Tommy Collier

There are a lot of ways we could tell the story of Tommy Collier – through the places he traveled, the teams he rooted for, the movies he watched, or the desserts he loved.

He was a storyteller in his own right and wrote a 29-page book for his grandkids, recalling memories of his childhood; listing favorite movies, quotes, and Bible verses; giving advice on building financial security; and outlining his philosophies on living a life of love and discovery. This obituary won’t be 29 pages, but you probably want to go get yourself a big slice of chocolate pie or a glass of iced tea and take a seat. Tommy lived an extraordinary life, and this is gonna take a while.

Thomas Burnham Collier was born Oct. 15, 1937, in Troup, Texas, to Lucy Waller Collier and J.D. Collier Jr. It was the Great Depression, and the family moved from town to town as J.D. looked for work. When World War II started, J.D. signed up for the Navy.

During those war years, Tommy, his mother Lucy, and his younger brother Jake lived in Haynesville, in northwestern Louisiana, with Tommy’s maternal grandparents, Daddy Doctor and Mama Waller. That place, the people, and the time greatly shaped his ideas of the world. And also his pronunciation of things, a style all his own that was very “innersting.”

In Haynesville, he was indulged by his grandparents and his Uncle Baldy. He bought cherry Cokes for a nickel at the drug store, got a horse for Christmas one year, built giant playhouses with neighborhood boys, played cards, broke his leg jumping off the porch, and stole his grandparents’ false teeth as a prank.

When his father came home from the war, the family moved to Cisco, in West Texas, though Tommy continued to spend most summers in Haynesville.

Tommy was very close to his Uncle Baldy, Burnham Waller, whom Tommy was named for. Uncle Baldy was in a car accident as a young man and was paralyzed from the chest down. Tommy helped take care of him every summer from about age 12, bathing him, helping him with the toilet, rubbing him down with liniment, and lifting him from his wheelchair to the car and other places. This was no small task for a young boy; Uncle Baldy weighed more than 200 pounds.

They fished almost every day in the summers, with Uncle Baldy perched on a special chair attached to a boat seat. Tommy learned a lot about life from Uncle Baldy. “His main wish always was just to be able to walk, but he did not seem to feel sorry for himself or go around talking about his troubles,” Tommy recalled. “He made the best of his situation and tried to live as full a life as he could under the.” When Tommy was 10, his sister Sue was born. He and his brother Jake adored their little sister, a beautiful child who brought light and joy to a rough-and-tumble household of boys.

Tommy was a good athlete. He played most sports in high school and particularly loved football. He won a Golden Gloves boxing championship and played on a semi-professional baseball team. Even as a child, he was a Baylor Bear fan, and he and his father enjoyed going to football games in Waco.

Tommy graduated from Cisco High School in 1956 and went to Baylor University, where he graduated in 1960.

As a junior at Baylor, he met his life partner, Cynthia Elizabeth Cameron. “I remember the first time I saw her, how pretty I thought she looked,” he said. “She was a pretty blonde wearing a red dress with a white fur collar.”

He wanted to meet her but didn’t know her name. One night, as he was taking his own date back to the freshman dorm, he saw Cynthia returning from a date with a boy he knew. Tommy went to the boy’s apartment and asked who his date had been. “He told me her name, and I called her and asked her for a date.” They went to “Coke Hour” on the Baylor campus and soon became a couple.

They married on July 29, 1961, in San Antonio, her hometown. Uncle Baldy was his best man. For a honeymoon, Tommy and Cynthia stopped for two nights in New Braunfels and San Marcos, then drove to Mart, where they lived the first year of their marriage. They then moved to Burkburnett, where their daughter Jana was born in 1964; then to Lake Jackson, where their son Tyree was born in 1965 and daughter Shannon in 1969.T

Tommy coached and taught school, mostly math, for the first 12 years of his adult career. To supplement his teacher’s salary, he sold encyclopedias door-to-door; drove a school bus; taught night classes at Brazosport College; did people’s tax returns during tax season; and worked on the mainframe computers at Dow Chemical Co. He even taught at night at the Brazoria County prison system.

