Photo above: Thomas present day. Photo right: Thomas, Champion of Pacific Northwest SCCA, about 1965.

“I drove my car there, a MG-TD, took the top off, put the straight pipe on, raced, put it back together again and drove home, all the time hoping I didn’t wreck it or blow up the engine,” L. C. “Tommy” Thomas said about going to Pebble Beach and his second car race.

Sworn into the Navy on his 18th birthday, the Lopez Islander had lived near Corvallis, Oregon, all of his young life. His father died when Thomas was 13, the oldest of three children. He joined the Navy in 1942, before he received a draft number for World War II. “You always have a dry place to sleep and you don’t have to walk as much as in the Army,” Thomas said with a typical sly grin and blue eyes sparkling.

Sent to Norfolk, Virginia, for Aviation Electrical School, he spent several months in Hawaii before being transferred to California. Thomas volunteered to go the South Pacific with the first night fighting squadron aboard the Carrier Enterprise as Aviation Electrician’s Mate First Class, the only electrician in the squadron. Hit by a kamikaze or Japanese suicide attack in April, 1945, a 500 pound bomb exploded in the number one elevator well and moved 15 tons of elevator 150 feet straight up in the air. “Not many injuries but it destroyed the department where beer and toilet paper were stored.”

Thomas left the Navy in October, 1945, shortly after the ship returned to Seattle. His service duty was fairly routine he says, except for some small personal experiences. One incident occurred when he and another were standing midnight to 4:00 a.m. watch. Walking among parked airplanes, his companion’s rifle suddenly discharged and shot a hole in the ground. “That got my attention really quick,” Thomas said. Not everyone had rifle training during boot camp.

Thomas returned to Corvallis, married and worked for the county power company cooperative for five years. Dairy Queen was a novelty on the west coast in the 1950s when he and a partner bought one in Lebanon, Oregon, and opened another in Sweet Home. “We thought you could make a lot of money by having a business. That wasn’t true. I worked from 9:30 a.m. until 11:00 p.m. and couldn’t afford to hire someone to come in so I could go home and visit my family.”

“Five years later we bought a locker plant just as people were starting to buy home freezers, so business was not very good.” Customers rapidly moved their frozen products stored in rented cold storage lockers into their space at home.

Thomas then worked for Sheppard Motors in Eugene, Oregon, for 32 years while maintaining his passion for racing.

“My first race was at Paine Field. I raced there a couple times on the air strip with the northwest region of the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA). It was easy to get into a race, tell them you want to, learn their safety rules, pay an entry fee and go race. I raced the MG-TD two or three times and then bought a Triumph TR-2. Both were our only cars. When the children’s heads started bouncing on the top, we had to buy a family car. I’ve had six Triumphs. I didn’t race the last ones because I was racing someone else’s car.”

Thomas raced the course laid out on California’s 17-mile drive, Laguna Seca and other raceways that led him to Daytona twice. Three SCCA winners from each division around the U.S. compete on a road course, built in the middle of the stock car track. He drove an Isuzu coupe, one of two sent from Japan for racing, at Riverside. “The last car I raced was a Volvo coupe at Portland’s Delta Park in 1969.”

The father of three children, his voice lowers as Thomas talks about his son who was killed in an auto accident when he was 20.

Divorced in 1968 and single for ten years, he married Joan who had sailed in the San Juans. The couple bought an Albin 25 boat and docked it at Friday Harbor. Monthly, they would leave Eugene, sleep in the ferry line, boat for two days and drive home on Monday.

Thomas retired in 1989 and the couple chose Lopez as their place to live. “We have not been sorry.” They spent a couple years building a home addition and a large garage. A heart valve replacement and spinal cord cancer have not slowed the energetic Thomas.

The former Yacht Club officer took up golf on his 80th birthday. Thomas is a devoted gardener who makes his own pickles. “One year I made 60 quarts of dill pickles and ate them all.” He recently started corresponding with a California resident who bought a 1960 AC Bristol Thomas had owned. “He’s restoring that fun car. I’d like to go see it,” Thomas said.