Thomas Michael Greenwood
Obituary

Thomas Michael Greenwood was born Feb 10, 1950 in San Bernardino, CA to Irene and Jacob Greenwood. Tom, along with his parents and younger sibling Rick, lived in the city of Colton up through the boys’ formative years

Growing up, Tom’s maternal grandmother, his Bubbe (Yiddish for grandmother), was very important to him, teaching him some of the Yiddish he was known to mutter while cooking in the kitchen well into adulthood.

As a teenager, Tom took up the guitar and became active in the folk music and coffee house scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s in and around San Bernardino, with Tom and his band once opening for Taj Mahal, and often covering Pure Prairie League’s “Amie.”

After getting clean and sober in 1986 through Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Tom began working in the alcohol and other drug (AOD) recovery field at the Roque Center, becoming a counselor dealing with clients in both the Detox and Treatment Units in 1987. In 1990, Tom received his Clinical Supervisor credential and served as Program Director supervising both the 18 bed Detox unit and 70 bed Recovery unit. For over a decade, Tom also served on the Board of Directors of the California Association of Addiction Recovery Resources prior to that agency merging with another agency to form CCAPP.

In 2014, Tom joined Cornerstone of Southern California as a case manager on a full-time basis and eventually moved to part-time, ultimately retiring in March of 2025. And although retired, Tom continued to help facilitate and nurture the weekly Family Support Group he helped found at Cornerstone, inspiring similar meetings to take shape at different programs.

Tom was a lover of the visual arts, frequently attending the Laguna Beach Sawdust Festival, as well as an aficionado of cinema, especially foreign films by Fellini, as well as having a special fondness for crime procedurals. He was a voracious reader and regular patron of the Mary Wilson library, his local library in Seal Beach, with Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings series as well as more obscure authors like Richard Brautigan having a special place in his heart. Tom also enjoyed cooking as well as enjoying meals with friends and family, in particular the Linguini Pescatore at Franco's Italian Restaurant in Cypress. And there was something about the combination of red meat over fire in an outdoor setting that awakened within Tom the primordial urge to grunt and occasionally howl at the moon.

And although losing the ability to play guitar along his journeys, Tom’s love of music, especially acoustic music, never dissipated, being an avid lover of jazz, bluegrass, folk, and Americana. Some of his favorite artists included John Prine, Leo Kottke, Bonnie Raitt, John Hiatt, John Fahey, and Jason Isbell. Tom also wrote and occasionally read his own poetry at local open mics.

Tom loved California, living in it for most of his life with the exception of a short stint in Ohio with his first wife. However, the central coast with its quiet towns and towering redwoods offered Tom a break from the pressures of work, often spending a couple of vacation days a year staying in or around Cambria.

Tom remarried in 1974 and his son was born later that year.

Tom would eventually marry the love of his life, Carolyn, in August of 2025, sharing 17 wonderful years together after meeting in a chat room for cinema fans in 2009. Along with sharing a love for film, Tom and Carolyn also shared a love for critters and fur-babies, especially cats and dogs. Tom was a committed husband to Carolyn, father to his son, John, and grandfather to both his grandson Forrest and the apple of his eye, granddaughter, Emma.

Tom loved to help people, especially to turn their lives around; and through simple acts of kindness, he spread a little more light around what he knew from experience could be a very dark and lonely world.

Tom is survived by his wife, Carolyn, son, John, granddaughter, Emma, grandson, Forrest, daughter-in-law, Candice, and many, many friends and colleagues both within and outside the AA and drug and alcohol recovery community.