DeWorth Thomas (Birth 1912/Death 05 Jun 1994)

DeWorth Thomas
DeWorth Thomas, a resident of San Marcos, California, died of natural causes on June 5, 1994. He was 81.

DeWorth was born in St. John, Idaho in 1912 to Rhoda Larson Thomas of St. John and Roby Clyde Thomas, formerly of Boone, North Carolina. He was the oldest of five children.

Dee. as he was know(n), graduated from St. John grammar and Malad High schools. He later graduated from Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute, in Glendale, California as a Master Airplane Technician. He was involved with aviation all his life.

Adventuresome and innovative, he built and flew a glider at the age of eighteen in his family’s cow pasture in St. John in 1930. A late pioneer in aviation, he worked on every type of plane from cloth covered biplanes with open cockpits, through aluminum skinned monoplanes with self starters, into jet powered airliners. AS a flight engineer and pilot for TWA,. he logged thousands of hours and millions of miles domestically and overseas before retiring in 1972.

He hobnobbed with many aviation greats, such as: Charles Lindbergh, Jimmy Doolittle, Howard Hughes, and Amelia Earhart. He worked on the racing plane of Ernst Udet, the famous German ace, who was competing in the Los Angeles air races, and who later helped Hermann Goering build the German Luftwaffe before being shot on orders from Hitler.

He flew with Wallace Berry and Gary Cooper, and sat in the cockpit with Orville Wright, who with his brother Wilbur, invented the airplane itself.

His wife, Helen, whom he married in 1938, preceded him in death in 1993. They are survived by their three children: Gary Thomas of Albuquerque, New Mexico; Sally Thomas of San Marcos, California; and Patricia Alexander of Los Osos, California and three grandchildren. His last surviving brother, Jim, lives in Mountain View, California.

Funeral services were private.