Thomakos to retire after 27 years on bench

Common Pleas Judge Elizabeth Lehigh Thomakos is ending her judicial career after 27 years on the bench in Tuscarawas County.

She officially retires Feb. 1.

While she wasn’t the first woman to serve as a judge in Tuscarawas County, she was the first female judge in the general trial division. Thomakos, a Republican, was originally elected in 1998 when she was 35 years old and barely a decade out of law school.

She grew up locally and graduated from Tuscarawas Central Catholic High School. Her father, attorney Daniel T. Lehigh, had a law practice in New Philadelphia, and Thomakos began working for him when she was 15.

She attended Stephens College, a women’s college in Columbia, Missouri. She started out as a dance major but eventually switched to communications and journalism. She was the editor of the school paper.

While in college, she attended a lecture that changed the course of her life.

She was sent to cover a speech by Pat Carbine, one of the founders of Ms. magazine.

“She was talking about journalists and their responsibility to educate people on equal rights and just talking about this idea of having an Equal Rights Amendment should not be radical,” Thomakos recalled. “It’s just human rights, and as a journalist you can educate people. I started thinking, well, maybe I should go to law school so I can learn about rights and be a better journalist.”

After graduating from Stephens College, Thomakos enrolled in law school at the University of Akron.

“Nobody was more surprised than my dad when I said I was going to take the law school admissions test,” she said.

At the University of Akron, she met her husband, Steven, also a law student.

Thomakos graduated in January 1987, took the bar exam that February and turned 24 the day after the bar exam. She married Steven three weeks later during his spring break.

After graduation, Steven got a job working for the public defender’s office in Canton while she joined her father’s law firm. Two weeks after her first wedding anniversary, her father told her he was going to work for Atwood Resources, an oil and gas company in Dover.

“It was just sort of this, boom, I’m going to be out of here,” Thomakos said. “You’re self-employed. I was 25 years old, and so I cried all the way home. We were barely getting by on very minimal salaries as it was. We had debt to pay. We lived in an apartment, and I thought, how am I going to be self-employed? Nobody’s going to give me a paycheck. I hadn’t even been licensed for a full year.”

So she formed a partnership with a young lawyer, Nanette DeGarmo, who was renting office space from her father. DeGarmo is now Nanette DeGarmo VonAllman, judge of New Philadelphia Municipal Court.

The two young lawyers soon found themselves busy. Two weeks after her father went to work for Atwood Resources, the company made a $29 million purchase of gas wells. Daniel Lehigh then hired his daughter and her partner to do all the due diligence work for the sale. That kept them busy doing gas well title work for the next nine weeks.

Thomakos and DeGarmo remained law partners for five years.

In 1995, Thomakos was invited by Ohio Attorney General Anthony Celebrezze to serve on a federal judicial selection committee. She served with three other lawyers on the committee, interviewing candidates in Cleveland. The process got her thinking about becoming a judge.

In 1997, she approached Common Pleas Judge Roger Lile about becoming a judge. At the time, Lile was preparing to retire. He told her that if she was serious, she had better start running for office.

So Thomakos began putting herself out more in public. “I remember the whole year, I never wore jeans in public. I never wore my hair in a ponytail. I made sure my shorts were long enough. I didn’t want people to see me out in public and think, she’s a child, or not look the part, which I didn’t look the part,” she said.

In her campaign, Thomakos enlisted many of her young family friends to help. They went door to door with her and held fundraisers.

She was elected judge Nov. 3, 1998, receiving 51% of the vote. “I don’t think anybody saw it coming. It’s kind of fun to be the underdog.”

In her first year in office, she received help from then-court administrator Elizabeth Stephenson and Common Pleas Judge Edward O’Farrell.

During her first term, she helped start a mediation program, which allows people involved in civil cases to work out an agreement without going to a jury trial.

In 2005, during her second term, a Drug Court program was instituted in her courtroom. The program is designed to promote rehabilitation and reduce recidivism among drug-dependent offenders.

Thomakos, who had never represented criminal defendants, was concerned she might not know how to interact with the individuals who came before her. That same year, she went back to school at Malone University in Canton to get a degree in Christian ministries.

“It just helped me think about the people in my courtroom a little differently and how they should be treated and how do you communicate and how do you encourage them. I think I did that to be a better judge,” she said.

To date, 410 people have participated in Drug Court. Of that number, 183 have graduated.

“It’s been really gratifying to run into people who are really working on their recovery,” Thomakos said. “I ran into two sisters recently who said, ‘Oh gosh, we’ve heard your name our whole life. Our mom has been clean and sober for 14 years and she always tells us it’s because you sent her to this place.’”

Gov. Mike DeWine will appoint Thomakos’ replacement. In the interim, O’Farrell will fill in as judge.

Her future plans include appearing in more productions at the Little Theatre of Tuscarawas County. Since 2014, she has appeared in 30 productions, including musicals and dramas.

She also hopes to visit her children and grandchildren more.