2008
Thomas Elwood Street, 90, a retired agricultural attache with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agriculture Service,
died April 5 of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease at his home in the District.
Mr. Street was born in Cleveland and grew up in Louisville, Ky., St. Louis, Mo., and the District, where he attended Western
High School before graduating from Case Western Reserve Academy, a preparatory school in Hudson, Ohio. When he was
growing up, mandatory poetry reading at the family breakfast or dinner table nurtured his lifelong love of poetry.
In 1938, he received an undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, where he sang in the campus glee club and tried his hand
at acting. He later received a master's degree in public administration from the University of Cincinnati.
He began his career at USDA in 1940. Three years later he was inducted into the Army and landed at Normandy seven weeks
after D-Day. Assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 120th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division, he was a rifleman who survived
combat in Normandy, the Netherlands and Germany. He was wounded near the city of Ubach in Germany.
He recovered in an Army hospital in Wales and was sent to the French city of Versailles, to assist food distribution to areas
ravaged by the war. Commissioned a 2nd lieutenant, he worked in the postwar occupation government in Germany.
After the war, Mr. Street and his family settled in the Hollin Hills neighborhood of Alexandria, and he resumed his work with the
Agriculture Department. From 1959 to 1961, he was an assistant agricultural attache in New Delhi and then agricultural attache
in Berne, Switzerland. Between 1968 and 1972, he was the agricultural attache in Paris.
He retired in 1973 and volunteered with Meals on Wheels, assisted the homeless and read for the blind. He became active in
the National Democratic Party and worked on a number of congressional campaigns.
He also began writing poetry and self-published a book of poems. At Ingleside at Rock Creek, the retirement community where
he began living in 2001, he helped found a literature group and was a committed member of the Sunday evening choir group
(actually a poker gathering of Ingleside residents).
His wife, Judith Hodson Street, died in 1998.
Survivors include two sons, Michael Street of Santa Rosa, Calif., and Gregory Street of Alexandria; two sisters, Catherine
Chilman of Mitchellville and Sibyl Vanneman of McLean; and four grandchildren.
-- Joe Holley