Written by Doug Goodnough
His father was one of the most legendary figures in Hillsdale College Athletics history. In fact, he and his brothers literally grew up on campus watching their father, Johnny Williams, ’44, teach and coach multiple sports for Hillsdale spanning parts of four decades.
Tom Williams, ’67, said his father cast a long shadow at Hillsdale and was known as a problem solver. In fact, his father was almost too good at solving problems when it came to Tom and his brothers.
“Dad would always take care of stuff,” he said. “And that’s a comforting thing. But I can’t go out on my own if he’s always solving every issue. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to go away [to college].”
But he didn’t, at least initially. Williams accepted a scholarship to compete in track and field at Hillsdale and spent the first two years of his college career living at home and working part time.
“My junior year, I needed to get away,” he said of his decision to transfer. “I was living at home, and I didn’t get much of the true college life. It was finally time to experience something else other than the local college, the local town.”
So he took advantage of the college tuition exchange program and transferred to Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida, where he and his brothers had visited a couple of times when his father took Hillsdale’s baseball team on its annual spring trip.
“I just picked it out,” Williams said of his decision to attend Florida Southern. “I didn’t know anything about it, but I knew of it from a couple of trips to Florida.”
He intended to graduate from there until the Vietnam War happened.
“In the process of going from one [college] to another, it would have taken me an extra semester [to graduate],” Williams said. “Except the local draft board said you get four years and you’re then eligible [to get drafted]. And a couple of my friends actually got drafted, so I moved back my senior year to Hillsdale.”
He said one year of being away from Hillsdale was enough. When he returned to the College, he was able to live off campus with a group of friends and had a chance to experience other aspects of campus life like intramural sports and being an active member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity.
“I was more of a regular student then,” Williams said of his senior year. “I got more involved with the community, more involved with campus life.”
He earned varsity letters at both Hillsdale and Florida Southern in track and field as a long jumper. In his three years of competing for Hillsdale, Williams had three different coaches. During that time, Hillsdale had some outstanding teams featuring athletes like Bruce McLenna, ’68, Larry Covey, ’65, and Earl Hook, ’68.
When he graduated from Hillsdale with his business degree, Williams was again draft-eligible.
“I couldn’t get a job because I was draftable,” he said. “In fact, the draft board says, ‘Go get your physical. You’re ready to go.’”
However, Garwood Industries, a local company that manufactured hydraulic utility vehicles for the U.S. military, was looking for a field service engineer to help train soldiers to use the vehicles during the war.
“I interviewed, and they normally were hiring engineers, not business [majors],” Williams said. “But it was a job, and it came with a deferment.”
And an assignment to Vietnam, but as a civilian.
“The guy that preceded me lasted two weeks and left,” Williams said of his first job. “That’s why I got the job. They were desperate when I got over there. I’m 21 years old, and they send me halfway around the world with basically a little bit of training and no real benefit of anybody else telling me what to expect.”
Living in a tent with soldiers who were part of the Navy’s heavy equipment section, Williams said he was “shot at and was in the middle of rocket attacks several times.”
He learned he had some of his father’s problem-solving skills there.
“It was even worse than I had imagined, not the war part, but the job,” he said. “I get there, and out of 25 vehicles, two of them were operational. So my job was to get them operational.
“What are the problems?” he continued. “Well, they didn’t know enough about this machine because it looked like a normal vehicle. But there was no normal drive train. It was all hydraulics. … So you had to figure out how to fix them and then how to train these guys to use them.”
After a month of trial and error, he figured out how to fix the vehicles and then trained the soldiers to use them.
“I was successful in an impossible situation,” Williams said. “From then on, it gave me the confidence to do other things.”
Completing his contract with Garwood, he returned to Hillsdale College, accepting an open position in the Admissions Office. Williams spent three years recruiting new students to the College. He credited then-Admissions Director Harriet Hale for teaching him how to be a professional.
“She was really sophisticated,” he said of Hale. “She helped bring the College from being just a local little Michigan school to attracting students from all over the country. I got a lot out of that experience.”
Florida Southern again came calling, offering Williams a job in its admissions office. He spent seven years there and also decided to pursue law school at nearby Stetson University. Law degree in hand, he practiced law for a couple of years in Lakeland in the real estate realm.
He and a colleague eventually started their own real estate development, management, and investment company that specialized in historic renovations. Williams was also involved in several other companies before founding his own agency, Thomas A. Williams, PA, in 2000. He specializes in transactional law, including estate planning, real estate, and business contracts. Although he shuttered his office a few years ago, he still serves a few clients.
He and his wife, Linda, a retired banker, have lived in the Estero, Florida, area since 1993, and they enjoy fishing and golf. He and his three brothers, John, ’66, Frank, and Pete, ’83, still consider Hillsdale College home.
“[Hillsdale College] has always been an important part of my life, from childhood until even now,” Williams said.
Doug Goodnough, ’90, is Hillsdale’s senior director of Alumni Marketing. He enjoys connecting with fellow alumni in new and wonderful ways.
Published in July 2025
