Biography
Lowell (Jackson) Thomas was born in Woodington, Ohio April 6, 1892.
His parents, Harry George Thomas and Harriet Wagner, were married July
30, 1890 and were both school teachers at the time of Lowell's birth. Later
in 1892 Lowell's father moved the family to Cincinnati, Ohio so he could
attend medical school and become a doctor. After graduation the family
moved to Kirkman, Iowa where Dr. Thomas opened a medical practice. At the
urging of Dr. Thomas' older brother Cory, who was a mining engineer, the
family moved to Victor, Colorado,
a gold mining boom town in need of a doctor, in 1900 when Lowell was eight.
Lowell had two sisters, Helen, who died in infancy (1901-1903) and Pherbia
(1904-1981).
Lowell’s first friend in Victor was his Uncle Cory’s son Carl, who was
a year older and with whom he would play marbles, build a miniature gold
mine and go exploring. In April 1901, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt
visited Victor and Lowell met and shook hands with him in a receiving line.
Five months later, T.R. would become President after the assassination
of President McKinley. Also on June 6, 1904, Lowell witnessed from his
father’s medical office window the mining labor riot that resulted in the
death of sixteen people and caused Lowell’s Uncle Cory to leave Victor
with his family and cousin Carl.
Lowell attended Garfield Elementary and had a paper route delivering
the Victor
Daily Record in downtown Victor and nearby Goldfield and later
added delivery of The Denver Post. The primary purpose of the paper
route was to raise money for the purchase a burro which he later did.
In the spring and summer of those early years in Victor
Lowell’s father would take him on long hikes collecting flowers and rocks
for Dr. Thomas’ collections. Lowell indicates being thrilled at finding
fossils and exposed crystals on those hikes with his
father1.
Later on his father bought a three-inch telescope and on clear winter nights
would wake Lowell and his sister Pherbia to see the spectacular night sky
Victor enjoyed from its rarefied atmosphere at 9,800 feet above sea level.
In the 1906-07 school year when Lowell was in the tenth grade, he had
his favorite teacher Mabel
Barbee (Lee), who years later would write a biographical history of
the early days of the Cripple Creek/Victor area called Cripple Creek
Days and a follow-up called Return to Cripple Creek with Lowell
Thomas writing the Introduction to both of these books.
During the summer of 1906 Lowell worked for the mining companies including
the Empire State and Tornado mines and had many jobs including mucker,
trammer, driller and ore sorter and also worked as an assay rider for the
Portland mine during the summers of 1908 and 1909. Lowell loved his experiences
growing up in Victor and felt that listening to the miners, while he was
an ore sorter, telling their fevered stories about the quest for gold in
far off places combined with the spectacular mountain scenery of Victor,
located near Pike’s Peak in the Rocky Mountains, gave him his life long
desire for and love of adventure. Also while in Victor Lowell's father
made him practice public speaking and he read extensively from his father’s
library, which contributed to his thirst for knowledge and adventure.
By the summer of 1907 Lowell's father concluded the gold mines in Victor
were giving out and that it was time to move on so he sent his family back
to Greenville, Ohio while he looked for a new opportunity in the northeast.
During the third week of Lowell's junior year of high school in Greenville
an important event occurred when the members of his class had to make a
speech before a school assembly. Lowell's speech, reciting Wendell Phillips's
tribute to Toussaint L'Ouverture, was so well received he was elected captain
of the football team the following week and it gave him more self confidence
than he had ever had up to that time. By the summer of 1908 Lowell's father
had not found another suitable opportunity so the family returned to Victor.
Lowell spent his senior year at Victor High School where he was a founding
member and senior editor of the school paper named The Sylvanite.
He graduated from Victor High School in 1909 and gave the commencement
address, a speech about President Taft, for his class of thirteen, spending
the summer working as an assay rider for the Portland mine.
In the fall of 1909 Lowell went to the University
of Northern Indiana in Valparaiso, locally known as Valpo, where he
attended classes for two years from 1909 to 1911 and graduated with
a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Arts degree by taking a double
class load. He spent the summer of 1910 on the road in a horse and buggy
selling updated road maps in Indiana and Illinois with a Valpo classmate,
Preston Burtis. While in Elgin, Illinois that summer attending the Elgin
Road Race, Lowell would meet speed dare devil Barney
Oldfield, future Indianapolis 500 winner Ralph
DePalma, and future World War I flying ace Eddie
Rickenbacker, all drivers in the Elgin Road Race. Also while a student
at Valpo, Lowell would listen to speeches by famous politician William
Jennings Bryan and British Antarctic explorer Ernest
Shackleton. After graduation in June 1911, Lowell returned to his parents
home in Victor, Colorado.
Back in Victor when no other job was immediately available Lowell began
working as a mucker at the Portland Mine. Within months, Lowell was offered
his first job in journalism as a reporter with the
Victor
Daily Record by owner George Kyner. About six months later Lowell
accepted the position of editor at the then newly formed Victor News.
