Mat Roy Thompson
Mat Roy Thompson, known also as Matt Roy Thompson, Matthew R. Thompson, Mathew R. Thompson, M. Roy Thompson, Roy Thompson, and Leroy Thompson, was a civil engineer and architect who worked on a great variety of construction and development projects across the United States, most notably on Scotty's Castle, the Death Valley mansion of eccentric millionaire Albert Mussey Johnson.
Biography
Early years
Thompson was born Leroy Thompson in Dunlap, Iowa, in 1874, the son of George Washington Thompson, a real estate broker of comfortable, if moderate, means, and his wife Susan Forrer. Thompson's father moved his real estate business to Tacoma, Washington while Thompson was still very young, and so it was in the state of Washington that Thompson grew up. In 1890, upon reaching the age of sixteen, Thompson graduated from high school and promptly enrolled in the Rose Polytechnic Institute of Technology, an engineering and technical school in Terre Haute, Indiana.When Stanford University opened its doors to students for the first time one year later in 1891, Thompson happily enrolled as a sophomore, one of only eleven upper classmen of a total 559 students. While continuing his study of civil engineering, Thompson met a pretty, young freshman student named Bessie Penniman. The pair attended many collegiate social events together, including the first football game between Stanford and rival University of California, Berkeley, during which Stanford's team was led to victory by fellow student and future American President, Herbert Hoover. It was not long before Thompson and Bessie were going steady, and then engaged to be married.
Bessie Penniman's family was extremely wealthy. Her father, Hiram Penniman, was a prominent early citizen of Walnut Creek, California and the creator of Shadelands Ranch. Bessie was Hiram's youngest daughter, and was much doted upon. As such, Hiram did not look kindly on Bessie's engagement to a less wealthy man. When Thompson's father lost what moderate wealth he had in the Panic of 1893, Bessie was forced to break off her engagement to Thompson and transfer from Stanford University to Cornell University on the opposite side of the United States. Thompson himself was forced to drop out of school and join his brothers in the workforce to help support his family.
Thompson obtained a job working in a sawmill back home in Tacoma. He and Bessie continued to correspond, but with decreasing frequency. At Cornell, Bessie met a new man, Albert Mussey Johnson, another engineering student, and became enamored. Albert Johnson graduated from Cornell in 1895, and married Bessie one year later. Thompson also wed in 1896, to a woman he had met in Tacoma, named Patience O'Hara.
It was not until 1904 that Thompson and Bessie saw each other again. Thompson and Patience's first child, Philip, was born in 1896, and by 1904 Patience had borne two more children, including a son named Matthew Roy Thompson, called Mat, in 1900. Albert Johnson and Bessie were en route to Alaska when they decided to stop over in Puget Sound for a visit with Thompson's young family. Johnson had been in a disastrous train accident in 1899 which had rendered him incapable of having children, so for Bessie, meeting Thompson's children was a glimpse of a life she might have had, and the beginning of a complex and ambiguous relationship with Thompson's third son, Mat.
Patience and Thompson eventually had six children together, and to support his growing family he took work in a variety of civil engineering capacities. Unfortunately for Patience, Thompson's work increasingly took him away from home for extended periods of time. In the years preceding World War I, Thompson signed on with a nationwide government program attempting to appraise the value of all the property owned by railroads as a prelude to the Interstate Commerce Commission increasing their management of American railroads. This job took him all across the country, and between 1919 and 1924 Thompson spent most of his time in Chicago. The lengthy separation between Thompson and his wife caused a great deal of strain on their marriage and may have engendered an estrangement between them.
Bessie and Albert Johnson kept their main residence in Chicago, where Albert's main business interests lay, and Thompson visited them frequently.
Scotty's Castle
By 1924, Thompson's work had taken him away from Chicago again, and he lost touch with the Johnsons. Bessie and Albert had begun the initial stages of construction of their vacation home at Death Valley Ranch in Death Valley, California, in 1922, and by late 1924 they had geared up for major construction and were looking for architects and engineers to help them materialize their dream.In 1924, Mat Thompson, Mat Roy's eldest son, had taken a job as a Work Secretary for a YMCA Boys in Portland, Oregon. In a fit of nostalgia, he decided to write and send a short Christmas greeting to the Johnsons. Upon receiving Mat's card, Albert Johnson responded with a telegram asking to know the whereabouts of Mat's father. Mat complied, and soon Johnson offered the job of overseeing construction at Death Valley Ranch to Thompson. At the time, Thompson was living in Washington, D.C., and working as senior railroad appraiser with the Interstate Commerce Commission. Thompson took a one-year leave of absence from his government job and joined Bessie and Albert in Death Valley on November 6, 1925. After a quick assessment of the work to be done at Death Valley Ranch, Thompson realized a year would be insufficient, and uncertain of when the ranch would be completed, he quit his job in Washington, D.C. entirely.
