Thomas W. Moore*

Thomas Moore was born in 1918 in Meridian, Mississippi. His father died before Moore was three, and his mother supported him and his two sisters as a school teacher. "I didn't realize until very late in life that I didn't have much as a child," he said. "The whole community was in the same boat." By the age of six, Moore was selling vegetables door to door. He went to work for the local newspaper when he was 10, bundling papers and delivering them to the trains.

Encouraged by his mother, Moore graduated from the University of Missouri, working his way through by waiting on tables and cleaning the zoology labs. He became a naval aviator in World War II. During his U.S. Navy service, he became intrigued by broadcasting and was determined to make it his career.

Moore remembers vividly the first time he saw a television. "It was in 1948," he says. "I walked into the back of a truck and saw, of all things, an Easter sunrise service on a screen. I'd never been so shocked in my life. It would have been difficult not to envision that television would soon take over. I knew immediately that it would be my life."

While attending night school at the University of Southern California, Moore began his career selling radio advertising in Los Angeles. He soon switched to television sales for CBS and, in 1957, he joined the ABC network in New York as vice president of sales. By 1968, Moore had become president of the ABC Television Network.

Two years later, he left ABC to found Ticketron with a group of investors. He left that enterprise after two years and formed a company called Tomorrow Entertainment, which produced television classics such as The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Body Human, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and many others.

A lifelong supporter of the U.S. Navy, Moore was the first president of the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, and helped raise more than $30 million to construct and develop the museum.

Moore said he had no definition for success. "At no time in my life have I felt I was a success," he said. "I think succeeding is feeling that the better and best is yet to come." He advised young people to think of how they can be of service to others.

Of his Horatio Alger Award, Moore said he had no idea when he received his award in 1968 that the organization would build into an institution for so much good. "I have watched the Association grow and succeed," he said, "and I wear and display the badge of membership with pride."