RICHMOND – Ray County’s oldest World War II veteran, Ted Thomas, turned 102 on May 18 and said he looks forward to Memorial Day on May 30. “It means a whole lot – the memory of them that’s gone on before,” Thomas said, including friends he had made while serving at Honolulu, Hawaii. “Several of them are dead and gone now.” Thomas enlisted after the attack of Dec. 7, 1941, and then served at Pearl Harbor, a place of sunshine and blue water. In a machine shop, he and others reworked faulty firing pins in torpedoes. Prior to the work, a torpedo launched from a U.S. submarine might strike an enemy ship, but not go off, leaving the submarine subject to a deadly counterattack – a point dramatized in the 1951 John Wayne submarine film “Operation Pacific.” “I got to make the first of the new firing pins that were used in the torpedoes,” Thomas said. The work represented a crucial milestone in winning the war in the Pacific. “That’s in the history books,” he said. Thomas, who lives in an…