in his native state which occupied most of his later years. 
In 1912, he married Anna Stroh Cram, of Des Moines, 
who, with three of their four children, survives him. 
While at Harvard, young Fred was quite active in 
various social clubs, among them the Hasty Pudding 
Club, the Phoenix Club and the Institute of 1770. Dur- 
ing his college years, however, he manifested little of 
that interest in natural history or science which later be- 
‘ame an absorbing interest and intellectual outlet. 
Fred ‘Thompson first became interested in fossils in 
1930 when he accompanied a friend of his on a collecting 
trip to the great coal-stripping mines near Coal City, 
Illinois. Here, the beautifully preserved remains of an 
ancient Carboniferous flora were being unearthed in great 
quantities, contained in the curious ironstone nodules 
which feature the sedimentary rocks of this area. Much 
time and effort were devoted by Mr. Thompson during 
the following years to the careful selection of these speci- 
mens which were subsequently donated to many colleges 
and universities. He was somewhat surprised years later 
to observe one of his own Illinois specimens, properly 
credited to the collector, on public exhibit in a museum 
in Mexico City. Harvard’s collections of fossil] plants 
were enriched by over ten thousand specimens culled 
from the spoil piles of the Coal City mines. 
In 1938, while on a fossil collecting expedition, Fred 
discovered a number of the curious calcareous concretions 
‘coal balls.°° Coal balls, 
. 
known among paleobotanists as 
because of their wealth of organically preserved plant 
tissues, have been one of the major sources of knowledge 
of the organization and structure of Carboniferous plants 
since they were first studied in Europe. The interest of 
paleobotanists in this new discovery was not long in 
manifesting itself, and during the following seven years 
Thompson collected literally dozens of tons of the Lowa 
[ 17+ | 
