Favored by genetics—he hailed from a line of civil engineers—Abercrombie also made his mark as a field mechanic. Once, at the Milwaukee Journal, he designed and built a waterproof housing for his camera out of Plexiglas and used it to photograph a Lake Michigan shipwreck for the newspaper. His boss in Milwaukee, Bob Gilka (who later became Geographic's director of photography), recalls that Tom and his wife, Lynn, drove their car as close to the water's edge as possible. "Then Tom tied one end of a long rope to the bumper, the other end around his waist, and waded out into the lake with his homemade underwater camera to test it. He and Lynn had worked out a plan: If there was trouble, he would signal by pulling on the rope—Lynn's cue to start the car and pull Tom out of the lake."

He liked being married. In the Empty Quarter of Arabia, Tom and Lynn were traveling together when a local sheikh decided to claim Lynn, a tall, striking brunette he assumed to be Tom's daughter, as wife number four. He offered 30 camels for her. Tom countered with 50, and the pair, who were married in 1952, stayed together. "I really needed Lynn," Tom later explained. "And what would I do with 50 camels?"

Such trips together were rare in the early years. Though a Geographic photographer herself, Lynn was busy raising their daughter, Mari, and son, Bruce, at the couple's waterfront home in Maryland. So Tom often traveled alone, thousands of miles from home for months at a time. Yet whatever spare time he had went to writing long, tender letters to his "Rabbits" back home, or filling his suitcases with exotic knickknacks from the local suq to spring on them when he came through the front door.

By the mid-1960s, Tom was spending so much time in the Middle East that it was clear he'd found his niche. He mastered Arabic (along with German, French, and Spanish), read the Koran, and adopted an Arabic name, Omar, on his travels. But he was not, to anyone's knowledge, religious, and few anticipated the news that arrived in a letter to Editor in Chief Melville Grosvenor, dated April 17, 1965. It was Tom, writing from Mecca: "Greetings and best wishes from Islam’s holiest city. I’ve just had the singular honor to witness, to cover photographically, and to participate in one of the most moving experiences known to man, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and Arafat. It has been an unforgettable personal experience and, without a doubt, the climax of our coverage of Saudi Arabia."