2009 SCENIC 395 ARTICLE

I met a man at a wonderful art gallery in Big Pine. His stunning talent and positive outlook grabbed my heart. He appeared to have discovered the secret to happiness and the fountain of youth.

When I first met Carroll Thomas, he was a young man of 97 and he had the swagger of a 40-year-old, but his kindness, wisdom and sheer joy proved he had been around a long time. Next year he’ll be 100.

How many people do you know who were alive when the Titanic sank? Carroll Thomas was. Who else do you know who has seen a planet come and go?

He has lived during seven wars and the influenza epidemic, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the Hindenburg disaster, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, Watergate, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Y2K bug, Halley’s Comet (twice!) and Hale-Bopp.

He was around when both the Los Angeles Owens Valley aqueduct and Disneyland opened.
Amazing? Yes, but so is the life of Carroll Thomas. He is a working artist and owner of a popular gallery in Big Pine.

Carroll was already painting as a child, inspired by the grandeur of 14,107’ Pikes Peak right out the window of his family home in Manitou, Colorado.

He sketched an hour each morning before school. A neighbor taught him the basics of watercolor and an artist was born. By the time he graduated from high school in 1928, Carroll knew that art would be his life.

He attended the School of Fine Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and actually lived in a closet he rented while in school. Time would prove his instincts accurate, but not without some departures from his course.

Carroll had numerous mishaps in the ensuing years, including a Model T accident and flipping his Super Cub plane on its back along the Salmon River in Idaho. The great outdoors remained his constant companion and a great source of future stories.

In 1954, Carroll made a trip north to Alaska on a hunting quest for a bull moose and dahl ram. He picked up a magazine before boarding a small plane that would drop him off in the wilderness. The cover of the magazine showed a Super Cub plane on the side of an Alaskan mountain with two human bodies scattered and a huge grizzly bear swatting at the air.

Carroll spent so much time watching the beauty out his window that he forgot all about the magazine.

The pilot dropped Carroll at Lake Louise, about 250 miles north of Anchorage, where he met up with a guide. Together they flew even farther into the wilderness. Carroll had skill and luck right off the bat, taking down a bull moose, but the dahl ram proved slightly more elusive.

The next day Carroll instructed his guide to fly him into the Talkeetna Range in search of a trophy ram. He planned to spend three days alone. The guide would check on him daily with a fly-over and if Carroll got his ram, he was to hang a towel from his tent pole.

After two days of searching for the perfect trophy ram, he was able to get a clean shot on the third day in pouring rain. Carroll was up for the laborious job of prepping it for taxidermy and cutting the good meat off the bones and loading it all up onto a packboard and then hiking back down to his tent.

When he was about quarter mile from his tent, he could see another tent about 100 feet from his. Carroll’s own tent was flat on the ground and his sleeping bag was sopping wet and his tarp was covering the other groups tent.

“I guess I looked fit to kill,” Carroll said about when he arrived at his campsite.

He could tell the two men had been drinking, but they sobered up quickly and offered to have him stay at their camp where a fire was going, there was ample room for him to sleep. They would help him dry out his camp the next day.

The two men turned out to be the president of Alaska Airlines and his assistant.

The next day, the guide flew over and saw the towel hanging from the tent pole and landed. The guide apologized to Carroll and said the airline president’s office had an emergency and he would have to fly the president to Anchorage instead of Carroll.

When the guide came back, the weather had turned bad. He said he would have to shuttle the remaining two men one at a time to a nearby caribou camp, instead of Lake Louise and would pick them back up the following day.

The two men had one sandwich and a pint of whiskey for dinner. Carroll was able to find six potatoes for breakfast. The weather continued to deteriorate. With no sign of the guide, Carroll was forced to kill and cure a caribou. Finally after three days the guide flew in and they were returned to Lake Louise.

An old mountain man at the airport sitting in a chair motioned for Carroll to join him. He questioned him about where he had been and then proceeded to call him a “damn fool for hunting alone in that grizzly-infested area.”

The old man then reached to the side of his chair and pulled out a magazine, the same magazine that Carroll had bought on his flight in. The old man pointed to the cover and told him, “Last year a father and son spotted a grizzly from their plane and landed nearby. They stalked the bear without getting a shot. They returned to their plane and before they could get in, the grizzly circled them and killed them both.”

It was another of many lessons Carroll Thomas would learn and remember in his journeys.
It would take a very thick book to tell all of Carroll’s stories and life lessons. They are fascinating and wildly entertaining, ranging from Iowa to Colorado to California, from Alaska to Mexico, so much so that a book is being written about his life. The autobiography should be completed and on bookshelves next year.

He is a true inspiration of what it is to live life fully and completely at any age.

For more gallery information, call 760-938-3243. The gallery is located at 442 North Main, open 10 to 5, and closed on Wednesdays, a short day of rest for the 99-year-old artist.

For all those people who have read the articles on Carroll Thomas in the last few issues of Scenic 395, Thomas would like to thank them for coming in to see his work and hopes they come again. His enthusiastic visitors came from all over the world and they told him they felt like they already knew him. Carroll is looking forward to the completion of his book and hopes that many of his supporters will want a copy of their own.