Chuck Thomas marks 100th birthday: ‘It’s not as hard as some people say’

When Charles “Chuck” Thomas celebrates his 100th birthday Monday, the party will be at the Forest Park Golf Course. He plans to have a small gathering. Only about 100 of his friends are invited.

He says of his age, “It’s not as hard as some people say.”

His life’s philosophy: “Help people. Live a good life. Try to be healthy.”

Thomas, a cheery man with dancing eyes who can turn a phrase with the best of them, arrived in Baltimore after graduating with two degrees from Howard University in Washington in the early 1950s.

Like so many men of his generation, he served in World War II in what was then called the Army Air Corps and today is the Air Force. He was assigned to racially segregated bases in Mississippi and Alabama. Conditions for Black men were hard there. When he was finally shipped to the Philippines, he calls that assignment “rest and relaxation” compared to his time in the Deep South.

He’s a Pittsburgh native and admits to once being a “hoodlum,” even if no one believes him. Thomas said he was determined to help people by becoming a social worker after the experience of growing up in Pennsylvania in the Great Depression.

He said his brushes with the authorities caused him to be assigned to a social worker.

“I wasn’t the best person in the world,” he admits.

“They thought they were helping, To me they were hindering,” he said. “Social workers didn’t understand a wayward child. That’s why I went to school. You can change.”

While studying social work at Howard, he made friends with Baltimore residents and starting visiting the city. He liked what he saw, commuted for a while and later put down roots.

He joined the Baltimore City Schools system as a psychologist and settled in to a job testing and evaluating elementary school students.

It’s not a surprise that he made friends, a lot of them. He hit it off with two top school administrators — Lewis Richardson and John L. Crew Sr., among many teachers.

Thomas and his wife, Angela Gibson, settled into life in Baltimore. He joined the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity and made friends, a lot of them. She served in the Maryland General Assembly but she doesn’t mention that.

Soon Mayor William Donald Schaefer tapped him for the board of the Baltimore Municipal Golf Corp. He got to know and inspect the Forest Park, Clifton and Carroll parks, Pine Ridge and Mount Pleasant courses, which he considers the toughest to play.

“Our board tried to be inclusive, to put good people where they should be,” he said.

He became the go-to person for Monumental Golf Club, an association of Black players throughout Baltimore.

“They sought him out to put the tournaments together,” said his wife, Angela. “He tried to put on the best possible tournaments.”

And while an outwardly jovial person, Thomas is actually detail oriented.

He also supported then mayoral candidate Kurt L. Schmoke. His wife, Angela, a baseball fan, attended West Baltimore’s James Mosher Elementary and she followed the James Mosher Little League. She knew Schmoke from his Little League days.

Larry Gibson, a friend, law professor and fellow fraternity member said, “Chuck was a guy who had his own special way of helping in a political campaign. He knew the golf players who were a constituency I had no way of reaching.”

Along the way Thomas moved to Northeast Baltimore at the Alameda and Cold Spring Lane in a development called Baltimore Mutual Housing. Once established there, he inherited another job, president of the board of the townhouse community.

Chances are he took the post seriously, but when asked what his responsibilities were there, he lightheartedly says, “Damn if I know.”

He now lives at the Village of Cross Keys on one floor and continues his recovery from a stroke two years ago.

On reaching 100: “It doesn’t seem like it because I’ve never been there before.”