Thomas H. Peebles, III, ’82, died peacefully on May 9,
2015 at the age of eighty. Tom quarterbacked a Tennessee
High School State Championship football team and
went on to play at the University of the South, graduating
in 1957. He taught and coached football at Columbia
High School for a year before entering law school
at Vanderbilt University, where he was a member of the
Law Review. Tom served as president of the Nashville Bar
Association in 1983. He loved to hunt and fish with his
family and traveled to South America, Central America,
and Africa on numerous occasions. He was survived by
his wife of fifty-seven years, Katherine Kolb Peebles, his
three sons and seven grandchildren.
George Edwin Pletcher, ’70, age ninety-one, died
peacefully on December 11, 2019. At age sixteen George
left the family farm in the Texas panhandle and boarded
a train for South Bend, Indiana. He studied at Notre
Dame for two years before joining the United States
Army. After a two-year hitch, he returned to the Golden
Dome and graduated from the Law School in 1951. He
returned to Texas – Houston – to practice law. George
traveled the state of Texas trying lawsuits for over fifty
years and served as President of the Houston Bar Association.
George was survived by his wife of seventy-one
years, Claudine, their eight children, sixteen grandchildren
and twenty great-grandchildren.
Thomas Ryan Prewitt, Sr., ’67, passed away peacefully
on July 18, 2018 at age ninety-five. Tom was at the University
of Tennessee when the U.S. entered World War II
in December 1941, and he immediately enlisted in the
U.S. Army Air Corp. After training, he was assigned to
the Fifteenth Air Force, deployed to engage in strategic
bombardment operations from bases in southern Italy.
Tom flew fifty bombing missions as navigator in a B-24
Liberator named “Lady Luck.” For his distinguished and
heroic service to his country, Tom was awarded the Distinguished
Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three
Oak Leaf Clusters. After the war, Tom enrolled in the
University of Tennessee Law School where he was Editor
of the Tennessee Law Review, won the Moot Court
award, and was Order of the Coif. Tom served as President
of the Memphis and Shelby County Bar Association
in 1979. Tom served as Assistant General Counsel to
Ray Howard Jenkins in his role as special counsel to the
Senate Subcommittee on Investigations during the 1954
Army-McCarthy Hearings. Following the assassination
of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968, he was retained
by the City of Memphis to negotiate with Dr. King’s attorneys
and the U.S. Department of Justice to end the
sanitation strike. Tom was survived by four children, six
grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Eugene M. Purcell, ’98, passed away on Monday, June
6, 2022 at age eighty-four. Judge Purcell, a former municipal
court judge in Long Hill Township, Morris
County, practiced in Bedminster and was a past President
of the Trial Attorneys of New Jersey. Judge Purcell
is survived by his wife, Diane Hailer, two children, a
step-child, and four grandchildren.
Daniel T. Rabbitt, Jr., ’83, of St. Louis, was seventy
nine when he died on March 3, 2020 survived by
his wife of fifty years, Susan Rabbitt nee Scherger, two
children and a grandchild.
James Edward Reeves, ’70,
was just shy of his eightyeighth
birthday when he
died on May 5, 2015. Jim
Ed attended the University
of Missouri and graduated
from its law school in
1951. Jim Ed served in the
United States Air Force as
a JAG officer. He served in
the Office of Special Counsel for the Whitewater Investigation
and as United States Attorney for Eastern District
of Missouri. Jim Ed was predeceased by two wives
and survived by three children and four grandchildren.
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