A native of San Francisco, Theodore Grover Wurm was a member of Kappa Alpha Chi, Tau Delta Beta, Sancturary Society, Officers Club, the Foghorn staff, the Camera Cluob, Glee Club, and the College Players. He graduated in 1941 in Accounting. He was a Second Lieutenant in the Coast Artillery Reserve.
Theodore Grover Wurm was born in San Francisco in 1919. His father, Theodore F. Wurm, had office jobs for the old Ocean Shore railroad and the Southern Pacific. The family had deep roots in the West. His grandfather and grandmother had settled in Carson City, Nevada, and Grover Hot Springs in Alpine County, now a California state park -- was named for a relative.
He attended St. Ignatius High School and the USF, where he majored in Business. His senior thesis was an analysis of railroad tariffs, and ran on the track team. He was also a member of the Reserve Officers Training Corps, and he received a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in 1941.During World War II, he served with the Eighth Air Force in the Army Air Corps in Britain.
He later served in the Air Force Reserve and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. He had a strong sense of social justice: He was a friend of the labor leader Cesar Chavez and helped build a hospital for farm workers in Visalia in Tulare County.
He earned his living as an accountant and Office Manager for the Tesio Meat Co. in Oakland for more than 30 years, but his true passions were old railroads and long-distance running. He was a historian who wrote five books on the life and times of Western railroads. His books -- some of them written with co-authors -- chronicled the Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods Railway, a tourist line that was once world-famous, and the Hetch Hetchy railroad, operated by the city of San Francisco during the construction of the Hetch Hetchy water and power project in the Sierra. He also wrote a book about the obscure Caspar Lumber Co. railroad in Mendocino County, and two books on his favorite line, the Virginia and Truckee in Nevada. Â
"He would work all day, then go down to the basement and work on his books until 2 in the morning, get up at 6 and go to work. He was a many- faceted man, but running and his history were his life," his daughter said. (SFGate).
