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Note: Tom was one of those people who could be called a 'solid citizen'. His character was such that his family was more important than his own well being and he shared any gains he made with his family. In 1913 when he was 16 years old, he badly cut his left arm in a farming accident and thereafter was unable to use the small fingers of his left arm.
After leaving Colorado in a 1917 Ford, he took his family to Idaho to try his luck in western farming. After securing promises and a piece of land, he farmed around Twin Falls with his sep-father, Eli. As the crops failed and landowners cheated, he packed his remaining family (Mary had died in the flue epidemic) and headed for California - the doctors saying that his mother, Myrta, needed the dry airs of lower lands. Myrta with a bad heart, Beulah just escaping the flue, Kate with a new husband, Ben 18, and Eli thinking a car was not much different than a horse, Tom was the rock around which all the remainder of the family revolved.
Arriving in California, they stayed at the Ingles Auto Camp at the south end if the 7th Street Bridge. The camp is still there, but much changed. He 'Called the Dances' in the recreation hall and knew them all. Tom was a plastering contractor in Modesto and built a home at 603 Colorado Avenue. Sometime in the 1920's or 30's, he contacted syphilis from a "loose woman' he knew and was treated with arsenic, which had a major cause in his eventual death of a heart attack.
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