THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 14, 1996 TAG: 9608140360
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MANTEO LENGTH: 56 lines
The respect and love that coastal residents had for Harry Hunt Thomas will be recalled Thursday at funeral services for the warrior, boat racer, educator and designer.
Harry Thomas was 78 when he died Sunday at his Roanoke Island home, where he retired after a series of careers.
In Elizabeth City, where he was a revered superintendent of schools, he will be honored as an educator.
On Roanoke Island he will be remembered as the creative lighting director who brought to The Lost Colony moods and colors that linked visual imagination to Paul Green's play.
In Manteo he will be recalled as a young boat builder who worked and raced with Vern and Ralph Davis on fast hydroplanes.
And Navy veterans who served with him in World War II will remember him as a two-stripe skipper of PC-470, a splinter of a Navy patrol boat that hunted down Nazi subs.
His surviving son, Hunt Thomas, who runs an Outer Banks radio station, says that his father became a schoolteacher despite his objections.
``He loved boats and building boats,'' Hunt said Tuesday, ``but he was also an amazingly well-educated man (College of the Ozarks; East Carolina University).
``One day on a boat-building job, one of his fellow shipwrights said `Harry, you ought to be a schoolteacher. . . .' ''
Whereupon, Thomas says, his father replied:
``My mother and father were teachers, and that's one job I don't want.''
So for the next 32 years, Harry Hunt Thomas taught and ran schools in North Carolina, most notably in Elizabeth City.
``My father finally retired in 1979 as superintendent of schools in Pasquotank County,'' said his son, ``and he came home to Roanoke Island, where he had started out as a teacher and basketball coach at Manteo High School.''
Harry Thomas is remembered by fellow teachers as an extraordinary intellect.
``He was a mathematician who enjoyed the really tough equations. He ran the Coast Guard auxiliary. He was an actor and director with the Albemarle Players. And in his spare time he was superintendent of schools,'' said an Elizabeth City teaching colleague who cherished the memories.
Less well known is the fact Harry Thomas gave of his time and energy to get lesser-known accomplishments started, like a kidney dialysis center on the Dare County Outer Banks.
State Sen. Marc Basnight, president pro-tem of the North Carolina Senate, notified friends and family of Harry Thomas only recently that the legislative mechanisms were in place to build a dialysis center in Dare County.
On Thursday, a graveside service will be held at 1 p.m. at Manteo Cemetery, followed immediately by a memorial service in Mount Olivet Methodist Church.
``It's hard to say how all the people who loved my father will pay their respects,'' said his son. ``I think half the population of Elizabeth City is coming.''
KEYWORDS: DEATH OBITUARY by CNB