While he was coaching, teaching, doing odd jobs, and raising a family, he was also going back to school. He studied at Southeastern Oklahoma and the University of South Carolina and got master’s degrees from Midwestern University in 1965 and the University of Texas in Austin in 1974. With those degrees, he moved into better jobs in school administration in West Columbia and Sweeny. He later worked for Region IV Education Service Center in Houston. In the late 1960s, he decided to add a room to their small, wood-frame house in Lake Jackson. He built most of it himself, with help from his father-in-law, Robert Cameron. Tommy did the plumbing and electricity based on how-to books he’d read.

This drive to work hard and get ahead started early. As a boy and teenager, he mowed yards, had a newspaper route, worked at a service station and the A&P grocery store, was a janitor at the Sears Mail Order store, and delivered milk. He worked on pipeline crews in Cisco and as a roughneck in the oilfield in Haynesville. The summer before he started college, he cut pulpwood in Haynesville – “the most difficult physical job I ever tried.” With an axe, a one-man bucksaw, a sack lunch, and some water, he worked alone from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. “It would be just me, the trees, and the ticks there in the pine woods,” he said.

All this hard work had a history and a purpose. When Tommy was growing up, his own father often worked two or three jobs at a time, and he experienced firsthand the difficulty of trying to get ahead. As Tommy worked on other people’s taxes, he realized that making a lot of money didn’t equate to financial security. “I know many people who made more money than we did but who now don’t have much.” He built a habit of saving money from every paycheck.

“Your grandmother and I wanted to live comfortably and be able to help our families and, hopefully, help make the world better because we have lived,” he wrote to his grandkids. “I hope you will each begin to save for the future as soon as you begin working regularly. ”Tommy and Cynthia were frugal about a lot of things, clipping coupons and looking for sales. When his children were little, cans of tuna fish were sometimes on sale for 10 cans for $1 – with a limit of 10. Each member of the family of five lined up with 10 cans of tuna fish and $1.05 in cash for the tuna and tax. Not sure what the cashier thought of 4-year-old Shannon buying 10 cans of tuna, but it was how they lived.And yet, Tommy and Cynthia were generous beyond imagination, giving money to organizations and directly to people in need. Granddaughter Rachel Keathley says: “Tommy counted every dollar and saved most of his. But he valued money most when he could put it in the hands of someone who needed it more than he did.

Still, he believed in splurging on some things.

Until his 30s, Tommy had only been to Louisiana, Texas, and a small part of Arkansas. In the late 1960s, the family spent several summers in South Carolina while he took summer classes at the University of South Carolina. The family visited the Smoky Mountains and other parts of the eastern U.S. “It caused me to want to see more of the world.” In 1972, Tommy and Cynthia went to Europe. They had been saving for a car, but Tommy made a proposal: wait on the car and use the money to go to Europe. Cynthia agreed. “It was an eye-opening experience for me,” Tommy said. “Even the variety of toilets was amazing to me. I realized there were many things in the world that I had not known about and certainly not understood. I think that experience really began my desire to see the world and learn more about what was out there.”

Tommy and Cynthia traveled to 84 countries and all 50 states. They went to famous museums and iconic sites, but their passion was meeting real people and experiencing life as they did. They went to the grocery stores, wandered local markets, and got lost in places where they couldn’t speak the language or read the signs.

Once, on the way back from one of their many trips to Vietnam, a storm caused their flight to be rerouted for several days to Gaziantep, Turkey, near the Syrian border, during Syrian civil violence. Most people on the flight hunkered down in their hotel rooms, but Tommy and Cynthia took to the streets, eating local food, shopping the markets, meeting people, and making friends.

Of course, their travels included following their beloved Baylor Bears. Although they’d always been season ticket holders, they really became immersed in Baylor sports when they moved to Waco around 1998. Win or lose, they followed Baylor football, basketball (men’s and women’s), baseball, softball, tennis, and volleyball. They attended games locally and on the road. A coach at heart, Tommy appreciated the skills of strategy, motivation, planning, and quick decision-making as much as pure athletic ability. He’d get upset when Baylor lost, but he quickly focused on the next game, the next season. There was always hope for a future championship.

