Colonel Tom Kelly Has Died but His Turkey Hunting Legacy Lives On

“This weekend, we lost one of the greatest,” Bates said. “No words can express what he has meant to me, our family and friends, his troops, and to his loyal legion of followers in the turkey hunting community.”

Col. Tom Kelly was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1927 and grew up around the briny Mobile Bay. At age 17, he joined the U.S. Navy against his mother’s wishes and became an aerial tailgunner during WWII. After the war, Kelly earned a degree in forestry from Auburn, eventually rose to the ranks of Colonel in the U.S. Army, and retired after 30 years of service.

While working as a forester, Kelly turkey hunted across the South and wrote about his adventures, which he later compiled into Tenth Legion, his Magnum Opus and the greatest work of turkey hunting literature. Every spring, turkey hunters flock to social media, quoting the Colonel and putting to words what he described as his greatest “compulsion.”

“I do not turkey hunt because I want to, I hunt them because I have to,” he wrote. “I would really rather not do it, but I am helpless in the grip of my compulsion.”

As much as Faulkner’s shadow still hangs over the Southern writer, Kelly’s own lyrical and meditative musings on turkey hunting cast a similar influence over others and even some contemporary writers today. It’s evident that Kelly’s writing affected generations of turkey hunters. Before Kelly, no one really wrote, with such eloquence, about turkey hunting.

Perhaps his greatest influence, though, goes beyond the page. His writing inspired his readers to revere the wild turkey, not through mere adoration alone but as a rally to arms for wild turkey conservation. In fact, the Mossy Oak documentary The Colonel and the Fox details Kelly’s and Fox Haas’ legacy of turkey hunting and conservation.

“He was 99. That sounds old for a man, but for Tom Kelly, you could almost believe he would live forever,” his daughter said. What remains of the colonel are his words and stories; stories that made generations of turkey hunters admire the wild turkey just as much as a turkey gobble might. And that, like the wild turkey, can surely endure.