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Jerry Winfield Thompson, Jr. was born at Rotan, Texas, on April 13, 1920 and passed away at Quemado, New Mexico on April 25, 2010, only days after celebrating his 90th birthday. His father, Jerry Winfield Thompson, Sr., was born in Alabama and married Quata Veta Deischer shortly after World War I. After the war, Winfield was employed by an uncle, A.B. Barrow, who owned a chain of furniture stores in Texas towns such as Hico, Breckenridge, La Mesa, Rotan, and Odessa. The family was in Odessa when the Great Depression struck the country with devastating results in October 1929. The Barrow furniture stores soon became a thing of the past-especially after the Dust Bowl struck the Great Plains and the Texas Panhandle particularly hard. Like so many other migrants of the time, the family packed what few belongings they possessed and headed west. With their chickens strapped in a cage on the roof of their car, the family, including a younger sister Twauna, constructed a small log cabin in a Ponderosa-shrouded Martin Canyon near Pipe Springs where they homesteaded, not too far from the small village of Mangas, New Mexico. Here the family survived on Winfield's small World War I pension, what they could grow in a small garden, poaching, and the money Winfield received working for the PWA on Pipe Springs School House and the Pie Town to Mangas road. Jerry graduated from the 8th grade at Pipe Springs, and in 1941, married Jo Lee Davis, a part Cherokee orphan girl from Oklahoma who had come west with her uncle Johnny Cobb. A son, Jerry D., was born in November 1942. Like millions of other young men of the depression generation, Jerry was drafted into the military during World War II. After training at Fort Bliss, Texas, Fort Riley, Kansas, and Camp Pickett, Virginia, he was deployed with in the 76th Infantry Division in the European Theatre. After pushing up the Seine River to Rouen, France, the 76th Lightning Division went into the front lines at Aachen, Belgium, in the fight for the Siegfried Line. Shortly before his death, Jerry told his grandson, Jeremy, that he had seven close calls during the war. One such time was at night when a German machine-gunner riddled and sank the small boat he was crossing Meuse River in. Some of his hardest fighting was in the winter of 1944 in the Hurtgen Forest when Jerry put his Pipe Springs log building skills to work in the cold and deep snow. One of his lasting images of the war, one that was seared in his memory for life, was seeing large numbers of American dead stacked up like cordwood in the bullet-riddled forest. He was in the history-changing Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, but amazingly avoided being hit head on by German Panzers by only a few hundred yards. In fact, the Germans took out an entire regiment of the 76th Infantry on the left of where Jerry's squad was dug into the snow. He was one of the first to cross the Rhine River on the Ludendorff Railroad Bridge at the small German town of Remagen. Pushing toward Berlin, he helped to liberate the infamous Buchenwald Concentration Camp where the cremation ovens were still warm. Years later he recalled looks on the ghost-like faces of the few Jews who had survived the horrendous Holocaust. He was in Berlin preparing to return to the United States for deployment in the Pacific and the invasion of Japan when the war ended in August 1945. After the war, Jerry drilled wells for ranchers all over the northern part of Catron County, all the way from Green's Gap to the York Ranch. For several years in the 1950s, he served as president of Catron County Independent School District # 2. In the 1960s, he found employment as a seasonal employee of the Forest Service on El Caso and Fox Mountain lookouts, before obtaining full-time employment as a heavy equipment operator and supervisor. Until his retirement in 1982, he was deployed fighting fires in the Apache and Gila forest districts and all over the American West, from the Couer d' Alene in northern Idaho and California's Big Sur, to Glacier National Park in Montana. Jerry Thompson is survived by an only son, Jerry D. Thompson of Laredo, Texas, a grandson, Jeremy Winfield Thompson of Ithaca New York, as well as five nieces: Carolyn Davis of Woodstock, Georgia, Marilyn Torres of Farmington, New Mexico, Sandra (Mickie) Campos of Midlothian, Virginia, and Rhonda and Martha Scogin of Aztec, New Mexico. He was preceded in death by his wife and sister. A memorial service will be held at the Baptist Church in Quemado on Friday, June 11, 2010 at 10:00 a.m., Pastor Ira Shelton presiding. Those who wish to send condolences may do so at www.danielsfuneral.com. Services have been entrusted to: Daniels Family Funeral Services 309 Garfield Socorro, NM 87801 (575) 835-1530
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