Tom Bogard, 85, of Fishers, Indiana, formerly of Columbia, passed away Monday, November 2, 2020.
Graveside services with military honors will be held at 2 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 9 in Memorial Park Cemetery, 1217 Business Loop 70 West, Columbia.
Tom Bogard traveled very far from home in search of adventure. He found it. But his travels are finished and he is at rest now. Born in Carlisle, Arkansas during the Great Depression, Tom was the son of rice farmers and shopkeepers. Tom's father Virgil died when he was still a young boy. He spent most of his early youth in Brinkley, Arkansas in the care of his aunt, Eva Gibbs, a strong matriarch whom he honored all his life. Tom attended Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas just a few years before it became a famous place. Tom was not a racist. He was too curious to be a racist - he liked anybody who could teach him something.
"Join the Navy! See the world." A young enlisted striker in 1954, Tom was on a ship that helped transport Catholic Vietnamese from the North to the South after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. It was the first of many visits to Vietnam. This is the place where Tom was exposed to Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant. Agent Orange causes or at least contributes to Parkinson's Disease, the illness that killed him. On that same tour, Tom visited Japan, where he rode a motorcycle all over northern Honshu and competed against a local village hero in a Sumo match. He was bested repeatedly. Tom made Chief Petty Officer as fast as was possible at that time.
During a tour at Glynco Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Georgia, Tom met Bobbie Crowell, who adored him and was loyal to him to the very end. He left the Navy for a brief period and attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He went back to the Navy immediately after the Cuban Missile Crisis as an officer in the surface Navy. He navigated a destroyer once from Subic Bay to Hong Kong by dead reckoning and arrived off the channel marker by no more than 500 yards. Not long after, Tom was selected for Russian language training. He attended the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California and went on to serve as a Presidential Translator on the Washington-Moscow Hotline. This was just before and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. If you asked him about that time, he didn't say much - usually just, "That was a stressful time." After two tours in the Pentagon, Tom yearned for a quiet life.
The next tour began the happiest period of his life. He became the XO of the Navy ROTC unit at Mizzou and had a long and varied list of hobbies: he was a beekeeper, he made stained glass windows, he raised orchids in a greenhouse that he and Bobbie built themselves. Tom was very active in the community. He was a Republican before the Republicans had much power in Boone County. He became Public Administrator for a short time and ran for Southern District Commissioner (and lost to a friend). Tom volunteered with the Missouri State Games for 19 years, delivered meals for Meals on Wheels and worked at many of the sales for the Friends of the Library. He was a member of the Cosmo Club and the Sons of the American Revolution and served as the 9th President of the local M. Graham Clark Chapter of the SAR.
Tom leaves behind so many people who loved him: his wife, Barbara; two sons: Derek (Casey) and Brian; a daughter, Melanie, who predeceased him; several grandchildren: Kaycee, Noah, Erin, Foster and Ariadne.
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