As young kids, they would also sneak into the track for race events and watch their racing heroes of the day speed around the course in their state-of-the-art midget race cars. Fred and Tom discovered their mutual love for all things mechanical and began learning about the internal combustion engine by way of building and flying gas-powered model airplanes in an empty field behind the old Gilmore Stadium race track. Incredibly, both Fred and Tom would go on to be among our most important hot rod pioneers. As luck would have it, another young boy of nearly identical age to Tom moved in across the street, and they quickly became best friends. In spite of the family hardships, young Tom found plenty to do and was off and running with a new and active life in sunny California. He just really never tried too hard at anything after that. I suppose my dad never really recovered from losing our mother and his business and all that he’d owned in Iowa. There was very little traffic, it was all very clean because most everything was new, and we no longer had to put up with the harsh winters and hot summers of Iowa.
California was an absolute paradise at that time.
He lived out there for the first few years we were in California until he got a good enough job that we bought a house of our own. “My sister and I shared a room, and my dad built a makeshift bedroom of his own on the front porch because there was no room for him in the house. Tom and his family got off the train in Los Angeles in 1935 to start their new lives and would begin their time in California by moving in with Tom’s Aunt at her small home in Hollywood. So, I rode the train the whole way from Iowa to California with this lamp on my lap. Tom remembered, “We had a beautiful lamp in the front window of our home in Stuart that my mother always liked, and I was given the job of carrying that lamp the whole way to California with strict instructions from my dad to not break it. But, within a matter of a few years, the Sparks’ lives would be turned upside down by fate and financial devastation when his Mother passed away when Tom was 2 years old, and the Great Depression wiped out his Father’s business.Īt the age of 9, Tom Sparks found himself on a train heading to California along with his father, older sister, their basic belongings and anything else they could stow away. We were looked at as a rich family,” recalled Sparks. “We had one of the biggest homes in the community, my father had a good car and was a member of the local country club, and we had indoor plumbing.
Because Tom’s father was one of the few people in the community with a thriving business, he was born into what was considered a relatively wealthy family for the area. Born in the small town of Stuart, Iowa, on June 6, 1926, Thomas Samuel Sparks was the son of the town jeweler and watch repairman.
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