His father, Casey, moved the family around frequently working as a manager in the steel industry in St. Louis, Missouri, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Springfield, Illinois, and Nashville, Tennessee.

In 1899 Thompson move to New York City to study at the Arts Student's League and worked on ways to improve his "Darkness and Dawn" ride.

[8] After the exposition, Thompson and Dundy moved "A Trip to the Moon" and the "Giant See-Saw" to Tilyou's seaside Steeplechase Park on Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York.

Thompson drew up elaborate designs for the park in a "free Renaissance and Oriental type" and Dundy managed to arrange $700,000 in financing (although they advertised it as $1,000,000) to pay for it.

Thompson got a job with Broadway producers Marc Klaw and Abraham Lincoln Erlanger and in 1913 he married Selene Wheat Pilcher from Nashville.

[14][15] Frederic Thompson returned to the midway at the 1915 San Francisco Panama–Pacific International Exposition with a ride called "The Grand Toyland", but with the war in Europe in the news fair goers were more interested in a bigger attraction, airplanes.