Family

According to my father, Butch and Helen Thomason moved to the desert near Death Valley in the 1930s to try their hand at gold mining. Around 1940 they built a small cabin and outbuilding. They had electricity provided by a windmill and a generator. They took drinking water from a nearby spring. 

In 1955 the Thomasons sold their ranch to Jim and Arlene Barker, who had moved to the desert from Oklahoma. To accommodate family gatherings, the Barkers enlarged the cabin and constructed more outbuildings. 

Today what remains of the ranch belongs to the National Park Service. A fire in May, 2009, destroyed most of the cabin, leaving only the cement and rock parts standing. The famous bathroom vanity under which Charles Manson attempted to hide from law enforcement is gone.

Inyo County sheriff deputies and National Park Service rangers captured the Manson family on the Barker ranch in October, 1969.  One of the deputies (later elected sheriff of Kern County) was my uncle by marriage, Merrill Helm Curtis (1908-1992). 

The deputies arrested Manson thinking he might be responsible for  some vandalism in the Death Valley National Monument.  Later the authorities realized he was a homicidal maniac. Once locked in the county jail, Manson climbed up through a 12-inch vent, entered a crawl space and attempted to break a hole in the wall with a piece of re-bar, Curtis told my father, Lee Goss. 

Merrill Curtis was my Aunt Ardith’s first husband. She went through a lot of men fast. I think we once counted eleven marriages. At Christmas my parents would bring along a general present to give to Ardith’s husband, not knowing who would show up. 

The men in the family liked to box and fight in the street, and my father, growing up,  greatly admired Merrill Curtis’s skills. Merrill was a little older and willing to spar with him. My father was an athlete and a tremendous puncher (he was offered football scholarships to USC and Oregon State). He said he couldn’t lay a hand on Curtis. Too clever. 

My grandfather once said that where he came from, everyone was tough.