In the fall of 1912, Lowell went back to school for a year at the University
of Denver earning another Bachelors and Masters degree. While at the University
of Denver, Lowell would make acquaintance with Fran Ryan whom he would
later marry.
After spending the early summer of 1913 working
as a cowboy at a ranch in southwest Colorado that his father had acquired,
Lowell decided for reasons that remained a mystery to him all his
life2
to go to Chicago and study law. Before the end of July and without having
applied to any law schools, Lowell departed for Chicago. The first thing
he did upon arrival in Chicago was go to newspaper row and get a job as
a reporter with the Chicago Evening Journal. While at that Evening
Journal job interview Lowell was able to arrange for a place to stay
and get a reference to the dean of the Kent
College of Law, which he attended that fall, also becoming a part time
professor in the department of forensic oratory. His first assignment as
a reporter for the Evening Journal was to interview the country's
most prominent black leader, Booker
T. Washington and one of the guest speakers Lowell had multiple times
for his forensic oratory class was the legendary attorney
Clarence Darrow.
During the summer of 1914, on a trip to the west coast to write a series
of travel articles about the scenic wonders of the west for the Santa Fe
and Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroads, which would include his first trip
to what would become his life long love, the great state of Alaska,
Lowell Thomas stopped off in Denver and asked Fran Ryan to marry him.
Fran declined, saying they had not even dated while attending the
University of Denver together, so Lowell continued on with his trip out
west, returning to Chicago at the end of the summer where he would continue
with his reporting position at the Evening Journal and second year
of law school. In 1915 he would witness the tragic sinking of the Great
Lakes excursion steamer Eastland in the Chicago river on July 24,
in which 844 of the approximately 2,500 passengers would loose their lives.
Later during the summer of 1915 Lowell Thomas would take a motion picture
camera on a second trip to Alaska to record the events of the trip and
on the returning portion would also visit the Grand Canyon and have a second
visit with Fran Ryan in Denver with whom he had been corresponding since
his marriage proposal the year before.
Upon his return to Chicago, Lowell Thomas had an acceptance letter from
Princeton, which he attended during the 1915-1917 school years, also becoming
the interim speech professor at the University. While at Princeton, Lowell
Thomas began giving narrated shows of the movies he had taken in Alaska.
During the summer of 1916 and for the next school year, Lowell invited
his mother and sister Pherbia to stay with him in Princeton while his father
was away volunteering his services to the surgical staff of the London
General Hospital during World War I. Also in 1916 after graduating from
the University of Denver Fran Ryan accepted Lowell's marriage proposal
in the fall and after teaching all six grades in a one-room schoolhouse
near Castle Rock south of Denver for a year married Lowell in the summer
of 1917. They had one son, Lowell Thomas Junior, born in London October
6, 1923 and were married fifty-eight years until her death in 1975. Early
in 1917, Secretary of the Interior, Franklin
K. Lane, invited Lowell Thomas to give his Alaska presentation
to a conference of western governors and dignitaries for a "See America
First" travel campaign. To prepare for the conference presentation, Lowell
Thomas traveled to New York looking for a public speaking coach. There
he met Dale Carnegie,
who would go on to fame as the author of How To Win Friends and Influence
People, and worked with him to modify his presentation for the conference,
which was a great success resulting in Secretary Lane asking Lowell Thomas
to head the new "See America First" campaign.
The United States entry into World War I on April 6, 1917 put the "See
America First" campaign on hold and Secretary Lane suggested to Lowell
Thomas that a good reporter was needed in Europe to report the war news
back to the United States. Lowell Thomas traveled back to Chicago to raise
funds for the trip and would also hire his long time cameraman, Harry Chase,
to accompany him on the trip. Within two weeks he had raised $100,000 and
began to finalize plans for the trip. On August 4, 1917 Lowell Thomas and
Fran Ryan were married in Denver and a few day later they set out for Europe
along with Harry Chase. After several months in France, they moved on to
Italy. There Fran would volunteer with the Red Cross and Lowell would begin
hearing reports of the British war campaign in the Middle East led by the
newly installed British General Edmund
Allenby. In January 1918, Lowell and Harry moved on to Egypt to begin
covering the British activities there. On the streets of Cairo, Lowell
Thomas would first see T.E.
Lawrence (of Arabia) and soon began accompanying him and reporting
on his war activities with the Arabs. Lowell Thomas would later write a
book about the time he spent with Lawrence titled
With
Lawrence in Arabia, which would go on to more than 100 printings.
Lowell Thomas would become world famous bringing
the story of T.E. Lawrence and British General Edmund Allenby first to
audiences in New York city, then London and later around the world.
This was just after the end of World War I, in 1919, before sound had been
added to pictures, so Lowell would stand at the side of the movie screen
stage and narrate the movies he and his cameraman had taken of Lawrence
and Allenby. A wall
size poster of the Lawrence of Arabia show is on display in a room
on the second floor of the Lowell
Thomas Museum in Victor, Colorado. The narrated movie presentation
brought the audience into the war campaign and imparted a great sense of
adventure. Lowell Thomas would begin his London presentation with these
words:
