In Loving Memory of Thomas Hamilton Latimer, Jr.

We are saddened to announce the passing of our father, Thomas Hamilton Latimer, Jr., on September 6th, 2024.

He was predeceased by his wife, Rev. Glenda Latimer, his son Andrew, and his sister Anne.

Thomas is survived by his brother, Fred, his children, Salvador, Tamsen, and Ben, his daughters-in-law Jennifer Daley and Patti Latimer, and his grandchildren Cayleigh, Joe, William, Dana, and Olivia. He will be deeply missed by his family and those who knew him.

Tom was born August 18, 1931, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, at St. Patrick’s. His mother, Catherine was 31. His father, Thomas Sr., was 28. His sister, Anne was 6. 

It was famously known, within family lore, that Thomas descended from Alexander Hamilton, his great great grandfather on his grandmother’s side. This fact would prove true, although just not that Alexander Hamilton. Thomas’s ancestor was a Scotsman from the Isle of Arran. Nice man, by all accounts, but not a forefather of the United States of America.

When Tom was three, his brother, Fred came along. The family moved to Illinois, first to Canton, then Wilmette. Here, Tom joined the boy scouts, working his way up to Eagle Scout.

At New Trier High School in Wilmette, he gained traction as not only a good student, but due to a very successful appearance singing in a school production of The HMS Pinafore, he suddenly found himself in a whole different social circle. He enjoyed this fling with popularity, but his heart was in a different place. The accomplished Eagle Scout imagined a life at sea. In pursuit of this dream, he traveled by himself to New York at 16 to gain his seaman’s papers. Dodging some unhelpful and sometimes unsavory characters there, he made it back to Chicago in one piece, papers in hand.

He got a job aboard the USS North American and worked the summer on Lake Michigan, quickly realizing ship life was not for him. Although there was plenty to like, he struggled to find his sea legs and take basic instruction. His mind didn’t organize according to others' expectations, but found its own way, its own solutions. This didn’t serve him in a role within a chain of command.

Upon graduation, he turned his attention from the sea to the desert, transferring from University of Kentucky’s NROTC to the University of Arizona where he became a member of Lambda Chi fraternity. It was in his early days in Arizona that he got directions mixed up and walked to the wrong church looking for his bible youth group. It so happened this wrong church also hosted a bible youth group. Sitting on a table was a young Glenda Westenberg, swinging her legs and laughing. His first thought was that she was loud and “unlady-like,” but they talked and he decided he would try to fix her up with one of his friends. He failed to follow through with this, electing to ask her out himself.Glenda transferred to UCLA while Tom finished up his undergrad in Arizona. He would take the bus to LA to spend weekends with Glenda, often having to run full out to catch the last bus on Sunday night. He loved every minute. On one of these trips, he proposed to her, in MacArthur park, asking a passerby to snap their photo.

They were married in Illinois and moved together to LA, in modest housing, while Glenda finished school and Tom found work at an advertising agency, BBDO. Again, he found his inability to take instruction made keeping a job difficult. He was drawing and selling cartoons part-time, expanding that to full time. Mostly gag cartoons, a single panel with a caption, but he also did commissions and developed his own panel cartoon, Blue Devil, basing all the characters on versions of himself and Glenda. It centered around a little ice cream stand in the middle of the desert, in a place named Lost Gulch, run by a small circus acrobat, Blue Devil. Fearing a cartoon career would not be enough to sustain them, he landed new employment in a field he was familiar with – the Boy Scouts of America. An executive, planning and running events he’d loved attending as a kid. They moved to Corcoran, California, where Glenda got a job as a high school art teacher.

He and Glenda were trying to have kids, but not having success. A colleague suggested they try fostering and offered to introduce them to a seven-year-old they currently had in residence. A boy in need of a new foster home. They met this young boy and decided he didn’t need another foster home, but a permanent one. They adopted Salvador and moved to Colusa, California.It was here that many things happened at once, forever shaping their lives. They adopted Tamsen from Paiute Reservation on the Nevada border -- and learned Glenda was pregnant with Ben. They now had an adolescent and two babies in the house. If that didn’t keep them busy enough, Glenda also found her calling to the church.

For Glenda’s seminary, they moved to Berkeley, California. Tom continued his cartooning and found he was an excellent house painter – a job he enjoyed but didn’t see as a career or full-time business. Painting was a side-job for extra money. Seeking a new career, Tom landed a job as a teacher at a new integrated Junior High School in Berkeley, working under Dr. Matlin, who would become a life-long friend. The school was integrated, successful and gained attention for its progressive programs and approach to teaching. Tom loved it. Despite his deficits when it came to understanding direction, he found he was a gifted teacher when it came to giving instruction. He used his cartooning daily, as a way to communicate on student’s homework. He also championed science as a way to spark interest with experiments of all shapes and sizes. His classes were fun, lively and sought out by students.

