Tom Hanks is a good man. We know that. And the Captain Phillips man enhanced his reputation this week by helping out some Girl Scouts selling cookies in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Tom HanksTom Hanks helped out some girl scouts selling cookies in San Francisco

The Oscar winner noticed the girls selling the cookies and decided they needed some help. He started out by buying four boxes and also donated an additional $20 to the cause. Hanks even hung around for a bit by taking pictures and generally using his celebrity status to help shift some cookies.

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"I'm still on cloud nine," said Archana Appanna, whose daughter was one of the three Scouts selling cookies "We did not know who he was (at first) because he covered his face with a baseball cap and glasses."

"He was so personable," she marvelled, "so down to earth."

Hanks, accompanied by his son Truman, was in town to visit the typewriter shop, Los Altos Business Machines at 100 State St. Truman is a freshman a Stanford University and Hanks is known to be a big typewriter collector - he even developed his own typewriter app for the iPad. Hanks was initially there to have his son's machine repaired, though he ended up buying two vintage Smith-Coronas. 

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John Sansone, the owner of the typewriter store, said he did not immediately recognize the actor until he heard him speak.

"I never realized how distinctive his voice is," he said. "It was right out of a movie."

Hanks recently completed work on Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, a cold war drama about an American lawyer recruited by the CIA to help rescue a pilot detained in the Soviet Union.