Born in 1952, Thrift was the eldest son of a working-class family in Savannah, Ga. His father, Foster, was a boilermaker at the local paper mill, while his mother, Reba, was a homemaker until Jerry and his younger brother, Ricky, were older, when she reentered the workforce as an administrative assistant.
If anything, the Thrift household was one of self-reliance and an all-American work ethic. “Our father could make stuff with his bare hands,” Ricky Thrift recalls today. “He had his torches and wrenches and was very talented. I remember when we were kids, he built a trailer for his fishing boat from scratch. Jerry definitely inherited his mechanical interest and ability.”
The Thrift boys were expected to pitch in, so work both around that house and away from it were the norm growing up. As a young man, Jerry held a variety of jobs, including running his own small lawn-cutting service. His younger brother vividly remembers him constantly tinkering with his riding lawnmower.
But even as a child, Jerry had a passion for learning and a work ethic that were unusual. “We’d come home from school,” Ricky remembers, “and me and every other kid in the neighborhood would toss our books away and go outside to play. But not Jerry. He’d go in the house, sit down at his desk and do all his homework right away. He wouldn’t come outside and join the rest of us until it was done.”
This dedication to his schoolwork was an early indication of Jerry’s passion for learning and the personal discipline he would rely on so often during his professional career.
As Jerry matured, so did his interest in mechanical systems. This love for tinkering would – in a few years’ time – come to fruition as he first raced souped-up riding lawnmowers in the streets with friends and later hounded a hesitant neighbor into finally selling him a 1967 Chevy Camaro Super Sport. The iconic 396-cubic-inch engine soon was scattered all across the Thrifts’ garage as Jerry tore it down to put a hotter cam in the car and boost its horsepower output.
His efforts were validated dubiously when the Georgia Highway Patrol clocked the Camaro at 120 mph and took off in high-speed pursuit. The incident ended with Jerry spinning out the Camaro in front of a roadblock. Today, the Super Sport sits restored in Ricky’s garage; the car is not for sale.
