Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace

Tom is 82-year-old Tom Hartwig, an old-timer best known locally for building and firing homemade cannons. Toiling in a shop that Perry describes as an antique store stocked by Rube Goldberg, curated by Hunter Thompson, and rearranged by a small earthquake, Tom works from scratch to make everything from shovel handles to parts for a quarter-million-dollar farm equipment. He has an endless reservoir of stories dating back to the days of his prize Model A.

Visiting Tom is dominated by the elderly man’s equanimity and ultimately by unvarnished tenderness.

Tuesdays with Morrie meets Shop Class as Soulcraft as Michael Perry, a middle-aged father of daughters, finds guidance and inspiration in visits with his octogenarian, cannon-shooting neighbor. Visiting Tom celebrates the wisdom, heart, and sass of a vanishing generation that embodies the indomitable spirit of small-town America.