Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly died over the weekend of 3 and 4 October 2026, at the age of 99. The family's announcement did not give the exact day or place of death. His daughter, Laura Kelly Bates, confirmed the news in a short video posted to his website on Tuesday 6 October, and Outdoor Life reported it the same day. She did not give a cause of death.

"This weekend we lost one of the greatest of the Greatest Generation, Tom Kelly," she said. "The Colonel, Daddy to me, and Old Tom to his grandchildren. No words can express what he has meant to me, to our family and friends, to his troops, and to his loyal legion of followers in the turkey hunting community." She added: "He was 99. That sounds old for a man, but for Tom Kelly, you could almost believe he would live forever."

Thomas Henry Kelly Jr. was born on 15 May 1927 in Mobile, Alabama. He grew up on what locals called the Needle Coast, the salt flats in and around Mobile Bay. According to his daughter, he had his first library card at four and skipped kindergarten.

He graduated from McGill Institute in Mobile in 1944 and entered Alabama Polytechnic Institute to study forestry. At 17, against his mother's wishes, he persuaded an uncle to help him enlist in the U.S. Navy, and he served as an aerial tail gunner and international Morse code operator in the final days of the Second World War, leaving the Navy in 1946.

He completed his forestry degree at Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now Auburn University, in 1949. When the Korean War began he was called up again as an officer and served as an artillery officer in Korea. He went on to retire from the U.S. Army as a colonel after 30 years of service.

After Korea, Kelly worked in several forestry jobs, including a post with the Tennessee Valley Authority. In 1953 he joined the Scott Paper Company in Mobile, where he worked for 40 years. He was appointed the company's manager of woodlands in 1978 and retired in 1993, after which he worked as a consultant. In the 1980s he wrote a guide to leadership and professionalism for his Scott Paper woodlands staff that was later published.

Throughout his forestry years he hunted wild turkeys and wrote short stories about the hunts. His wife, Helen, suggested he turn them into a book, and in 1973 he self published Tenth Legion. The title came from the Roman legion that Julius Caesar trusted above all others, which Kelly saw as a model for the devoted, almost cult-like turkey hunters of south Alabama. Unauthorized photocopies circulated widely in the 1970s and helped build the book's reputation, and it came to be called the bible of turkey hunting.

Kelly wrote about 30 books in all, among them Dealer's Choice (1983), Better on a Rising Tide (1995), The Season (1996), The Boat (1998), A Year Outside (2000), Faces in the Crowd (2002), Ol' Tom and Laura (2008), Absent Companions (2008) and No Place to Hide (2015). He recorded many of them as audiobooks in his own voice and made instructional films on turkey hunting. He contributed at least three pieces to Outdoor Life, including the February 1978 column "Turkey Trauma" and a 1979 essay about teaching his daughter to shoot.

In 2024 he received the Monroeville Literary Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors Alabama authors. The outdoor writer Jim Casada called him "the poet laureate of the turkey woods."

Kelly was married to Helen, who encouraged him to write his first book, and for many years they lived in Spanish Fort, Alabama. They had a daughter, Laura Kelly Bates. Beyond hunting and writing he played minor league baseball, sculpted, built furniture and played the banjo.

After Helen's death he moved to the Washington, D.C., area to be closer to his daughter. He killed his last turkey three weeks before his 96th birthday, on a hunt with Laura beside him. In his final years he could no longer hunt, but his daughter said his writing and his family sustained him.

Tenth Legion is widely regarded as the most influential book ever written about turkey hunting, prized for its wit, its plain language and its honesty about failure as well as success. Its closing reflection, that each turkey that came to him stirred the same emotion as the first and that he was glad he lived to see it one more time, became one of the most quoted passages in American outdoor writing.

Daniel Haas of Mossy Oak, who helped make a documentary about Kelly and Haas's grandfather Fox Haas, called him the last torchbearer for the old days of turkey hunting, a generation of hunters whose devotion helped keep the sport alive when wild turkeys were scarce. His books remain available through Tom Kelly Inc., his official bookshop, which has reissued several of them, including a limited Bootleg Revival edition of Tenth Legion.