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Ghapter 7 ary Pickford was married to one man and in love with another, but she still had an eye for a handsome face. In her position as their honorary colonel, she reviewed the troops of the 143rd Field Artillery and blew a special silver whistle to start the camp football game. On the field and at the dinner at the Hotel del Coronado that February evening in 1918, Mary spotted a six-foot-two, blue-eyed,sandy-haired fullback whose chiseled features stood out even in a crowd of good-looking men. She was careful to position herself next to him for the team picture. Mary returned to Camp Kearneywith Frances a fewweeks later to finalize the arrangements for the 143rd's appearance inJohanna Enlists. The two women toured the base hospital because Mary's "find" from the previous visit was recovering from a broken leg. Frances had to agree that Fred Thomson was something to look at and while Mary went on with her "colonel's duties," Frances stayed behind to talk with the handsome patient. The lieutenant had just turned twenty-eight when Frances, almost thirty, met him at Camp Kearney and she soon realized he was no ordinary man; Frederick Clifton Thomson was the chaplain of the 143rd and a world champion athlete.1 Frances went to church only to get married or to witness someone else doing the same and while she still rode horses occasionally, she had no interest in sports. Had she ever read the sports section, she might have recognized Fred, for he had run, hurdled, and thrown his way to the title of All Around Champion Athlete of the World at the National Amateur Athletic Union's Field and Track Championship in Chicago in 1910. Since he wasa native of Pasadena, the local papers often ran articles under his byline about the virtues of clean living.2 But as Fred and Frances spent the afternoon talking, they realized they had met their respective match. He was welUread and a musician and mathematician by avocation with a breadth of knowledge she had rarely encountered—certainly never in someone so good-looking. 87 v WITHOUT LYING DOWN "No one had written more satirically about 'love at first sight' than I," Frances admitted, but that night she told Maryit had happened to her. She knew that if she had penned such a scene it would have been discarded as too far-fetched, but the truth was that the experienced and sophisticated writer had fallen in love with a straitlaced, God-fearing BoyScout.3 Behind the smiling, competent, and assured veneer, there was a complicated man who, as the third of four brothers, had been beaten by his minister father, "alwaysin the name of God." He had grown up aiming to please, watching and then weaving his way through the patterns of behavior that would result in peace, yet developing his own moral compass, a strong backbone, and a list of very real accomplishments.4 Fred Thomson's mother, Clara, was a four-foot-eleven-inch powerhouse, the only survivor of thirteen children after her father caught tuberculosis and fatally infected all her brothers and sisters.Clara had married a medical student, James Harrison Thomson, on what turned out to be his deathbed and, a young widow overnight, she went on to Wooster College in Ohio. She earned her master's degree bycataloging their library, then she and her mother, Anna, joined fellow Indianians in a group purchase of property in southern California. There Clara was reunited with her dead husband's younger brother, Williell, a brilliant, troubled man who had attended Hanover College, taught school, and studied law before graduating from Presbyterian Seminary in Danville, Kentucky.He continued his studies at the San Francisco Theological Seminary and reencountered his sister-in-law while serving as the minister at Santa Monica Presbyterian Church. They were married in December of 1882.5 The Thomsons built a largehouse on the comer ofColumbia and Fair Oaks in Pasadena. Their widowed mothers lived with them, and Clara and Williell became active in the community, circulating antisaloon petitions and helping found Sierra Madre College. Clara read Greek and Latin and taught school, but her immediate focus was on what she called her "four stairsteps": Henry LyonThomson, born in 1885 when Clara was thirty-five, followed by Williell junior in 1888, Frederick Clifton in January of 1890, and Samuel Harrison in 1895. Williell continued to work as a pastor, and also...

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