Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 8, 1993 TAG: 9304080207
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
PULASKI'S MANAGER COMES HOME
Pulaski's new town manager will be coming home to assumes his new duties. Thomas Combiths, who grew up in Pulaski, was chosen from about 140 applicants; town officials made the announcement Wednesday.Combiths, 43, was born in Philadelphia but lived in Pulaski from the age of 2. He remembers things like going to see "The Iron Claw" movie serial each week at the old Dalton Theatre; having his first date at a bowling alley, which was the teen hot spot; and graduating from the old Pulaski High.
The movie house and bowling alley are gone, and the high school has been consolidated. But downtown Pulaski still holds memories for Combiths, he said, as well as promise for the future.
"The most obvious thing to me are the improvements that the community has done to downtown," he said when asked about changes. "We obviously did most of our shopping on Main Street when I was growing up."
Many of the stores he recalled have closed in the years since he left, but an effort led by Pulaski Main Street has succeeded in getting many of the buildings occupied again by antique and collectible outlets and related businesses.
"I just want to jump onto what the community's doing," he said. "I'm just going to be all ears here for the first couple of months."
Combiths graduated from Randolph-Macon College in 1972 with a political science degree, then spent four years in the Navy, mostly in the Mediterranean. When he got out, he earned a master's degree in public administration at California State.
He has been in California for 15 years, working as an administrative intern with the city of La Mirada, then administrative assistant to the Paramount city manager and associate city planner at Brea.
For the past eight years, he has held several jobs with the city of Palmdale: senior planner, acting planning director, deputy city administrator and, for the past five years, community redevelopment deputy executive director.
Palmdale has grown since 1985 from 20,000 population to nearly 90,000, mainly because of affordable housing for people moving out of Los Angeles. Combiths had been seeking that, too: "I'd been looking for jobs on the East Coast for about six months," he said.
When Pulaski Town Manager Don Holycross announced his resignation in January, Combiths' brother, who still lives in Pulaski, sent him the news. Combiths got the job after two interviews.
Rob Lyons will remain as acting town manager until details of Combiths' contract are worked out over the next 30 days.
Combiths and his wife, Susan, have four sons: Daniel, 12; Stephen, 10; Nathan, 8; and Ben, 4. He has another brother in Roanoke and a sister in Atlanta, which is where his mother, Mary Currin Combiths, now lives. Her father, Allen Eskridge, was mayor of Pulaski from 1942 to 1948.