Aside from some very specific technical advice and guidelines early on, Albert Johnson participated little in the construction process, and it was Bessie who worked closely with Thompson on the final design of what would become Scotty's Castle. Johnson had already had a building installed on the property as the main house that was generally described as a plain, stucco box. Although Johnson liked the plain, box-like design, and felt it "Symbolized that everything he did was on the square", Bessie thought it was ugly and was greatly pleased when Thompson presented her with a series of sketches that redesigned the stucco box as a Spanish revival-style hacienda, somewhat reminiscent of the style of the buildings the two of them had seen at Stanford.
Over the next six years, Thompson oversaw the construction crews and the logistical requirements of the great construction undertaking at Death Valley Ranch and Johnson's nearby property at Lower Vine Ranch. Johnson paid him a monthly salary of $400, half of which was sent home to Tacoma to support Patience and his brood of children. This money was no substitute for a husband, however, and in 1931 the long-estranged Patience O'Hara and Thompson divorced. Mere weeks later, construction at Death Valley Ranch ended due to Johnson's financial difficulties and a land ownership dispute.
Later years
Nearly broke and with no reason to return to Tacoma, Thompson moved the short distance to Reno, Nevada. Thompson had not been in Reno long when he entered into a relationship with an acquaintance of his, a Mrs. Ivah Thaxton, whom he had met while she was vacationing at Death Valley Ranch some time before with her husband, whom she had since divorced. Thompson and Ivah Thaxton were soon married.Thompson wrote to Albert Johnson several times requesting work at the Death Valley Ranch should construction resume in the near future, even sending in a completely redundant résumé at one point. Johnson did later provide a few small jobs for Thompson at the castle, including recruiting him to complete some unattributed drawings in the Scotty's Castle guidebook Bessie had put together for tourists, and surveying a plot of land in Santa Maria, California, to investigate its ownership status. In 1947, late in Johnson's life, he tried to call back Thompson to oversee the completion of the swimming pool, though nothing came of it.
In lieu of further steady employment at the castle, Thompson resumed his engineering contracts with the government, and in January 1933, Thompson and his new wife had moved to Los Angeles to take up employment with the Metropolitan Water District and work on the new Los Angeles Colorado River Aqueduct.
Thereafter, Thompson turned his engineering focus to military and defense contracts. He helped plan and lay out a number of military bases worldwide, including Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan.
Thompson finally retired in 1954 at the age of eighty. He died of natural causes near his boyhood home in Tacoma, Washington, on June 8, 1962, at the age of eighty-eight.
Controversial personal life
Bessie and Thompson's romance
Many people in Thompson's life, his children and first wife included, were of the opinion that Thompson never really got over his first love, Bessie Johnson, née Penniman. The extent and frequency of the correspondence between the pair caused many of their acquaintances to be suspicious of the nature of Thompson and Bessie's friendship, particularly in light of the lifelong disabilities Albert Johnson acquired in a train accident in 1899, a few years after his marriage to Bessie. Many thought Bessie to be unfulfilled without the children she might otherwise have had, and in seeking to direct her energies elsewhere, therefore more inclined to dwell nostalgically on the relationships of her past.The confession
To some extent, Thompson seems to have confirmed a number of the commonly held suspicions about himself and Bessie. Although generally a discreet man who kept his personal business to himself, the truth of the matter may have been too much for him to bear, and he confessed his feelings for Bessie in a letter to his then-wife Patience O'Hara. Patience describes the letter thus:Certainly such a confession would be neither constructive nor welcome in most marriages, and though some claim that a long-standing estrangement between Patience and Thompson was what led to their eventual divorce in 1924, others attribute their separation in at least some part to meddling, either intentional or unintentional, by Bessie herself. While researching his father's involvement with Scotty's Castle for posterity in 1933, Thompson's son Mat discussed the issue with some of the castle's personnel, who would have had a better chance to observe Thompson and Bessie than Mat himself would have. Mat concluded: