Noah Without An Ark......... *Kentucky Bluebird*

Posted on Fri, Jun. 04, 2004

Flood let him play Noah without ark

RICHARD THOMAS SAVED HIS EXOTIC ANIMALS AFTER RAINS CAME

By Lee Mueller

EASTERN KENTUCKY BUREAU

PAINTSVILLE - When he went to sleep Sunday night, 79-year-old Richard Scott Thomas never dreamed he would wake up and have to swim to try to save his camel.

"I'm a good swimmer," said Thomas, a former New York City Ballet dancer and instructor, but not that good.

Thomas, the father of actor Richard Earl Thomas -- "John Boy" in the long-running television show The Waltons -- said yesterday that, when he got out of bed about 3:30 a.m. Monday in his Johnson County home, he stepped into ankle-high water.

By the time he reached his back porch, floodwater -- "I thought it was backwater," he said -- from nearby Jennys Creek was nearly up to his chest.

Thomas waded toward his barnyard where he stables about 40 exotic animals in a row of buildings and began opening barn doors to free his animals.

As the water rose, Thomas stripped off his Brooks Brothers nightshirt and began swimming -- against a swift current -- toward the last building in an attempt to free Alex, a two-humped camel -- and a farm favorite.

The current kept pushing him back against a metal gate, about 30 feet from the camel's stall, he said.

Pressed against the gate, Thomas said he looked behind the barn, saw "two humps walking in the water" and realized Alex probably was safe. As he was hanging on to a barn window, Thomas said a black water buffalo swam past him.

"That was pretty weird," he said, but perhaps not as surprising as the floating appliance that greeted him after he swam, following a submerged fence line, back to his kitchen door.

"I didn't know refrigerators could float," he said.

Dick Thomas, as relatives call him, is a Paintsville native whose grandfather was mayor and whose father was once county judge and a state mining official.

Thomas has been living on his parents' farm on Ky. 825, about 5 miles from Paintsville, for about four years after a career in show business that rubbed off on his more-famous son.

After graduating from Paintsville High School in 1943, Thomas went to the University of Kentucky, ignored his father's advice to become an engineer and accompanied an aunt to the West Coast where he became a dancer in Los Angeles.

Mitzi Gaynor, he said, was his first dance partner.

After World War II ended, Thomas moved to New York where he joined several ballet companies, including the New York City Ballet.

In 1950, he married dancer Barbara Fallis during a trip to Cuba, and their first child, Richard Earl Thomas, was born in 1951. For years, the young actor visited his grandparents in Eastern Kentucky almost every year. The younger Thomas, now 53, is a Broadway actor.

In 1985, a few years after the passing of his wife and then his father, Dick Thomas closed his dance school in Manhattan and retired.

He still owns a 16-room Victorian house in New Rochelle, N.Y., but resides on his small farm, called Golightly, wedged between a railroad track and Jennys Creek.

Wednesday, Thomas bantered with a neighbor he hired to haul away and try to salvage several pieces of antique furniture inherited from his parents, including a grandfather clock he said his mother won on a TV game show, Say When!, while in New York.

"My mother was a hoot," Thomas said, smiling.

Thomas has built fences and barns for a diverse collection of animals, most of which survived last weekend's flooding.

They include a bison named Nickel, a water buffalo, a Brahma bull, llamas, emus, peacocks and a stableful of quarterhorses.

Yesterday, fenced pastures were still quagmires of mud, which also filled Thomas' new pickup, parked Sunday night with the widows open.

"We lost three goats and a donkey and a potbelly pig named Pepper," Thomas said.

Alex, the camel, appeared in need of grooming yesterday, but playfully nipped at Thomas' hat.

Scott Preston, a cousin who is a Paintsville attorney, said at one point, Thomas also tried to buy an elephant, "but somebody beat him to it."



A Note : During the storms that hit Kentucky Last Memorial Day weekend; I had travelled to Stanton To do Makeup and Hair for A Graduation. While I was there, A Tornado Touched down and Floods From The Red River Gorge Stranded Me as well as Others for 3 Days>>>>If I can Find News Coverage, from the area I will Post it, I Opted to stay away from The News Team's Cameras>>>> a Little Camera shy...lol *wink*...But a Local man whom was thoroughly Intoxicated drove his pickup truck through the flood, and some Cute pre teenager with bright red hair and freckles was laughing at the man and told the News Team, he only wanted to be on The News...LOL Needless to say It was a scary time, yet everyone laughed with the Young Boy...Thirty Horses were also lost in the flood, very tragic, and so many homes destroyed..Even So Still We were All Very Fortunate..

Have a Great weekend

God Bless USM

Keep a Rainbow In Your Pocket and a Smile In Your Heart

*Blue*

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