Marilyn Thompson

A true California girl, Marilyn Frances Thompson died in Utah on Thanksgiving after a brief illness. Born on May 23, 1927, she grew up in Santa Paula, amid citrus groves and small storefronts. In the 1930s, her mother taught her art, her father thrift. In the 1940s, including her college years, she drew the eyes of many young men and in 1951 married the first of three husbands, Neil Hicks, with whom she bore her only child, Michael, now an author, composer, and professor. Her third marriage, to Paul Thompson, proved decisive: she knew she'd "finally got it right." (Paul passed away in 1991.) She lived her life with a spiky mix of grace and stubbornness, truth and beguilement, peace of soul and lip-chewing worry. She loved Jesus, shunned modernism, and resisted the technological deluge of the 1990s and beyond. Yet she found and cultivated her own brand of suburban chic bohemianism in the fiery decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s-sleek cars, hot pants, record clubs, organic veggies, granola, and always, art: watercolors (in which her mom excelled), acrylics, pencil sketches, pastel and charcoal portraits, pen and ink cartoons, anything that enthused her--or for which she could get paid, which she did till late in her life. She declared herself a "commercial artist" for her death certificate, but also drew maps, proofread, laid out handbooks, kept avid diaries, wrote reams of letters, and mastered all else visible on a page. Buoyant with goodwill and mirth till the end, she will be lamented by a smallish circle of friends who lived to see the day, and by a widening circle of family: her older sister (June), her son (and daughter-in-law, Pam), four stepsons (Tom, David, Robert, & Larry), four grandchildren and their spouses, eight great-grandchildren, nieces and a nephew, and so on. Her body will be buried at Alta Mesa Cemetery in Palo Alto, following a brief graveside ceremony at 11 a.m., Friday, December 4, 2015. Flowers welcome but, better still, donate on her behalf to a charity that blesses children.

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