"[1][2] John Thomas Idlet was born in Baltimore in 1930, the son of a teacher and World War I veteran who claimed to have invented the "double header" ice-cream cone.
[1][3] After school, he considered entering the priesthood, but instead served in the Air Force during the Korean War, working as cryptographer due to his very high IQ.
[3][4] After his discharge in 1954, he married, had children and worked as a taxi driver, psychiatric orderly and city worker, while writing never completed novels.
[1][3] As a result, he was fired from his job, and was forced to work mixing powders and cleaning vats in his wife's lover's paint factory.
[1] At Venice Beach Thomas worked as the manager and chef of the Gas House, a project which aimed to provide free meals to poets and artists who were living rent-free at the Grand Hotel[4][5] Menus were planned based on the amount of money gathered in a gallon jar by tourists who had ogled the beatniks during the day.
[1][4] Ingenuity was needed, and Thomas used cheap fish, and "filet mignon", which as actually horse meat bought from a local pet store.
"[4] Thomas was member of Venice beats, a little-known group described as "an outlaw strain in Southern California letters", by the historian John Arthur Maynard.
[1] Four years later Thomas published Epopoeia and the Decay of Satire which consisted of the same works, except that some of the poems in the first collection had been deleted from the second.
"[citation needed] Thomas spent the sunset days of his life in his house in Venice Beach and reading while sitting under a sweet gum tree on the grounds of the Zen Center of Los Angeles.
Less than 3 weeks into his sentence, Thomas died of congestive heart failure at the age of 71 in the USC Los Angeles County Medical Center.
The lawsuit alleged that the prison system did not provide him adequate medical care, including failing to have him seen by a doctor despite evident poor health.