Chapter 7

      Mary 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 Kearney with Frances a few weeks later to finalize the arrangements for the 143rd’s appearance in Johanna 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 was a 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 well read and a musician and mathematician by avocation with a breadth of knowledge she had rarely encountered—certainly never in someone so good-looking.

      “No one had written more satirically about ‘love at first sight’ than I,” Frances admitted, but that night she told Mary it 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 Boy Scout.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, “always in 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 by cataloging 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 large house on the corner of Columbia 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 Lyon Thomson, 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 as a surveyor, civil engineer, teacher, and a superintendent of the Pasadena Street Railway Company. He wandered from job to job, never particularly successful at any of them, and it was Clara’s strong will that held the family together. Everything and everyone was expected to function and behave within very strict guidelines to be worthy of her attention, let alone her approval.

      Entering first grade at the age of four, Fred set himself on a steady course to win approval at school and avoid punishment at home. His mother’s idea of high praise was to tell him that he was “fairly obedient and never obtrusive,” yet he flourished academically and excelled in everything athletic. Acclaimed as the star fullback of the Occidental Academy High School football team, he was accepted at Occidental College as a sixteen-year-old freshman and played all four years for the varsity team. He won event after event, local championship after local championship, and the Los Angeles Herald declared “Thomson was practically the Occidental team,” but good grades and athletic awards weren’t enough for Clara Thomson.⁶

      Musical instruction at home was a daily occurrence and Fred was also active in the YMCA, played in the college band, joined the literary society, worked on the staff of the college yearbook, and served as student body president his senior year. After graduating from Occidental and a brief stint as the director of the Long Beach YMCA, Fred decided to follow his father and older brother Williell in becoming a Presbyterian minister.

      It was the summer before he entered Princeton Theological Seminary that Fred was first heralded as “the All Around Champion Athlete of the World,” winning the AAU National Championship by accumulating the most points in a series of events—the 100-yard dash, the shot put, high jump, 880-yard walk, hammer throw, 120-yard hurdles, pole vault, throwing a fifty-pound weight, the one-mile run, and the broad jump.⁷

      He played football for Princeton and represented the college when he defended his title as National All Around Athlete at the AAU meet of 1911, again held in Chicago. He scored a total of 6,709 points, exactly 500 more than his nearest competitor, yet after completing his second year of seminary, “the red blooded divinity scholar” announced on his return home to Los Angeles in the spring of 1912 that he would not enter the Olympics.⁸

      Although he was “almost certain to make the team,” Fred was morally opposed to competitions held on Sundays and the Olympic schedule in Stockholm would have challenged those convictions. Still, he claimed the primary reason for his decision was that “I have spent two of my summers at athletics and will not give