Thomas Kay Young Jr

Dr. Thomas Kay Young, Jr., 91, retired Columbia surgeon, died Monday, June 6, 2005 in Columbia. Funeral services will be conducted Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. in the Sanctuary of Zion Presbyterian Church with Rev. Arch Warren officiating. The family will visit with friends immediately following the service in the Zion Fellowship Hall. Oakes & Nichols Funeral Directors are in charge of arrangements. Rev. Warren will conduct a private family graveside service at St. John's Churchyard at Ashwood. Notes of sympathy may be sent to www.oakesandnichols.com. Dr. Young was born in Covington, Virginia on July 11, 1913. He came to Columbia over fifty years ago as the first Board Certified surgeon, but the road he took prepared him for much more. He grew up in Presbyterian manses as one of three children of a pastor, Rev. Thomas Kay Young, Sr. and his wife, Harriet Rebecca Cox Young. He graduated from Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, but his real dream of becoming a doctor had to be delayed. It was the aftermath of the Great Depression and the hope of graduate school was not afforded most folks. He went to work in one of the coal mines of West Virginia. After two years of working and praying about his future, medical school became a reality. The University of Tennessee Medical School in Memphis provided a lot more than a medical degree. While enrolled, he made a good friend named Bill Maury whose kid sister could stop traffic on Poplar Avenue. He married that young lady, Ann Maury, on February 16, 1939. Things seemed to be on schedule for the completion of his training and the beginning of their joint life call. Then the world's beeper went off at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He and the rest of America's Greatest Generation answered it the next morning. The U. S. Navy certified him as a flight surgeon and stationed him in Brazil for service. The end of the war promised the chance to get back on track with his dream, but all obstacles were not behind him. During his surgical residency at Scott and White in Temple, Texas, he contracted polio. It was 1949. After dedicating himself to a skill requiring intricate dexterity, he was rendered virtually helpless, unable even to feed himself. His war-tempered Memphis debutante worked two jobs, mothered two sons, and nurtured him to what she would only accept be called a miraculous cure. Whatever your inclination to such an assessment, one thing is certain. The hands of a skilled specialist are best entrusted to the heart of an empathetic healer. Dr. and Mrs. Young moved to Columbia in 1951, when he was 38. What is now Maury Regional Hospital was still a vision being promoted against minor opposition to its location. Some said it was "too far out in the country." He served the transition from The King's Daughters Hospital and became one of the charter staff members of Maury County Hospital. He served there until his retirement in 1984. His service to this community also included membership of First Presbyterian Church and Zion Presbyterian Church. He is probably best remembered for the hundreds of football sidelines he walked for over thirty years, and for how he taught scores of young men the difference between pain and injury in a day when our culture allowed medicine to make such a distinction. Dr. Young was preceded in death by his wife and wonder of 64 years, Ann Maury Young, as well as two sons, Bill Young and Dick Young, and two sisters who lived in Memphis, Helen Gibson and Mary Lib Cannon. He is survived by a daughter Rebecca (Frank) Stegall of Rome, Georgia; a son, Buck (Lesa) Young of Columbia; eleven grandchildren, Beau Young, Ben Young, Andy Young, Richard Young, Ann Reid Young, Maury (Justin) Hitchcock, Frank Stegall, Blair Stegall, Emily Young, Lucy Young and Tom Young; three great-grandchildren, Chance Young, Ann Wesley Young and Thomas Parker Young.