Meet John and Mary Thomson, ages 79 and 76, respectively. At first glance, the pair could be mistaken for the North Pole’s Mr. and Mrs. Clause, a mix up they confirm has happened more than once. He has a full white beard, a belly and attentive ear. She exudes sweetness and calm with a ready smile. They have been married for 44 years and are parents to three adult children and six grandchildren.

Gabby receives an offer

The Dear Gabby column on Jan. 28 included a letter from someone who described themselves as “an incarcerated writer with nothing waiting for me on the outside.”

Eleven days later John wrote to Gabby. John Thomson shared that by the age of 26, “he had spent the past 11 out of 13 years in penal institutions of one sort or another. I was tired, hopeless and in utter despair.” Yet nine years later, he was married, awaiting the birth of his first child and gainfully employed. He was open to telling his story if the RoundTable was open to hearing it. We were.

A troubled childhood

Over two meetings and multiple hours of talking, John told his story. He quickly recalls dates, names and details. His father, Wilmer, was an alcoholic. When he was drunk, according to John, Wilmer would beat his wife, Frances, and John, the second oldest of his four children from his marriage to Frances. Both parents worked for Illinois Central Railroad, Frances as a telephone operator and Wilmer as a switchman.

His parents divorced when John was 10 years old. Frances became a single mother with four children (ages 12, 10, 6 and 2) and an uninvolved ex-husband. John was prone to getting into trouble. He was caught shoplifting at the age of 6.

Glenwood School for Boys

Frances sent John to Glenwood School for Boys in Glenwood, Illinois, a military academy for troubled youth, where he lived from 1954 to 1957, between the ages of 10 and 13. During the summers, he attended Glenwood’s camp in Wisconsin. Hazel Crest is less than seven miles from the Glenwood School. Each parent visited him once during his first year, but otherwise no one in his family visited him during his three-year stay.

In 1956, while John was at Glenwood, Frances married John Killian, also a switchman for the railroad and had the first of five children with her new husband. When John Thomson got out of Glenwood, he met his new stepfather and infant stepbrother, Michael. As John Thomson tried to integrate himself into this new family, it became clear that he didn’t get along with his stepfather.

The spiral continues

John Thomson dropped out of high school when he was 16 and continued to get in trouble with the law. His crimes kept escalating in seriousness. His sentences demanded more time behind bars in harsher environments. Although John said he never physically hurt anyone during any of his crimes, he acknowledged that he caused emotional and mental pain to his victims.

Over the next 10 years, John would be given chances, jobs and support by family and friends, but he repeatedly disappointed the people who tried to help him. In 1971, he wound up in the St. Louis City Jail following an arrest for the armed robbery of a bank.

The man with the black lunch box

John was looking out the window from his jail cell. He said, “At 26, half of my life had been in juvenile or adult penal institutions. I looked out and I saw a man coming out of the courthouse, and he had a black lunchbox in his hand. I looked at him and I said, ‘Why can’t I be satisfied with that?’ I pictured a man who had a family, a job and so on, and I thought why can’t I just be satisfied with that? But no sooner than I thought it, I dismissed it as wishful thinking. And I resigned myself. I resigned myself to living the rest of my life in prison.”

But this man and what he symbolized – a purposeful life – was etched in John’s brain. He would recall this image again and again.

At his next court appearance, he changed his plea from guilty to not guilty by reason of insanity, which required that he undergo a psychiatric evaluation. John was sent to the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, for a 90-day observation.

Meeting Mary, a prison employee and volunteer

During his stay at the prison medical center, he spent any free time reading in the prison’s learning center. (In 1965 John had achieved his GED while a prisoner in a reformatory in El Reno, Oklahoma. He was in solitary confinement most of that time.)

One Sunday, he observed people in street clothes coming into the prison complex to lead the weekly church service. Sundays were a slow day and John was looking for something to do. On two consecutive Sundays, he sat in the back and attended the service. He did not say anything. No one spoke to him.

