Service Held for Thomas Owen, Former Thrift Leader

Thrift industry leader Thomas J. Owen was buried here Tuesday. He died of cancer Dec. 13 at age 63 in Bethesda, Md., a Washington suburb.

Like his father before him, Mr. Owen was chairman and chief executive of Perpetual American Savings Bank. He resigned in the early 1990s when the $6 billion-asset thrift ran into trouble with regulators over soured real estate loans.

Perpetual was also one of the thrifts burned by the government's 1989 decision to require goodwill to be written off quickly. Perpetual filed one of more than 100 lawsuits, which the government lost in a 1996 Supreme Court decision. But by then Perpetual had been seized by regulators and sold.

Mr. Owen became president of Cafritz Corp., a real estate management company he headed until his death.

Mr. Owen is survived by his wife, Sally LaHue Owen, and two children from his first marriage. Ms. LaHue Owen has represented thrifts on Capitol Hill for a decade with America's Community Bankers and its predecessor organizations.

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