Joseph Thomas "Tom" West III (22 November 1939 – 19 May 2011) was the protagonist of the Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction book The Soul of a New Machine. West worked for Data General Corporation as a hardware engineer and vice president, retiring as Chief Technologist in 1998. West died at the age of 71 in his Westport, Massachusetts home of an apparent heart attack. He is survived by two daughters, one of whom is Jessamyn West.
His nephew, Christopher Schwarz, is a former editor of Popular Woodworking magazine, author of The Anarchist Toolchest, and co-founder of Lost Art Press.
Famous quotes containing the words tom and/or west:
“New York state sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse. And they got no windows in the workhouse. You know, in the old days they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker.”
—John Michael Hayes (b. 1919)
“It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Portland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.”
—For the State of New Hampshire, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)