January 14, 2014
Harold Lee Thomas was the oldest of ten living children. Harold
was a farmer, carpenter, coal miner, mechanic, and Jack of All Trades.
Harold worked the family farm while his father Finlay, worked in
the coal mines He quit school in the eighth grade to go into the coal mines
with his father, Finlay, to help support the family.
In 1941, at the age of seventeen he joined the Army to fight
against the Japanese.
March 1945 he married Edith Alberta Shoupe (Ms Alberta).
After the death of Sharon Gail he left the mines and went to Elizabethtown,
Kentucky where he got a job as a mechanic on the Army base at Fort Knox. Most
of the other mechanics knew him as Tune Up Tom, or just plain Tom.
Harold acquired the name Tune Up one day when a tank he had been
working on all week wouldn’t start. After going back over and double checking
all the work he had done on the tank, he got a ball pin hammer from his tool
box and gave a gentle whack to something on the tank. He said, “That should
tune it up a little.” The tank started right up.
There was snow the night of January 13th, 1968. When Harold
got up the next morning he went out with a snow shovel and shoveled the
sidewalks and driveway so he could take Ms Alberta into town.
They stopped at a red light beside the post office and across
the street from what was then First Federal Savings Bank. Harold turned and
looked at Ms Alberta and said, “I don’t feel so well.” Harold slumped over the
steering wheel, the car started rolling through the light and Ms Alberta started
screaming.
A young man in the car beside them saw something was wrong, put
his vehicle out of gear and rushed to help. Harold was taken to Hardin Memorial
Hospital where he was given the diagnosis of a massive blood clot to the heart
with no chance of survival. He was forty three years, five months and ten days
old when he died.
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