Former BJ photographer is Paul Bunyan,  Chet Atkins, Justin Wilson and David Zabriskie rolled into one body since he retired from the BJ in 2001.

He took time off from barn-building (he’s done at least three of those) to take down a huge tree that had the temerity to lean toward his house on his farm near Salt Fort Lake in southeast Ohio.

Writes Tom: “Big cleanup Job.”

Indeed.

Tom also has been strumming a mean guitar for more than six decades at campfires around America.

There’s a bit of Willie Nelson in him, too, because he’s often on the road again. Tom and wife Kay have driven 3,000 miles along the Gulf Coast and up through Appalachia and another 10,000 miles, most of it in Alaska, by spending months in their truckbed camper.

For a change of pace, they cruise the Caribbean. Tom and retired BJ photographer Don Roese and their wives took a trip through the Panama Canal together not that many years ago.

And he’s quite familiar with bicycling through life with wife Kay Ann Shaffer Marvin of Coshocton. They live on a farm in Guernsey County, just north of Salt Fork State Park, near I-77 and north of Cambridge.

They met when Tom was transportation supervisor and Kay was a school secretary for the same school district.


Tom and Kay have seven children between them.

His are Steve Marvin, a bank assistant vice president who lives in Cambridge; Brian Marvin, who lives in Worthington and is a Reynoldsburg police detective; Misty Bellon, a registered nurse living in Eunice, Louisiana, who is married with a son, Nick; and Beth Marvin Stevens, a Los Angeles attorney, from Tom’s marriage to former BJ staffer and former Hoover High School English and journalism teacher Pam McCarthy, with a son, Jackson Marvin Stevens.

Kay’s children are Tim Wilson, an electric company forester in Florida; Debi Geese, who lives in Fresno, Ohio and is married with two children; and Brett Wilson, a contractor in Coshocton.

Tom and Kay have 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

This gives them a reason to travel to Louisiana, Florida, California and other parts of Ohio.

Their neighbor on an adjoining farm is Mark Kovack, who handled computers for the BJ.

Tom’s address is:
74321 Birch Rd
Kimbolton,Oh 43749

But I wouldn’t count on him being home, so you’d better phone (740) 498-7471 to make sure he’s not gallivanting somewhere or bulldozing another tree on the back 40.