Kenn Thomas - RIP

 Kenneth Francis Thomas

Kenn Thomas – RIP

I was sorry to learn of the death of Kenn Thomas, a long time associate who I met on an AMTRAK train as he recognized me from having attended a JFK conference in Dallas, the year Bill Clinton was elected president. I recall that because I was having dinner with Kenn when we passed through Arkansas, a dry state, so the waiter stopped serving our beer and wine until we passed the state line.

Kenn got off in St. Louis, while I continued on to Chicago on another leg of my cross-country train trip that I took to meet and interview other researchers, witnesses and suspects in the assassination, courtsey of a $3,000 grant from the Fund For Constitutional Government Investigative Reporters Project.

Kenn had a radio program and interviewed me in the back of the train, then sent me a tape on which you can hear the clacking of the train wheels in the background. He also gave me some psychedelic mushrooms and a tape of the Irish rock band movie The Commitments.

Kenn was also good friends with John Judge, and was a source for the manuscript passed among JFK buffs called the Torbitt Document, ostensibly written by a Texas lawyer with inside knowledge of the conspiracy to kill the President. Kenn later published the document with his Steamshovel Press he subtitled NASA, Nazis and JFK. It is the first documented record of the role of the mysterious Defense Industrial Security Command (DISC) intelligence network that is run out of Columbus, Ohio, of all places.

Kenn also offered to publish my work, and now that it’s almost ready, I’m sorry to say he can’t be of assistance.

More on Kenn from the St.Louis papers:

Musician, activist, veteran. An empty-handed army, who dedicated his life to the People. Celebrated by his wife Ellen, mother Lorrie, and his children (all the young punks to ever live.) Services: Memorial at Fortune Teller Bar, 2635 Cherokee Street. May 1, 6-10 p.m. Second line at 8:45. Wear dancing shoes.

When he was a young adult, Kenn Thomas, who died in his sleep on Friday, September 22 at the age of 65, was infamous for answering the phone, any phone, with just his name:  “Kenn.”

No “Hello” or “Thomas Household” or any other kind of introductory phrase greeted callers, whose time he said he didn’t want to waste. Of course, he also really liked to keep people on their toes. That was Kenn – witty, mischievous, and almost always one step ahead.

Kenn was born in St. Louis and grew up in and around Hillsdale and Pine Lawn, where he attended Catholic grade school. His parents moved around a bit during his youth. An important constant during those early years and throughout his life were comic books. Over his lifetime, he amassed a collection of comics that numbers in the thousands. He loved the artwork and the storytelling and was regularly spotted around town at comic book meetings and conventions. His favorite comic book artist was Jack Kirby.

As a teenager, Kenn put his substantial artistic skills to work writing and drawing his own comic strip, “Norm and Andy” for Normandy High School, from which he graduated in 1976. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and Speech Communication (1980) and a Master of Arts in English from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he also spent the majority of his professional career. He was employed by the University’s Western Historical Manuscripts Collection and State Historical Society of Missouri as a Senior Manuscripts Specialist from 1986  until his retirement in 2019.

Kenn was a charming conversationalist who could talk about anything – music, politics, comic books, and (his favorite) conspiracies. He was a polymath, talented in multiple areas, and could pick up new skills seemingly effortlessly. He was a writer, an artist, a researcher. He could understand and explain even the densest literary works (Pynchon was his favorite). He took an acting class once and blew everyone away with his portrayal of Cardinal Wolsey. He was a gifted speaker with a DJ’s voice and worked at KWMU on the weekends for a few years when they still played music. He reviewed rock concerts in the 1980s for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and co-hosted a music and talk show on KDHX in its early on-air days, where they primarily played and discussed the music of Bob Dylan.

He was part of a small but (obsessively) devoted local group of Dylan diehards who saw every concert and got together to talk about and listen to Dylan recordings and bootlegs regularly. He loved the Beat poets and Timothy Leary and could claim a friendly connection to William Burroughs, for whom he accepted the honor of induction into the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 1990 when Burroughs was too frail to travel to his hometown. Kenn will be buried a stone’s throw from Mr. Burroughs at the beautiful, historic Bellefontaine Cemetery in North St. Louis.

Kenn published a conspiracy magazine, Steamshovel Press, and wrote or co-wrote 10 books on conspiracy topics, including “The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro.” He regularly contributed to other periodicals, wrote introductions to other writers’ books, and spoke about his research internationally at conferences. A full list of his works can be found on his Wikipedia page. He donated his papers to the University of Missouri.

Continued at:

https://stlouiscremation.com/obituaries/kenneth-francis-thomas/