THOMAS EDWARD DAVIES, Jr.
Thomas Davies the retired co-proprietor along with his late spouse, Alice P. Davies, of CareerPro of Towson, a resume writing service located in Towson, Maryland, from 1991 through 2014, died on June 27, 2024, of complications from chronic heart and congestive pulmonary obstruction diseases at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis , Massachusetts.
A long-time advertising, promotion, and public relations writer and management professional, he was employed in the promotion departments at WBAL-TV and Radio in the early 60s, by WJZ-TV in Cleveland, and by WSBK-TV in Boston into the early 70s, and was Executive Vice President of EGG Advertising in Cambridge, Massachusetts, prior to becoming what he called himself ; a “Paladin” in the communications field: One with a typewriter, who was willing to travel.
He began writing resumes for private clients in the 70s and was hired to manage an office for Professional Resume and Writing Service in Springfield, M, in 1983. After several years, he and Alice purchased an office in Towson, MD, from that company and in 1991, when they relocated permanently to the Baltimore area. While in the resume writing business, Thomas was also recruited by the Community College of Baltimore County’s Job Network program in Essex in 2006 where he served as adjunct faculty and facilitated hundreds of the program’s students in their job search activities through the spring of 2014.
The son of Thomas E. Davies Sr., a Baltimore-based electrical engineer and Irene Elizabeth Davies, a registered nurse and homemaker, he was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on August 18, 1935, and moved with his family to the Parkville suburb of Baltimore shortly after the outbreak of World War II in March 1942. He was educated in the Baltimore County School System, attending Parkville Elementary School and Towson High School through 1950 and receiving his high school diploma from Milford Mill High School in 1953.
Thomas married the late Mary Sue Hampt in 1965 and they became the parents of one son, Griffin Thomas Davies, who now survives both his parents and lives with his life partner, Michelle Ryder in West Yarmouth, MA. He and “Sue” divorced in 1973. Thomas met his second spouse, Alice Pinkham Grose, shortly thereafter, and they married in September of 1974 in Harwich Port, MA, on Cape Cod, where they lived until the early 80’s when Alice returned to college after raising a family of four in her first marriage. Thomas and Alice relocated to Amherst, MA, in 1983, where she had taken temporary residence while completing her bachelor’s degree at Smith College in 1981 and entered a Ph.D. program in sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She dropped out of the program after receiving a master’s degree, in order to take over Thomas’s office in Springfield when he suffered a heart attack in 1985. The couple later relocated to Baltimore to operate their CareerPro Resume Service in the summer of 1991, in order to be closer to his father and two of his siblings.
Following high school, Thomas had attended what is now McDaniel College for eight semesters, from the fall of 1953 through the spring of 1959, interrupted by two years of military service in the United States Army from 1954 through 1956. In the Army, he was trained as a medical aid technician and assigned to a helicopter ambulance detachment in Salzburg, Austria, prior to the end of the Allied occupation of that country in 1955. He was then reassigned to an administrative position at the Army’s 97th General Hospital in Frankfurt, Germany, where he served until his honorable discharge in August of 1956 and returned to college at McDaniel.
While in Europe, he took advantage of the amazing European transportation system and traveled on weekends and extended leave times to Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, in addition to several cities in Germany and Austria, including Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg, the city of Vienna, the Mercedes automotive plant in Stuttgart, and Lake Constance on the German/Swiss border. He made these trips alone and independently at the age of 19 and 20 and became a skilled photographer. While stationed in Frankfurt, he became one of a group of three other soldiers who enjoyed the arts and communed together at their post’s library, exchanged books, listened to recorded music, and traveled locally to observe the country and its inhabitants. Together they attended the local opera often and as music lovers, formed a barbershop quartet in order to enter a talent competition that included a potential trip to Berlin for a final concert, but unfortunately were not selected. (One member of the group was a music teacher prior to being drafted into the Army.) Also while in Frankfurt, Thomas corresponded with parents of friends in the U.S. who complimented him on his letter writing skills and recommended that he study English when he returned to college, which he did.
In the military, at college, and the many years since, he was an inveterate reader and developed a broad library of progressive authors, with favorites including Vladimir Nabokov, Tolstoy, Thomas Pynchon, D. H. Lawrence, John Updike, Phillip Roth, Gore Vidal, and David Foster Wallace, among many others. Upon reading Updike’s “Memories of the Ford Administration” in the 90s, he wrote to Updike about the similarities between that novel’s protagonist and his own life and received a hand typed and signed postcard from the author thanking him for pointing out an error he made concerning the Chevrolet Corvair as having front wheel drive, as it did not. Thomas was one of the few people who may have read all of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (Nabokov’s translation of the title, not Scott-Moncrieff’s “Remembrance of Things Past”), as well as what is referred to as the longest ongoing serial written in English, Anthony Powell’s 11-volume set, “A Dance to the Music of Time.”
In addition, Thomas was equally interested in all the arts, beginning in high school where he won several “Gold Keys” from the nation-wide Scholastic Awards program for high school students. He won several best of show awards at Milford Mill--and one of his tempera paintings showing a group of young men observing another student while repairing his “hot rod” in his parents’ garage was selected by the County-Wide Art Supervisor to be permanently displayed in her Towson office. While at Milford, he also sang tenor in the men’s glee club and played trumpet, baritone horn, and trombone in the school concert band. As a freshman at McDaniel, he wa sassigned to Band Company in the school’s compulsory ROTC program (as what was once called a “land grant” college) but was able to resign due to scheduling conflicts. As an adult, he also sang as a chorister for one season in the former Baltimore Comic Opera Company, appearing in 1966 in their production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance” on the stage of the Lyric Theater in Baltimore and in “Trial by Jury” at a local school auditorium. His only surviving painting, a 3’ x 4’ oil scene of a beach in Ocean City, Maryland, hangs in the dining room of his son’s home in West Yarmouth.
In addition to his son’s family, Griffin and partner Michelle and their son Jonathan Thomas Davies of Wareham, MA, Thomas is survived by a brother, Joseph (Jay) Morgan Davies and spouse Madeline (Maddy) Davies of San Francisco, CA, another brother, Jonathan David Davies of Baltimore, and a sister, Doreen Elise Walker and spouse William S. Walker of Timonium, MD. He was also the stepfather of Karen Grose Way of Middlebury, Vermont, Donald Grose of Framingham, MA, Elizabeth Grose Rogalin of Glen Ridge, NJ, and Jay D. Grose of South Dennis, MA, and several step grandchildren and great step grandchildren.
Plans for a memorial service are currently incomplete. A site of inurnment of the remains of Thomas and Alice are yet to be determined by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.