Ships
- USS Enterprise (CV-6) Commander in command from 10 July 1944 · Relieved on 29 July 1944
- USS Savo Island (CVE-78) Captain from 6 December 1945 · Relieved on 18 February 1946
Few men who ever commanded Enterprise were as famous ashore as Tom Hamilton. He was born on 26 December 1905 in Hoopeston, Illinois, and went to high school in Columbus and Granville, Ohio. At the Naval Academy he starred on the 1926 team, which went 9–0–1 and won a national championship. The one blemish was a tie with Army that has been called one of the greatest football games ever played. He graduated in 1927.
After the required surface duty he earned his wings and flew patrol planes out of San Diego in 1938–39. In between, he returned to Annapolis as Navy's 21st head football coach from 1934 to 1936. He married Emmie Spalding in 1932. During World War II he served in aviation training and aboard Enterprise as flight deck officer and then executive officer in 1943–44, commanding her during a brief refit in July 1944.
After the war he coached Navy again (1946–47) and became athletic director at Annapolis. He left the Navy a rear admiral to become athletic director at the University of Pittsburgh (1949–59), where he also coached in 1951 and 1954. From 1959 to 1971 he was founding commissioner of the Athletic Association of Western Universities, which became the Pacific-8 and later the Pac-12. He chaired the President's Council on Physical Fitness, spent 16 years on the U.S. Olympic Committee and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1965.
Hamilton died on 3 April 1994 and is buried in the Naval Academy cemetery.