Hunter S. Thompson: Growing Up Gonzo

I. COMING OF AGE IN LOUISVILLE 

Sandy Thompson (now Sondi Wright) met Hunter in 1958 and was married to him for seventeen years.
Hunter was born different – very differ­ent. He was angry. He was charming. He was a lot of trouble. And what I always used to say – which is interesting, in light of the end of his life – was that he shot out of the womb angry. And then he left that same way.

Neville Blakemore grew up with Hunter in the Highlands neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky.
My grandmother owned a house a block away from Hunter’s. It was a neighbor­hood in which people would sit on the porch and talk to the people walking by. In the afternoon we’d listen to radio programs like Superman and Sky King. Television did not exist.

Deborah Puller was Hunter’s personal assis­tant from 1982 to 2003.
Hunter’s mother told me that he was born a night owl. She cursed him for that – “Oh, God, he never slept at the same time as his brothers.” But Virginia loved him and was very proud of him. She told me he was very charismatic as a young man, even as a boy. Kids – boys and girls – would come around to the house and sit on the front steps to wait to walk to school with Hunter.

Neville Blakemore
My parents didn’t like my hanging around with him – they thought he was a bully. But we always wanted to go over to his house. There was always some­thing going on. We had toy soldiers and we’d play these huge war games. World War II was a big influence. We’d play Germans and Japanese and have battles all over the neighborhood. People would have cardboard guns and cap pistols and backpacks and helmet liners. Some guys had BB guns.

Behind another friend’s house was Beargrass Creek and a culvert. A lot of African-Americans lived on the other side of the creek. Hunter and his group would shoot these guys with BB guns and hurl racial insults, and the black guys would finally have enough and swarm down into the culvert and up the wall, and Hunter and the others would retreat into their friend’s house and hide. They’d start these little mini race wars.

Another time, when I was twelve or thirteen, I had all the neighbor kids over for lunch, and we played soldiers in the back yard. Hunter stole a bunch of my soldiers. It really hurt me. My father said, “Well, I’m very sorry, but it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, be­cause that’s the kind of guy he is.” That for me meant, “OK, he’s fun to be around, but be careful.”

Gerald Tyrrell also grew up a block away from Hunter.
Our group would go to Cherokee Park to play football, or go to the basketball courts, or grab a dime and go down­town to the movies – we would go all over the place. But going to the library and reading books was always given equal billing. Hunter would say, “Let’s go to the library,” and seven or eight of us would grab our bikes and ride down. It’d be all grab-ass and,being rowdy and loud marching up the steps of the library – and then we’d be quiet as church mice inside and each pick out a book and sit down and read for a couple of hours – and then put the books back and leave and be rowdy and grab-ass and ride our bikes home. And it wasn’t just on rainy days. It was year-round.

We were all very keen on athletics. One of Hunter’s big disappointments was that he didn’t grow in the ninth and tenth grades, when he was fifteen and sixteen. He was short. It wasn’t until his junior year that he grew – maybe three or four inches. But by that time it was all over – —he was a smoker and a drinker, and he wasn’t the athlete that he really wanted to be.

Since Hunter couldn’t be an athlete, he had to turn his energies to something else – and he turned it to social activities based around various shapes of bottles. Now when we took the bus downtown for hot dogs and orange drinks, we’d put gin in our drinks and go to the movies.

Lou Ann Iler was Hunter’s high school sweetheart.
Hunter’s father died in July between our freshman and sophomore years. Hunter showed up on my doorstep –— I had a large porch —– and sat for hours, not saying too much. One of the loneliest things I’ve ever seen was Hunter walking away from my porch to catch the bus on the night his father died. It was dark, and the streetlight was on. He wasn’t openly emotional, but I held his hand.