Early Life
Thomas Cassin Kinkaid was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on 3 April 1888, the second child and only son of Thomas Wright Kinkaid, a naval officer, and his wife Virginia Lee née Cassin. At the time, Thomas Wright Kinkaid was on leave from the U.S. Navy and employed at the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts. When Thomas was only a year old, his father was posted to the USS Pinta, and the family moved to Sitka, Alaska, where a third child, Dorothy, was born in 1890. Over the next few years the family successively moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Norfolk, Virginia; Annapolis, Maryland and Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Thomas attended Western High School for three years before entering a U.S. Naval Academy preparatory school. He sought and secured an appointment to Annapolis from President Theodore Roosevelt, and was asked to take the admission examination. The Navy was undergoing a period of expansion, and the intake of midshipmen was double that of two years earlier. Of the 350 who took the examination, 283 were admitted. The class was the largest since the Academy had opened in 1845.
Kinkaid was admitted to Annapolis as a midshipman in July 1904. His instructors included four future Chiefs of Naval Operations: William S. Benson, William V. Pratt, William D. Leahy and Ernest J. King. In 1905 he took an instructional cruise on USS Nevada. He also spent six weeks on USS Hartford, his only experience of a warship under sail. In subsequent years, his training cruises were on the USS Newark and USS Arkansas which, while much newer, were by this time also obsolete. He participated in sports, particularly in rowing, earning a seat in the Academy′s eight-oar racing shell. He graduated on 5 June 1908, ranked 136th in his class of 201.
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