Jeri Ann (Hartfield) Thomas, wife of retired Foreign Service Officer and U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Robert D. Thomas, went home to be with her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on Sunday, January 20, 2019. She succumbed to complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at the Montgomery Hospice Casey House in Derwood, Maryland. She was 84.
Mrs. Thomas, who lived for more than 50 years in Silver Spring, Maryland, was born and raised in Houston, Texas. She loved the outdoors and rode bareback on her horse Sunbeam and hunted squirrels with her father. She graduated valedictorian of her high school class and with honors from Wheaton College in Illinois in 1955. She excelled as a high school athlete, playing volleyball, basketball, and softball and in college field hockey. After teaching middle school for two years in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, she attended Columbia University in New York City where she received a Master’s degree in constitutional law in 1960 and where she met her future husband.
In 1961 Mrs. Thomas became a legal researcher for the Institute of Defense Analyses. In the following years she accompanied her husband on his assignments to Germany, Paris, Moscow, Prague, and Leningrad. She introduced President Jimmy Carter to church members of the American community in Bonn during the president’s official visit to Germany. In Prague she was an information systems manager and in Leningrad a communications officer for the Foreign Service. For her outstanding service under difficult and unusual circumstances in Leningrad, she received an award from the U.S. Government.
In addition to her devotion to raising her three children, much of Mrs. Thomas’s life centered around her commitment and service to Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland, where she was a member for half a century. She served there as a deacon and especially loved being a “prayer warrior” as part of Fourth’s intercessory prayer group. Over the years she served with the church’s Reformed Reading Group, Women of Fourth, and as a Sunday School teacher. More recently she served meals every week at Star of Bethlehem Church in downtown Washington, D.C. When not ministering to those around her, Mrs. Thomas, an avid fisherwoman, spent time catching trout in the lakes surrounding the family cabin in Buena Vista, Colorado.
Mrs. Thomas is lovingly remembered by her family, including her husband of 58 years Robert Drake Thomas of Silver Spring; her son James Douglas (Suzanne) Thomas of Ellicott City, Maryland; her daughters Cary Laurence (Joel) Barnes and Kelly Drake (Jay) Hubbard, both of Wheaton, Illinois; and her nine grandchildren, Kristin, Jonathan, Drake, McMillen, Jessi, Ellie, Reagan, Reese, and Jeremiah. She was preceded in death by her father, James E. Hartfield, and mother, Maurine H. Hartfield, both of Houston, Texas, and her brother, Dr. James E. Hartfield, Jr. of Largo, Florida.
A memorial service will be held at 2:00 p.m., Saturday, January 26, 2019, at Fourth Presbyterian Church at 5500 River Road in Bethesda, Maryland.
The family requests that donations in lieu of flowers should be sent to Fourth Presbyterian Church.
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