On December 14, 1944, he married Marjorie Oletha Payne, 1920-Living, in San Diego, California. Following the war, they both attended the University of California (Berkeley), graduating in 1948. For a short time, Bill worked with IBM in San Francisco. He and Marjorie owned one, then another, MG sports car. Their first son, Daniel Charles Thomas (1950-Living), was born October 8, 1950, in Alameda.
The family moved to San Diego in 1952, and Bill began working with Consolidated Vultee Aircraft (CONVAIR), which would eventually be taken over by General Dynamics Corporation. Following the Russian launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 (beginning the Space Age), Bill began working in the Atlas missile program of the soon-to-be formed Astronautics division of G.D. His specialty would be the fuel supply system, for which development and implementation he served as a test engineer. (In addition, he often said that the G.D. of General Dynamics Corporation could easily stand for "God Damn Corporation.")
On September 16, 1958, Marjorie gave birth to their second child, Bruce William Thomas (1958-Living). By this time Bill had almost completed building a small sailing sloop, the Twod Oller, which was launched shortly thereafter in Mission Bay, and which he sailed in the early 1960s, until selling it. In the early 1970s, he and Marjorie bought another commercially constructed sailboat, the Santana, on which they made a number of cruises off the coast of Southern California and many weekend and day trips.
In 1976 and 1977, Bill underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatments for Hodgekin's disease. Debilitation from those, along with his history of smoking and alcoholism, contributed to his death from pneumonia in July, 1977. He has been much missed. Son, friend, brother, hero, sailor, husband, father, uncle, and rocket engineer.