Wiley Grant Thibodeaux

Wiley Grant Thibodeaux died in Hot Springs on August 21, 2026. He was eighty-three. Born there on August 4, 1943, he grew up knowing the bathhouses as a weekday neighbor, not a postcard. His father hauled ice. Wiley learned that steam is a set of rules that do not care how late you are for supper. For thirty-four years he was an attendant on Bathhouse Row, first folding towels that never quite came dry in August, later the man who could hear a tired pump before the logbook admitted it. He did not advertise the town. He kept the rooms honest. He would write up a cracked tile even when a tour was already promised. He charged a fair hour on the side when a church van needed a lift more than a sermon. He kept a notebook of boilers, not clients. The notebook had mineral on the edges. He married Imogene Thibodeaux in 1965. They raised three children in a frame house that needed a new porch every twenty years. Imogene kept the garden and the choir. Wiley grilled on Sundays and considered a plate of smoked chicken a seasonal obligation. After his knees quit the worst pits he still came out for a favorite Saturday, moving slower, doing the same honest work. Friends remember a man who wiped the marble before he offered a hand, who could stand in a hiss without making it a personality, and who left a room cleaner than he found it. He loved the lake at evening, a glass of tea he did not finish, and the sound of a pipe that had decided to live. He died in Hot Springs, in the city whose heat had written his calendar. The row still steams. Someone else will hear the knock that means trouble.