The Latimers bought their first house in Berkeley for $17,000 – a point of pride for Tom. Andrew was born during this busy time and the family was complete. When Andrew was a toddler, Glenda graduated top of her class with a Master of Divinity degree, and was called to a church in Prescott, Arizona. Tom and Glenda were thrilled to return to Arizona and their combined dream of building a house in the desert. Prescott would not be that dream, as it turned out.

They sold the Berkeley house and bought a large home in Prescott, Arizona. It was 1968 and Prescott was both a college town and a conservative town. The two didn’t mix well. A movie, Billy Jack, was filmed there during this time, that fictionalized this conflict. Tom and Glenda invited a student, Bruce, to live with them. He was a soloist at Glenda’s new church and had suffered a head injury in a car accident. He needed care and time to recover. When Tom and Glenda learned that his girlfriend, Mara, was without a home, they invited her to stay as well. A short time later, they invited Kathy to live with them. She was the secretary at the church, with a husband overseas in Viet Nam. Kathy discovered she was pregnant and being alone in Prescott, had nowhere to turn. Others in need came to live there as well. The house quickly filled with hippies and students. It was alive and fun with music, cooking and interesting conversation. Glenda loved it. Tom was more dubious but liked the energy of Berkeley in their home here. His new school was very different. He was teaching fifth grade. Gone from the faculty and administration was any of the excitement of teaching Tom had experienced in Berkeley, replaced by status quo, tenured teachers and shifty money hustles. Tom hated it and after his second year, quit to return to cartooning full time. Glenda’s church was unappreciative of the minister’s home turned into a commune. Their displeasure resulted in Glenda’s resignation.Using this as an opportunity to pursue their dream of a country home in the desert, they consulted a realtor who gave them the practical assessment that they could not afford buildable property here. He told them of his childhood home in Colville Valley, located in northern Washington, where property was still affordable.Tom and Glenda sold the Prescott house, bought 66 acres along Onion Creek in the Colville Valley and a four-wheel drive Dodge truck with a homemade camper shell. The property had been homesteaded 80 years prior, but there were no standing structures, no electricity and no water. Tom’s first project was to install a rope swing over the deep ravine bordering the property. When asked what their experience was that brought them to such a place, Tom’s response was that he built a birdhouse once while in the scouts. They named the property “Sunstead”.

While all the hippie friends from Prescott moved up with them, none stayed. By the time snow began falling in October of 1972, even Salvador, now 19, had departed. Tom, Glenda and three small kids lived in that homemade camper shell and a canvas tent, building the first of three cabins in what they would find out was the worst winter in 70 years.

Christmas time and New Years saw them move into the single-room cabin, with just thin plastic on the windows. A wood stove gave them warmth for the first time in months. Tom tried to cartoon but was too busy with the work of homesteading.

Spring of 1973 brought the Leone family to the property. Jeno “Mike”, Judy and their young daughter, Jenny. Tom found a worthy partner in Jeno and the two became lifelong friends. Together they repaired the log cabin on the property, dug a well, built a cistern and finished the three hexagon cabin.

To bring in an income, Tom was working for a painting crew in Spokane, commuting back to Sunstead on the weekends. Glenda was called to a small church in a farming community in southern Washington. This would bring an end to their living permanently at Sunstead, but not an end to the dream of Sunstead, which would continue and be the place the family all called home.

1975 began with Tom packing up his kids in the truck and pulling a small U-haul trailer of their things to a little white house on a hill in Eltopia, Washington. Glenda had her new job, back in the pulpit. Tom painted again, until landing a job with the Pasco School District as a fourth-grade teacher. He found success here. Recognized by the governor as “Teacher of the Year” he gave a speech in Seattle in front of thousands of fellow faculty and state administrators. He was petrified at the idea of giving this speech, not sure he could do it, but seeing someone else just as nervous as he was somehow energized him and he strode on stage with confidence and brought the house down. He got his Master of Education Degree in the 1980s from UC Berkeley. 

Tom bartered with his house painting to make a land deal that got them 9 acres of desert property just outside of Eltopia. He had a well drilled in a spot that was an uninformed gamble. A depth of 400 feet returned 70 gallons a minute and turned the property into buildable land, a soon-to-be oasis, where Tom traded house-painting and favors into a passive solar home, built into the ground on three sides, all glass on the southern side, with wine grape vines covering the windows in the hot summers, but allowing the sun in during the winter months. Tom and Glenda had their country home in the desert.

