FLINT, MI -- Almost 15 years ago, Terry Thomas walked in the back door to his office in the downtown Flint Halo Burger for the last time after selling the business that his father had founded decades earlier.

“It’s been a pretty rough day already ...,” he told The Flint Journal that morning. “Fifty-seven years I’ve been doing this, and it’s all I ever wanted to do ... If I had to do it all over again, I’d do the same thing.”

Thomas died at 85 on Thursday, Sept. 11, after a lifetime of building the Halo Burger brand into a mid-Michigan fast-food staple -- something his son William said he did by working hard to serve the freshest products and by treating employees and customers like part of an extended family.

In lieu of flowers, his family said in his obituary, “he would love for the

See Full Page