Tom grew up in Mt. Wolf, a small south central Pennsylvania town where he still lives in the house he was brought home to from the hospital.

Tom graduated from Dartmouth College (BA), the University of London (MA) and M.I.T. (PhD). During his studies, Tom joined the Peace Corps where he worked on agricultural and irrigation projects for two years in a small rural village in India.

While at the University of London, Tom met Frances, marrying in 1975. Together for 42 years, Tom and Frances have raised two wonderful daughters.

Frances Wolf is an accomplished oil painter whose impressive professional career includes jobs as a market researcher for a publishing firm and a planner for an engineering, architectural and environmental consulting firm. She has held leadership positions on numerous boards in York county and its region where she has focused much of her attention on issues to do with urban redevelopment and education.

Tom and Frances’ daughters Sarah and Katie attended York County public schools before going to college. Sarah is an architect and lives with her husband, Joe, in New York. Katie is a geologist and lives with her husband, Jamie, in Boston.

Tom has been deeply and broadly involved with his community in York and beyond. He has served in leadership positions on a wide range of non-profit as well as business boards. 

Together, he and Frances volunteered as Planned Parenthood escorts. They have regularly served meals at soup kitchens, and even rolled up their sleeves to help build a Little League baseball field.

In his spare time, you can find Tom taking in a baseball game, immersed in a book, or driving around in his beloved 2006 Jeep Wrangler.

After graduating from M.I.T., Tom returned home and worked as a forklift operator and warehouse worker in the family business.

Later Tom took a risk by securing a loan with his two cousins to buy his family’s business — and as CEO, he turned it into America’s largest supplier of kitchen cabinets and a leading provider of specialty building products.

In early 2009, Tom was preparing to announce his bid for governor when he received an urgent phone call. The company he sold three years earlier — a company he spent twenty-five years building and growing — was on the brink of going bankrupt and closing.

Instead of walking away and leaving his former employees to join the ranks of the unemployed, Tom immediately ended his campaign, bought the business back, and put every penny he had into saving his family business.

Tom changed the business model, transforming it from just a distributor of other people’s products to a company that sources its own American-made cabinets, competing directly with Chinese imports.

Tom led this turnaround the right way, by treating workers fairly with good wages and benefits. He even returns 20 to 30 percent of the company’s profits back to its workers – because he knows that their work is what truly makes the company successful.

In November of 2014, Tom was elected Governor of Pennsylvania after driving hundreds of miles across the commonwealth in his 2006 Jeep Wrangler to meet with families, business owners, and hard-working Pennsylvanians.

The first thing Tom did as governor was to declare that he wouldn’t accept a salary or a pension, banned his administration from accepting gifts, reformed legal contracting to end the pay-to-play culture in Harrisburg, and made his daily schedule available to the public.

As promised during his campaign, Tom invested more in education at all levels than any governor before him. He has restored the billion dollar cut made by Harrisburg Republicans in the previous administration that devastated our schools so that we can set our children and our economy up for success, and he passed a fair funding formula to take politics out of school funding once and for all.

Tom is also growing the economy by moving ahead on large projects like the Shell Cracker Plant in Western Pennsylvania, the Port of Philadelphia, a steel plant in Johnstown, and expanding companies like Amazon to make Pennsylvania a technology hub. He even saved the jobs of working Pennsylvanians at a plant in Easton, Pennsylvania for Majestic Athletic the official provider of on-field uniforms for all 30 Major League Baseball teams.

Tom is also dedicated to ensuring that Pennsylvanians have access to quality and affordable health care. That’s why one of his first acts in office was to expand Medicaid which has given an additional 720,000 Pennsylvanians access to health care and he increased enrollment in CHIP by twenty percent. The governor’s actions have reduced Pennsylvania’s uninsured rate well below the national average to its lowest point in history and has made the commonwealth a national leader in new and innovative ways to battle the opioid epidemic that is ravaging Pennsylvania communities and families.

To protect our seniors, Tom has increased opportunities for older Pennsylvanians to remain in their homes, stood up to Donald Trump’s proposed “age tax” on insurance, and has saved more than 180,000 seniors from losing their Medicare Advantage health plans.

He’s also worked across the aisle to move long-stalled legislation like medical marijuana legalization, liquor modernization, and pension reform.