Tom retired from teaching in the late 80s, when all the kids were finishing or done with college. He liked to journey in his camper, sometimes all the way to the east coast, always coming home to Glenda full of the stories of his travels.

A serious bout with cancer in 1993, slowed him down. It was a brutal surgery with radiation and chemo afterward. Recovery took a while, but he came back strong, celebrating the two weddings of his sons, Ben and Andrew in 1994 and his daughter Tammy a few years later.

Glenda passed away suddenly in 1996, leaving him alone in their Eltopia Desert Home. He decided the memories were too many to stay, so he sold the house and property, bought a truck and trailer and set out to start again.

His first stop was the very church in Arizona where he met Glenda, discovering the youth minister they had met so many years ago was still there, now the lead pastor at the church. Tom reconnected with him, then traveled up and down the west coast, circumnavigated the entire United States and crossed the length of Canada twice. He spent his days meeting new people, reading the bible and as many books as he could reasonably keep in the trailer. He also cartooned, giving his Blue Devil panel away to newspapers up and down the west coast. It was a robust schedule, delivering a cartoon every day – and a color edition for Sundays. At the height of the strip’s readership, it was reaching 250,000 subscribers.

In 2001, he parked his trailer next to Ben’s house for months, helping with a rebuild as they awaited the arrival of William, his fourth grandchild after Olivia, Cayleigh and Joseph. Dana would not be far behind. He worked during the day installing a new oak floor across the upstairs, tiling all the bathrooms and painting the entire interior of the home. He would continue to work in the evenings, when Ben got home from work, side-by-side until the neighbors begged them to quit with the hammering. The house was finished literally the day William was born.

Tom’s love of Canada found him settling down after years on the road. He bought a small single-wide trailer by a creek in Grand Forks, BC, where he lived until the Canadian government asked him to start paying taxes or please leave. It was this move that brought him to Spokane in 2004, where he bought a four-bedroom house that reminded him of his childhood home in Wilmette.

He met and married Jessie Powers in 2008. They were opposites in many regards, but both shared a deep love of family. Tom was impressed and appreciated Jessie’s family, spending many meals, church services, holidays and vacations with them.

During their time together, Tom suffered a stroke that left him unable to sit up in bed. The doctors told him he would see the majority of his recovery in the first six months – and he took that as a challenge. He was able to stand with a walker in a week’s time. Walk with assistance in a few weeks after that, graduating to a cane as he improved. He continued to walk and walk and walk, ultimately giving up the cane, able to go a mile unassisted. He celebrated his six-month milestone painting Jessie’s granddaughter’s home.

Tom busied himself organizing church groups to make bedrolls for the homeless. He raised money and brought people together, expanding the operation to include coats and blankets for Spokane’s cold winter months. He found a woman on the street one of those winters, in tears, inconsolable, fearing for her life in the elements. The shelters were full, so Tom brought her home where he and Jessie put her up in a guest room for the night. A year later, this same woman had cleaned up, found a home and was working herself in the street ministry that distributed those bedrolls. She sought out Tom to thank him.

After 11 years of marriage, Tom admitted Jessie wasn’t always happy, but he was of the mind and heart they were able to be together and be happy despite their religious and political differences. Jessie felt differently. Tom came home one day to find her moving out. He was devastated, but the decision was made.

Covid and lockdown came shortly after, isolating Tom. He was diagnosed with an ailment where the treatment was dangerous and full of debilitating side effects. He was deeply unhappy about all of this, but rather than wallow in circumstances, he took initiative and began a project repairing a camper and writing a book based on his cartoon characters from Blue Devil. An original story focusing on the central character, Kablamos, the family lost and the family found. After a year of recovery, Tom came back strong once again, joining online writer groups and bible groups, writing his book, and working out every day. He could famously drop and do 30 pushups on demand. He found happiness in independent living, caring for his beloved home, new-found closeness to his adult children and entertaining good friends, including Bob Arnold, who Tom admired and appreciated every single day.

Tom’s book, Ol’ Jeep & Me was published this year and is currently available on Amazon. Tom was preparing a follow up book, illustrated, continuing the story of Kablamos and the community he found in Lost Gulch.

Tom celebrated his 93rd birthday in August surrounded by family and friends, with his mind and heart still planning for the future. He was good at living. He never stopped moving, creating and overcoming. From a difficult young adulthood, he triumphed with each passing decade, undaunted by illness and hardship, making his own happiness and finding joy in the people around him. While his death was unexpected, he lives on through all that knew him. His memory, his cartoons, his writing and the example he set for all of us.