An Aggie who was kidnapped in 1994 and spent 11 months as a hostage of Colombian guerrillas died unexpectedly of a heart attack over the weekend in Houston. Thomas Hargrove was 66.
The inspiration for the film Proof of Life, Hargrove's life led him to the jungles of Vietnam as a second lieutenant and into the sprawling Andes as a captive of leftist group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The Galveston resident's passion was writing, and he penned books about both experiences: Long March to Freedom in 1995 and A Dragon Lives Forever in 2003.
"He was a man of courage, of words, an incredibly articulate man passionate about international agriculture and the Green Revolution," said daughter-in-law Emily Hargrove of Dallas. "He could speak to the simplest man on the street and he could speak to presidents."
His wife, Susan, passed away in October 2009 after more than 40 years together, and family said the death devastated him. "He was turning around from that, and then this happened," Emily Hargrove said.
Thomas Hargrove was the middle of three children of Tom and Bargy Hargrove. He was raised, as he put it, "in a red-dirt, dryland cotton farm near Rotan in West Texas."
Following graduation from Texas A&M in 1966 with degrees in agricultural science and journalism, Hargrove earned a master's from Iowa State University, and around that time married his wife, Susan.
Soon after he shipped out to Vietnam, where he was part of a team advising the South Vietnamese in one of the country's most war-torn provinces near the Mekong Delta.
"Because I was a farm boy with advanced degrees in agriculture," he wrote in Long March, "I was assigned to advise the local agricultural officials, in addition to the regular duties of a junior grade officer."
He helped spread across Chuong Thien Province a high-yielding rice called IR8 and the new varieties doubled and tripled yields overnight in long-stagnant areas. In 1988, he met with an ex-Viet Cong who told him they could have killed him two decades earlier but he was spared because he brought new rice seeds.
"He'd tell people, 'It was rice that saved my life,'" Emily Hargrove said. "His time in Vietnam propelled him into international agriculture."
He immersed himself in the Green Revolution, the development of agriculture in the Third World. He joined the International Rice Research Institute in the Phillipines, and then after a career in Asia he decided in 1991 to head to Latin America, where he began working for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, based near Cali, Colombia.
His son, Miles Hargrove, said Monday -- the day after losing his father -- that he will remember him for his inspiration: He was always active and up to something, like the time he discovered Spanish ruins in a lake while scuba diving in the Phillipines. He wrote a book about that, too: The Mysteries of Taal.
"His life was the biggest adventure," Miles Hargrove said. "Growing up and trying to figure out what I wanted to do, just seeing how passionate he was about the career he had chosen and the things he did made me feel like I couldn't settle for anything less."
Perhaps a bit of adventure was on his mind the morning of Sept. 23, 1994, when he rushed to work and came to a stop at an intersection where he had to decide whether to drive through suburban Cali's heavy traffic or take the longer route through the pretty Colombian countryside.
In his book he writes of recalling one of author Robert Fulghum's rules for a better life: "Always take the scenic route."
Proof of Life -- a 2000 film in which David Morse plays a character based on Hargrove's experiences -- also starred Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe and pulled in almost $63 million in gross revenue.
In addition to Miles, Thomas Hargrove is survived by brother Raford of Rotan, sister Becky of Angelton, son Geddie, and 21-month-old grandson Everett of Dallas.
Services will be at 2 p.m. Saturday at First United Methodist Church in Rotan, which is in northwest Texas in Fisher County.
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