Tom Yarish knew how to get things done, even if it meant uttering the occasional mild profanity and yelling at Adams County commissioners by saying something like: “We need some streetlights!”
Yarish, for years the voice of a small neighborhood in Adams County, died at his kitchen table Feb. 9 while doing a crossword puzzle. Yarish, who hadn’t been ill, was 78.
A switchman for the Colorado and Southern Railway for 36 years, Yarish was best known for his activism in his small unincorporated Adams County neighborhood.
The two-block by five- block area, near West 58th Avenue and Federal Boulevard, contains about 40 houses, said son Steve Yarish of Brighton.
Often “the neighborhood felt left out” because it isn’t part of a town, Steve Yarish said.
Tom Yarish “could be crass and cold on the outside, but he really was very sociable,” his son said.
He “would keep harping” at county officials until things got done, leading to his being dubbed the “Mayor of Bugville,” Steve Yarish said. Tom Yarish’s children said the neighborhood was sometimes called Bugville because the former agricultural area had so many mosquitoes.
“He was very forthright, and sometimes he’d say things just to get us (kids) to think and argue,” said daughter Gayle Malik of Littleton. “Since he died, we’ve been discussing how old each of us was before we ever won an argument with Dad.”
“There was Tom’s way and the wrong way,” said son Bruce Yarish of Littleton. “He was a character, attention- commanding and not afraid to take charge. But everybody liked him at some time.”
Tom Yarish kept after county officials until sewer lines and streetlights were put in, and he helped with the annual community cleanup, his family said.
Yarish loved trains, and every year he put up a model train set under the Christmas tree, teaching his kids how to build a village, said daughter Lori Mellon of Parker.
But Yarish rarely traveled by rail because he and his wife took trips overseas, Mellon said.
With the woodworking he’d learned at Johnson School of Technology in Scranton, Pa., Yarish “was always tinkering,” said Steve Yarish, making birdhouses, toys and games. He also made jewelry boxes and boxes for his daughter’s Barbie dolls and Barbie clothes.
He made a 6-foot replica of a semaphore, a railroad-signal device, on which he hung his mailbox.
The device had a lantern at the top that could be switched from a red to a green light, just like the ones seen on tracks to warn of a clear track or a train coming.
Thomas Stanley Yarish was born Dec. 19, 1930, in Dickson City, Pa., and graduated from high school there. He graduated from Johnson School of Technology.
Yarish enlisted in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War and served much of his time at Denver’s Lowry Air Force Base, where he met Elaine Lillo. They married in 1952.
He decided to stay in Colorado because he thought it was “God’s country,” Mellon said.
Yarish bragged about being a member of the “Mud Ducks,” railway workers who were faced with the mud cleanup after the 1965 Platte River flood in Denver.
He served on the board of the Berkeley Water and Sanitation District and as a representative for Local 202 of the United Transportation Union.
In addition to his wife and children, he is survived by eight grandchildren.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
