Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1926)

The Mystery Man of Hollywood 47 father's family a heritage of physical debility which, however, has been conquered by the health received from his mother's tree. The predominating characteristics of two lines have come to a focus in him. His paternal annals are replete with scientific achievements. You find in each generation an academic, scholarly mind, a brilliant mentality holding stubbornly to a firmly fixed religious creed. William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was England's greatest physicist, an authority on the principles of light and on the dynamic properties of heat. James, his brother, aspired to and trained for active engineering. When ill health forced his retirement, he devoted himself to theoretical calculation, and contributed to science notable researches in thermodynamics. Turn, then, to a direct opposite : Bach, inspired through religion to melody's creation. Bach's son, Philip, in tracing his father's genealogy, describes Veit Bach, great-great-grandfather of the composer, with a line that may be appropriately applied to Fred Thomson: "His zither must have sounded very pretty midst the clattering of the mill wheels." Now, Fred wouldn't know what to do with a zither, would only grin at it, but his big, clumsy hands can beguile music from a violin — though he tries to keep it a dark secret — and his devotional zeal midst the noise and danger of his work is somewhat reminiscent of Veit Bach. Persistency, traveling two roads, meets and is doubled into obstinacy. The boy Johann Sebastian Bach, at ten, for six months laboriously copied by moonlight a volume of music, access to which his brother had denied his groping, eager talent. Spiritedly, he thus forced his way through barriers to his gift's expression. On the other lane, learned scholars propounded revolutionary theories and stuck to them through argumentative wars which shook the scientific world, eventually proving their theories and introducing innovations that have contributed much to modern comfort. The Thomson family has kept up its erudite traditions. Fred's brother, eight years younger, is now a professor at Prague. Their mother, seventy-six years of age, is with him, studying two languages and a literature course ! "By the time she's grown up," Fred smiles, "mother will be a smart girl." There were four boys. Fred and the youngest were born after their mother had passed her fortieth birth day. Children born to a woman of middle age are often exceptionally brilliant, but are likely to be physical weaklings. "That we are athletes," Fred explains, "I attribute partly to the health that my mother's line gave us, and partly to the fact that my father, being a semi-invalid, determined that his children should be strong. When his health broke under the sedentary life of the ministry, he returned to college, annexed a few more degrees, and became a civil engineer, so that he might live in the open. In our childhood-, he insisted that my brother and I be trained in athletics, fostering in us the natural American-boy spirit of activity and accomplishment in sports." Thus the inherited debility was conquered by this infusion of red blood from a strong stock. The boy Fred calculated scientifically how to beat other youngsters at sports, fooled with inventions, studied the violin, licked the stuffings out of kids who jeered, and took it for granted that he would follow the grooves of his forbears, and would deliver from the pulpit the usual preachments. A postgraduate course in theology at Princeton prepared him. When he could not make the Princeton football team, he gathered together a scrub eleven that licked everything it met on the gridiron. During these years, he established athletic championship records, some of which were broken only by his younger brother. After college, he donned clerical garb, first serving a Washington congregation. Cramped, however, by city life, restless for the open, he accepted a call to a church in Goldfield, Nevada. There, he and a Catholic priest, working in jovial cooperation, cleaned up the town by what Fred calls "practical Christianity — helping a man when he's down, and showing him the way up to a useful, constructive life." Quick to fight in a good cause — and what could be a better one than the defense of his principles? — he occasionally taught the jeering miners with his fists. Charity, good sportsmanship, example, that which comes from the heart rather than from set rules written in musty books — this is his creed, and he has not deviated from it a hairbreadth since he left the pulpit for what he calls "a wider ministry." During the war, as chaplain of the 143d Field Artillery overseas, he looked after the spiritual welfare of his men and served as instructor in ballistics — range, aim, angles, pressure, and the properties of powders — Continued on page 108 He is uncanny in his ability to handle animals.