Delmer Ray, "Jake" Thompson was born April 21, 1919, at the family homestead south and east of Vilas, Colorado. Jake was one of five children born to Gideon Ray Thompson and Effie Yowell Thompson. His siblings were; Lee, Opal, Jack and Ruth.

Jake attended Vilas School until the death of both his parents. He enlisted in the United States Army on December 2, 1941, and served on three theaters of World War II, Northern Africa, Italy and Japan.

Before the war Jake worked as an airplane mechanic and after he was honorably discharged from the army he trained and raced his own horses, earning dozens of awards and honors as a top trainer in Omaha, Denver and Phoenix.

Jake married Betty Bell from Springfield in 1949. Jake and Betty were parents to two children, who now reside in Northern Arizona and Northern California. Jake was a proud grandfather to William and Tara Thompson.

Jake retired to Walsh, Colorado, in the late 1980s where he often regaled his family and friends with recitations of Robert Service poems, including 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew', stories of his racing days and what it was like growing up during the Great Depression. Jake had such a keen memory for details which made his stories all the more entertaining and fascinating.

Jake passed away January 29, 2015, at the Walsh Healthcare Center. He was 95. Jake was interred alongside his family at Stonington Cemetery.

Eulogy for D.R. "Jake" Thompson
by Justin Thompson

Jim Morrison, lyricist for The Doors once wrote-
"You've seen your birth your life and death
you might recall all of the rest
Did you have a good world when you died?
Enough to base a movie on?"

Dad probably wouldn't have liked the quote much, especially not the source, but since I first heard it that line has resonated with me. In thinking about my dad's life, I know an extraordinary movie could be based on him.
Jake never talked much about himself when I was a kid, I had to pry and dig to get stories out of him but he did tell me a few. Riding his horse to school and his dog named Dewey saving him from an angry bull were a couple of my favorites. Perhaps the biggest was about his dad and Uncle Bill. To get perspective on the successive ages between him and his father Gid Thompson I'll have to throw down some numbers here. Gid was born in the mid 1800's and died in 1935 at about 80 years old- when my Dad was only 16! I was born when Jake was 43, and I'm 52 now.
Gid Thompson and his brother Bill fled the Carolinas when they were kids, probably to avoid he civil war or its aftermath in the mid 1860's. Over the following decade, in their early teens, they both slowly made their way out West, apparently by nefarious means.
They fled Dodge after acquiring 4 thousand dollars the way many outlaws did at that time and crossed the border into Baca County. They bought up a good amount of land and set up a homestead here.
About 10 miles south of the homestead they settled on, was a little town called Boston. It was a pretty wild town and was frequented by visiting outlaws, including Gid and Bill, and eventually burned down sometime in the late 1880s.
It's so quiet out there now, but for the wind hushing the overgrown grass and antique headstones of the old Boston graveyard on a hill nearby. My dad and I went there together about 9 years ago and from that graveyard hill you can look across the farm road and see the tiered flat ground that was the city's foundations once. It's been plowed over many times since then and you can barely make it out.

Jake was born in 1919, just five months after the close of World War I and 20 years before the first jet engine airplane was made. The common refrigerators came along in people's homes about the time Jake was 9 years old and at the time he was born the new 1919 Ford model T automobile sold for $850. Growing up, Dad rode a horse to a little schoolhouse in Vilas, struggled through the horrific dust bowl that ravaged this county, and the Great Depression that brought the country to its knees. Out of high school he worked on airplanes for a while as a mechanic in a time referred to as the golden age of aeronautics. He was a boxer in the army, stationed in Gilroy California in the early 1940's, and at the famed Cow Palace in San Francisco was announced as "the Southpaw from Gilroy" before the bell started his fights. Once while hitchhiking to San Francisco for a fight, he said a classy woman in a nice car pulled over and gave him a ride to the event. That woman was the movie star Bette Davis.
After punching a superior officer in the face outside of the boxing ring, the army offered him a choice: either stay stateside and lose his sergeant stripes, or remain a sergeant and get shipped overseas where World War II awaited him. Sergeant Thompson served in three different theaters of that war, Northern Africa, Italy, and Japan. He set up communication lines once the allies had secured a territory. After chasing Rommel in the desert he marched up the boot all the way into Northern Italy and into France. Returning south through Milan, he saw Mussolini strung up in the town square. Shipping home in 1945, after passing through the Panama Canal, their ship was diverted to Japan right after the atomic bomb had leveled Hiroshima. He said that he could just drive his jeep right over where the buildings once stood, it was all completely flat save for one building where the work of setting up new communications began.
Dad owned and trained racehorses in the '50s and into the '80s, and when I was a kid the daily racing programs had a weekly status of the top trainers. I was always proud to see Jake Thompson listed quite often as number one. We watched the moon landings together and the Watergate trials, a lot of football, and because of him I remain a die-hard Broncos fan to this day.
I cannot help but reflect on the extraordinary bookend, the vast expanse of time, that Gid to Jake Thompson closes here in the sunset of his life and in the hand to hand of his father and himself. Chiefly this, that Dad's father walked the Earth with President Lincoln, he breathed the same air as this country's slaves, and heard the first cannons of American civil rights shaking the clouds. And that man's son, died under a black President.
Jake Thompson's life was the life of America in the 20th century. One of my last best memories of my dad was showing him the Internet about two years ago. I looked up some pictures and articles of the old Centennial racetrack where we spent our summers, south of Denver, and showed it to him. "My gosh." said this once dust covered boy from a house with no electricity or running water, "I can't believe it."