His grandchildren called him Hommy, and he adored them. He was so proud that all six graduated from college in four years and went on to have good jobs. In the book he wrote for them, he called out each one, naming unique characteristics he appreciated and moments he remembered. He played games, took them on trips, put them in “bear traps,” and let them paint his nails and fix his hair.

In 2021, Cynthia had a stroke that left her partially paralyzed on her right side. Tommy became her caregiver and chief encourager. He refused to leave her alone except for brief trips to run an errand. He said his experiences with Uncle Baldy all those years before helped prepare him for this role, perhaps his most important.

When Cynthia died in July 2025, the loss was nearly overwhelming. He said he’d experienced grief when his mother and father died, when his brother Jake Collier died in 2020, and when friends died. But nothing compared to the loss of his beloved Cynthia. Still, he kept moving forward. He traveled to Ohio in October for his granddaughter Rachel’s wedding and showed all the young people how to get down on the dance floor.

Through this deep grief, he was buoyed by the love and support of his dear neighbors, Dave and Laurie Goss and Summer and Adam Collins, and the incredible community of his International Sunday School class at Columbus Avenue Baptist Church. His Sunday school friends called him regularly, brought him food, and lifted him up through prayer and love.

One story Tommy told exemplified the kind of father, grandfather, and friend he strived to be. He recalled his first Sunday of his first paper route. He was in elementary school (yeah, child labor laws were different then). He was a little boy on a bike, hauling a huge bag of newspapers in the dark on the red dirt roads of Cisco. It was so much harder than he’d imagined, and he worried he couldn’t complete the route. When he was in tears and about to give up, his father drove up in the car. He’d been following Tommy, and now, in his son’s low moment, he offered a ride and help finishing the route. “I always remember that about Daddy. He wanted me to learn to do things for myself, but he seemed to always be around when I needed him.” This was the kind of father and grandfather Tommy was. He encouraged us all to work hard and take risks. But he was always there, in the background, ready to pick us up if we got in over our heads -- not to save us, but to give us that hand to finish the task.

Tommy Collier was a person of hope, of forward momentum, of progress. He believed we could all become better people through experience, education, and the wisdom those things brought.

His oldest granddaughter Claire Keathley recalled a conversation with Hommy just days before he died. “Hommy’s last words to me were telling me to enjoy my children,” Claire said, “and I think those are words he lived by throughout his whole life. He enjoyed his family. ” If Tommy Collier had a list of tenets to live by, we think it might look something like this:

• Believe that good will triumph in the end

• Know there’s always another season, and you can try again

•There is, in fact, power in the power of compound interest

• Save, invest, and use it to help others

• Eat dessert

•Take the trip

•Help someone finish their route

Tommy is survived by his children, Jana Collier and her husband, Mike Wallace; Tyree Collier and his wife, Rose Ann; Shannon Saegert and her husband, Chip; his grandchildren, Claire Keathley and her husband, Cody Brannock; Rachel Keathley and her husband, Caleb van Haaren; Aidan Collier and his fiancé, Megan Peterson; Ben Collier; Hank Saegert; and Lucy Saegert; his great-grandchildren, Collier Brannock and Henning Brannock; his sister, Sue Sloan and her husband, Robert; and so many nieces, nephews, grand-nieces, grand-nephews, and friends here and around the world.

Please join the family for a memorial service to celebrate the life of Tommy Collier at 2 p.m. Monday, March 23, at Columbus Avenue Baptist Church in Waco. We’ll have a reception afterward with Tommy’s favorite dessert, Cowboy Cookies.

The service will be livestreamed at https://cabcwaco.org/stream.Donations can be made to Columbus Avenue Baptist Church.

And if anyone needs toothpicks, back scratchers, individual take-home containers of Rudy’s Sissy Sauce, or empty Cool Whip containers (H-E-B brand), let us know. We’ve got you covered!

The family invites you to leave a message or memory of Thomas online in the "Memorial Guestbook" at www.WHBfamily.com