Gerry Thomas, who died Monday at 83, was the culinary (tele)visionary who brainstormed that iconic comestible of the space age, the TV dinner.

He was immortalized with a tray and handprints on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and added to the immortals of the American Frozen Food Industry Hall of Fame.

The story is a familiar one, as the TV dinner’s 50th anniversary last year was accompanied by an outpouring of marketing-driven publicity, in which Thomas participated with glee.

In December 1952, C.A. Swanson & Son, a major purveyor of Thanksgiving turkeys, found itself with a massive oversupply – 20 refrigerated cars’ worth, at 52,000 pounds a car. One million pounds of turkey, and Thanksgiving was past.

Challenged by management to think outside the coop, Thomas came up with the three-compartment foil tray, filled with turkey, dressing, gravy, mashed sweet potatoes, and petite peas. Then he thought of the name.

“This revolutionary new product demanded a unique personality,” Thomas wrote in “The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.” “By marrying the word ‘television’ to a frozen meal, the ‘issue’ would automatically become contemporary. The name would be easy to say and remember … and it was ‘cool.’ “

It was also a nearly immediate hit, selling at a rate of 13 million a year annually by 1954. Swanson soon added the familiar favorites: fried chicken, roast beef, filet of haddock, and Thomas’s son’s favorite, Salisbury steak.

There were those who disputed Thomas’s inventor’s credentials, including former Swanson’s employees and descendents of the Swanson’s owners. Thomas never denied he was inspired in part by “Strato-Plates” – reheated meals produced for airlines – for instance, as well as the three-compartment mess tray he encountered during service in World War II. Lacking documentation, definitive credit is difficult to assign with assurance. But there is no question Thomas was present at the creation and had a major role in the TV dinner’s development. Add to that an ebullient personality and props like the TV dinner cufflinks he liked to sport, and it’s hard to deny him credit.

Thomas was brought up in Nebraska during the Depression. His mother opened a boardinghouse in Omaha after his father was wiped out as a stockbroker. Thomas served in the Pacific during World War II and then attended the University of Nebraska to study marketing. His name appears among the cast of the show put on by a university drama group, The Kosmet Klub, beside that of John Carson, the future “Tonight Show” host who would remain a lifelong acquaintance.

Employed by Swanson from 1948, Thomas helped the company begin advertising new products, including frozen chicken pies. After the introduction of the TV dinner, Swanson was acquired by the Campbell’s Soup Company and Thomas went to work at its marketing department, where he helped introduce new frozen products, including World’s Fare international dinners and Hungry Man deep-dish pies. He also helped start Campbell’s Godiva chocolate boutiques. He ended up as director of marketing, and retired in 1970 after suffering a heart attack.

Thomas next became director of an art gallery at Grand Central Terminal devoted to representational art, and later started a business selling Western art prints. He divorced his wife and moved to Arizona, where he went into business selling luxury Christmas stockings for dogs through department stores. The business was called Christmas Crumpie Inc., and his partner in it became his second wife. Neither liked pets much, his wife said, but the business opportunity was too good to pass up.

A connoisseur of food as well as art, Thomas had a flair for gourmet cooking, and rarely if ever sampled one of his TV dinners. He was so attached to his recipe for a wet martini – three parts Bombay gin to one part specially imported vermouth – that he insisted on handing bartenders a preprinted card with the recipe.

“Through it all,” he wrote in a self-penned obituary, “Thomas will always be remembered for his TV dinner and the billion-dollar industry which it spawned.”

He made his case, eloquently.

Gerry Thomas

Born February 17, 1922, in Seward, Neb.; died July 18 at a hospice in Phoenix, of liver cancer; survived by his wife, Susan Mills Thomas; five children, Nancy, Terry, Cindy, Linda, and David; two stepchildren, Eric and Luke, and six grandchildren.