in place the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs that ultimately landed a man on the moon.

 When I returned home from Vietnam in 1969, I stopped by the draft board to make sure they changed my status.  The lady who was the administrator there told me that my brother had visited earlier concerning his defense industry deferment and she wanted to warn me that there was something wrong with him.  By then, of course, I knew that. My whole family knew it.  Tommy had lost his job and he was becoming erratic.  Using plywood, he had boarded up his apartment window and had put triple locks on his door. He was having delusions of some kind of a diabolical creature following him.  He was suffering great anxiety from fear and from the profound isolation that comes with mental illness.

 Shortly thereafter, I accepted a job with Alcoa and moved to Pittsburgh, PA.  On a subsequent call home, I was told that my brother had been evicted and my parents had taken him back into the house.  This change created a difficult family environment as my younger sisters were 15 and 13 at the time.  Tommy became hostile during the ensuing months and threatened to kill them all.  He told my mother he would start with her.  My parents arranged for my sisters to leave the house and stay over with friends.  They then went out to dinner, discussed their dilemma and made the only decision they could make.  They went directly to the Montgomery County Maryland police department and arranged to have my brother picked up from the house and committed to the state hospital in Sykesville, Maryland.  Some months later, Tommy tried to make good on his threat and attacked and injured both of my parents as they visited him at the hospital.

 In 1978, my father retired and he and my mother moved to Austin, Texas.  By now, my brother was out of the hospital and under reasonable control due to the use of drugs that became available for schizophrenia during the 1970s.  Since my mother's mother owned a rental house in Temple, Texas, it was decided that Tommy who was still unemployed and probably unemployable would move into that property.  Tommy lived there in relative peace until 1991 when he was found dead at the age of 48.

 Michael Hagan