One of the church volunteers was Mary, a former elementary school teacher. A graduate of Beloit College, she was tutoring prisoners at the learning center. She also sang in a Christian folk group and was part of the group coming to the prison.

The next day at the learning center, Mary was working at the front desk. She described John’s look at that time as “a stone hard face.” She looked up at him and said, “It was nice to see you at church on Sunday.”

John’s response was, “Well, that’s nice, but it didn’t do me any good.”

Finding and accepting faith

The next day John apologized to Mary for his unkind retort. Over the next few days, Mary would occasionally engage with John about faith, but only a few words at a time. He was bitter and without hope. Recalling the incident, John explained that he had no roadmap or models of how to succeed in life. He was afraid to try in case he made a mistake or failed.

John recounted, “She [Mary] said, ‘I’ve told you everything I know about Jesus Christ. You can either accept him or reject him. You accept him and all the promises of God are yours. If you reject him, the consequences of your life are on your shoulders.’”

That night, John had a life-changing experience. It was June 1972.

He said, “I’m all the evil and criminality that you can lump into one person, right? I pray this prayer. I say, ‘If what she says is true, that you can change my life, then I accept your son.’ And I stop myself. And I go over it again. You know, no hope, no help. It’s all on him. It’s your job, you know, not me. And the second time, I say, ‘I accept your son as my savior.’ I immediately start bawling.”

The next day, he shared the news with Mary. She was overjoyed but circumspect. The rules for how prison employees were allowed to interact with prisoners meant she needed to be reserved with her reactions. She smiled but didn’t say much.

A health crisis leads to positive changes

John still was facing sentencing in the armed robbery. He knew he would be going to jail for years; he just didn’t know how many.

Months later, John was sentenced to 12 years in the maximum security federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. He arrived in Terre Haute in January 1973. By the fall of that year he had developed a serious kidney infection that appeared to require surgery. John got transferred back to the prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri, in January 1974.

While he was recuperating, a guard that knew John from one of his previous stays in a different prison noticed that John had changed. His demeanor was different, less angry. This guard suggested that John apply to serve his sentence at the prison camp complex in Springfield, to avoid being sent back to Terre Haute. John followed the guard’s suggestion and his application was accepted. He spent 1974 to 1977 within the federal prison camp in Springfield.

One of his jobs while in prison was as editor of the prison newspaper, The Weekly Echo.

Reba Place Fellowship

In 1975, Mary moved to Evanston and joined the Reba Place Fellowship. She lived in a large household owned by the church and had several housemates. Since she was no longer employed by the prison, she and John were allowed to write to one another. They corresponded as platonic friends for several years. She told her church community about John and frequently shared his letters to her with church elders.

Back in Springfield, John had five years lopped off his sentence for good behavior. He spent the final year of his sentence at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago. Over the course of his 12-year sentence, he was denied parole five times.

The last time he was denied parole was in October 1977. John appealed the denial. He wrote letters to friends asking them to write to the parole board to change its mind. The campaign worked. John was granted parole in December 1977 and released to a halfway house in Chicago in January 1978.

Epilogue

Reba’s communal households provided John the structure and acceptance he needed to succeed upon his release. (Communal households are where one or two married couples and several single people share a home.) There he found friends, fellowship, communal meals, weekend housing and assistance securing work.

After he finished his stay at the halfway house, he moved to Evanston into a Reba household. It was a different household from the one where Mary lived. March 1 marked the 46th anniversary of John joining the Reba Place community.

In prison John had learned bookkeeping, which helped him secure work. Over the years he worked at Northwestern University as an accounting clerk, at Leo Burnett as an ad auditor, and at Scandinavian Design as a clerk in shipping and receiving – he later managed its warehouse.

He and Mary began dating in October 1978 and married in April 1980. On the eve of their wedding, Mary gave John the perfect present: a black lunch box.