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Alumni Feature

Harry D. Brooks: Explorer Par Excellence


Harry BrooksThere are tourists, and there are explorers. Harry D. Brooks (BS ’70) most definitely belongs in the latter category.

Brooks, 58, a former Marine aviator who once flew fighters, now owns a company that investigates aviation and marine accident insurance claims. Last year he was re-elected to a second term on the board of directors of the venerable Explorers Club. Based in New York City, the century-old Explorers Club is an international professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research and “to the ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore.”

Specifically, the club promotes the scientific exploration of land, sea, air, and space by supporting research and education in the physical, natural, and biological sciences. The crew that won the $10-million X-Prize in October 2004 for building and flying their privately funded vehicle, SpaceShip One, to an altitude of 71.5 miles was a recent Explorers Club Flag Expedition.

“First to the North Pole, first to the South Pole, first to the summit of Mount Everest, first to the deepest point in the ocean, first to the surface of the moon—all accomplished by our members,” declares the club’s Web site (http://explorers.org).

Club members have included such intrepid adventurers as Admiral Robert Peary, Lowell Thomas, Sir Edmund Hillary, Ernest Shackleton, Jimmy Doolittle, Thor Heyerdahl, Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, Theodore Roosevelt, and Buzz Aldrin.

Aldrin is an honorary director. Hillary, the first Westerner to reach the top of Mount Everest in May 1953, is currently the Explorers Club’s honorary president.

An explorer, explains Brooks, “must be looking for something, must be trying to discover or explore something. It’s not just riding the tourist bus.” For his part, Brooks has “always had kind of an urge to travel and a scientific curiosity. I drove to Alaska one summer when I was at Carolina. It’s a long way from Columbia to Juneau.”

With no formal scientific training, Brooks has gained his expertise on the job. “But I’ve always been interested in science,” he says. “As a kid, I actually read the entire World Book Encyclopedia. I had it in my room. And flying has a lot of scientific aspects to it, especially flying fighters.”

Brooks’ first Explorers Club expedition surveyed coral reefs of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. From there, he went on to Papua, New Guinea, to climb 14,000-foot Mount Wilhelm, where, as he discovered, “there is snow on the equator.”

He has done other coral reef surveys in Belize and Honduras, scoured Midway Atoll for airplane wrecks, and led several expeditions into the Peruvian Amazon with the Bora Indians, once with 11 high school students to introduce them to bio- and ethno-diversity. But his favorite expedition was to the nation of Kiribati, a collection of small islands dotting the central Pacific. On a second trip there in the late 1990s to the remote island of Butaritari, his group discovered the skeleton of a Caucasian male.

It turns out there were two battles on Butaritari during World War II; the Marines were forced to leave their dead behind after Carlson’s Raid in August 1942. After Brooks reported the skeleton to the Marine Corps, searchers were dispatched to the island, where they eventually found a total of 18 skeletons. “They brought these guys back,” says Brooks, and in August of 2001, the remains of most of the long-dead Marines were buried at Arlington National Cemetery. (A few families buried their loved ones in local cemeteries.)

Brooks grew up in West Virginia and attended Georgia Military College in Milledgeville, later transferring to the Moore School where he majored in banking, finance, and insurance. “I wasn’t a stellar student,” he says, “but I got a good education.” After learning to fly and serving in the Marine Corps from 1970 to 1975, Brooks joined the Marine Reserve and began working in the insurance industry, investigating home and auto claims. He also went to law school.

“After a while,” he says, “I figured that if there are home-owner and auto claims, there must also be airplane claims.” He launched his first company in this arena in 1978. In the fall of 2002, he founded Atlanta-based International Loss Management to handle aviation and marine accident insurance claims. The firm also does product liability work for manufacturers and defense attorneys.

Now, for business two or three days a week, Brooks flies the 6-seater Piper Lance that he has owned for 23 years. “My airplane is really a necessary business tool,” he explains, “because I investigate claims and accidents nationwide.”

As an Explorers Club board member, he and his colleagues “talk about money—raising money and spending money, and we are responsible for the overall club governance. We also have a fund set aside to help young people do explorations.” Brooks is also chairman of the club’s Flag and Honors Committee, which decides which members are allowed to carry an official club flag on their expeditions. “Our flags have been to some very, very exotic places,” says Brooks, including to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest point on earth.

Brooks’ teenaged son and daughter are student members of the club, and have gone with their Dad on several expeditions. His wife has not. “To be an active member of the Explorers Club,” Brooks explains, “you either have to have a spouse who is an explorer, or a spouse who is understanding. My wife is very understanding.”

—Jan Collins