[3] Upon graduating, during World War II, he was deployed to Europe, where he served as a captain in the United States Army under General George Patton in the Battle of the Bulge.
[4] He also had a fifty-year association with Charlotte Aircraft Corporation,[4] and was vice-president and of legal counsel to Allied Life Insurance Company.
[3] In 1993, he established the John Thomas Byrum Law Scholarship in memory of his father, who died in 1961.
[1][4] In 2011, the Wake Forest University Welcome Center, nicknamed the "front porch" was named for Byrum.
[3] He was interred in Ballards Bridge Baptist Church Cemetery in Tyner, North Carolina, alongside his parents[10] and stepmother, Helen, who died in 1982.