Tom Barnes

I was born in Fort Myers, Florida and when I was five years old my family moved to Central Georgia, the land my great grandfather fought for in places like Gettysburg, Cold Harbor and Saylers Creek.
I grew up listening to Civil War stories and faithfully recorded them into my journal. I studied English literature at Middle Georgia College and drama at the Pasadena Playhouse.
My military service was spent in naval aviation where I became a member of an
elite group known as the Hurricane Hunters. Squadron 114 flew routine patrol flights out of Miami into the Caribbean and South Atlantic in search of Tropical Storms. Once a storm was located the path and growth was watched and charted. The information we gathered was then passed along the Weather Bureau and they issued storm-warning bulletins to all potential areas in the path of the storm.
After the Navy I went to New York and soon landed my first Off Broadway play, “A Good Place to Raise a Boy.” Then I did tours with Bert Lahr in “Harvey”, Vera Miles in “The Country Girl” and June Lockhart in “Forty Carats.”
When PBS decided to do the TV Series Georgia’s Heritage I was hired as host narrator and writer. My initial writing assignment was to research and write two episodes for the series The Battle of Atlanta and The Battle of Chickamauga. Once those shows were finished we picked up out cameras and trekked all over Georgia filming, writing stories about Georgia and interviewing local historians.
Chasing hurricanes with the Hurricane Hunters had its moments but the last two segments of Heritage took anxiety and fear to a whole new level. I was given 48 hours to write a documentary on the Okefenokee Swamp, faced off with an alligator and had my first brush with the legendary Doc Holliday.

That brush with the legend gave me the idea and following tons of research and writing a fact based fiction emerged and is titled Doc Holliday’s Road to Tombstone.
That effort was followed by a nonfiction story based on my navy experience and called The Hurricane Hunters and Lost in the Bermuda Triangle.
My third book is a novel based on the Nazi plunder of art during World War II, The Goring Collection.
A fourth novel is in the works relating to the winding down of the African slave trade in the 1850’s titled Tungee’s Gold.
I do a blog on a variety of subjects called Rock The Tower.