Lt.-Col. Thomas Hitchcock (1900-1944)

He was born in Aiken, South Carolina, to a noted equestrian/polo playing family. In his final year at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, he left to join the Lafayette Flying Corps in France in the midst of World War I. He was shot down and captured by the Germans, but he escaped by jumping out of a train. He then hid in the woods during the daytime and walked more than one hundred miles over eight nights to the safety of Switzerland. After the war, he continued his studies at Harvard University and Oxford University, and in 1924 he competed in the Paris Olympics, winning a silver medal in Polo. Known as 'Ten-Goal Tommy,' writing about his performance in the 1927 Westchester Cup matches Polo magazine concluded: "No-one who has not seen a ten-goal player play fifteen-goal polo can imagine the stark power of this youth." Nelson Aldrich Jr. wrote Hitchcock's aptly named biography, American Hero.

During World War II, he was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel, Headquarters IX Air Support Command; U.S. Army Air Forces. He was awarded the Legion of Merit and the Distinguished Flying Cross (D.F.C.), but was killed while test-flying an experimental version of the P-51 Mustang fighter over Wiltshire in England. According to his son, William, the author F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled two characters in his books on Hitchcock – Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tommy Barban in Tender Is the Night (1934). Hitchcock's first edition of the former was inscribed: “To Tommy Hitchcock for keeps, from his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Los Angeles, 1927.” He married Margaret, daughter of William Larimer Mellon, Chairman of Gulf Oil and a nephew of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon. They were the parents of four children.