TRANSCRIPT OF
AN ORAL HISTORY GIVEN BY
LARKSFIELD PLACE RESIDENT
KENNETH THOMPSON
Recorded June 30, 1998

Interviewer: Rita Pearce, a graduate student of the Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State University.

Today is June 30, 1998. The time is about 2:15. I’m Rita Pearce, a graduate student in the Elliott School of Communication at the Wichita State University. This afternoon, I’m interviewing Kenneth Thompson, a resident of Larksfield Place. Larksfield Place is a retirement in Wichita, Kan. The interview is taking place in Mr. Thompson’s apartment, E-110. This interview is being conducted as a part of the I, Witness to History program. Mr. Thompson, would you tell me a little bit about your childhood?

Thompson: I was born about three miles and a half of Wichita State University on north Hillside in 1914, the 22^nd day of March. I have an older brother, two years older, little over two years, who is now deceased. I have a younger brother that’s about five years younger who lives on the west side of town. All three of us started to country school which was about a mile from our house, you had to walk across field. It was the corner of 45^th and Oliver. That building stood for a number of year, it was a brick building. The Koch company finally brought the property, but the latter years that facility had only been used as a residence, but people, the building is no longer there, they tore the building down. My older brother went eight years to country school, I went with him the last year or two. Then he was, could have gone to Valley Center High School, but since Wichita High School East was closer, the county would pay his tuition to go to East High. So he went the 9^th grade there. The country school then finished one month before the Wichita schools, and at the end of his ninth year, at Roosevelt, he asked me one day, why don’t you go with me, because my school was already out, and I said, well, ok, I’ll go. And I kind of fell in love with the place. You got to play baseball, and you got to go to woodwork room and make on things, and you sure didn’t do that in country school. So I talked to my parents to see if they wouldn’t let me go to East High the next year, the seventh grade, which they let me do. They had to pay a tuition, which was a nominal thing, I remember, a dollar a month or two dollars a month or something. And I was really glad to get to do that. My younger brother had gone one year to country school with me when I was in the sixth grade. So he went to Fairmount School in Wichita and they had to pay tuition for him. We had a car to drive and most of the time we drove, sometime our folks took us. And we left my younger brother at a place, it would be about 25^th and north Hillside, and that family had two that went to Fairmount school, so they would take all three of them in later in the morning to Fairmount. Then on the way home we would pick the three of them up, my brother and those two boys, and bring them back to their place, and my brother home. I started taking piano lessons probably in the fourth grade, somewhere along in there, and when I went to Roosevelt, I talked to the music teacher and she said, yeah, she could use me as a piano player for the orchestra. Then along, oh, in the first semester, Raymond Hunt who was teaching at East High doing band and orchestra, was also the supervisor of instrumental music. He brought over a brand-new trombone one day and asked her to find someone to play it. Well, I said, I’d sure be glad to do that so that’s the way I got started playing the trombone. I took lessons then from the trombone player in the Middle Theater Orchestra. That’s when they had live orchestras. And there were two, or three or four of these players that had a studio and I think it was the corner of Emporia and 1^st street. I think that building is still standing there. There was a coffee company on the lower floor, and I know that as you went up to the second floor where the studios where, it always smelled like coffee. (Interviewer laugh.) So then my older brother had one year to go to high school when I finished Roosevelt. And our father one day during this summer said, "Did you ever think about going to this new high school?" That was North High School, it was going to open in the fall of ’29. We kind of looked at each other and said, "No, we didn’t." We knew how far it was to East High, so one day we were going in the near direction of North, and we kind of checked it out on the car speedometer and it was about the same distance, so it didn’t make much difference which school we went to, so we concluded well, we might as well go a brand-new school. So I went to North High School. Along in my junior year, the counselor talked to me and said, "You’ve taken enough subjects, you could finish by the first semester next year." So I did, I only went to two and a half to high school. My older brother had gone to Friends University, he was in his second year. I wasn’t too thrilled about going to Friends, they weren’t doing much with instrumental music then. But I enrolled over there, and as I remember, took 15 hours, it was about $5 an hour then, $75 when wheat was only 20 to 30 cents a bushel made it pretty tough for my folks, I know. But during the summer of ’32, he started about wanting to be an agri-major, that’s agriculture. So there’s only one school to go to and that was K-State. So, I started and looking and talking and seeing what I could find out about the music department there, which seemed to be as good as anyplace. Friends wasn’t doing anything much with instrumental, Wichita State wasn’t doing a whole lot with it. So we both went up there. Money was pretty scarce. We lived five blocks of Aggieville, if you know Manhattan. We paid $10 a month for our room. We ate family-style meals at a lady’s house for 20 cents. Once in a while you felt rich and had dime and would buy a bowl of oatmeal at a restaurant on the way to campus. But must of the time, we just ate two meals a day there for a while. Uh (pause) I think, I was always glad that I went there to school. Pittsburgh had a supposedly good department, Emporia had a good department. We had a transfer student from Emporia, and his feeling was that this is a much better music department at K-State than what Emporia had. I played in both band and orchestra there, and of course, it took all kinds of music courses. My high school teacher probably was the one I talked to about getting into this business. And I think one of the best advises I had from anybody was he said, if you’re going to do that, you buy you a violin and start taking violin lessons when you go to the university and learn a string instrument. It almost killed me for the first semester, I just sounded so bad practicing on that thing. And then you’d go take a lesson and the teacher would play these little pieces and it would sound so beautifully and you’d wonder what is he doing with the bow and and with his fingers that I can’t do (both laugh) that his sounds and mine sounds so bad. The second semester I began to make a little progress to satisfy myself and get out of just playing first position and learn the vibrato and start playing some little student concertos and then it was kind of fun. He wanted me to be real serious about playing a violin, but in those days there wasn’t any place to go play. That would have been a real rough career. So along in my junior year, which would have been my second year at K-State, I went into the dean’s office. That would have been the dean of general science, that’s where the music department was to ask about a course or schedule or something. He got all of my things and looked at it, and in the course of talking to him, he said, "You know, if you’d take so many hours next year, you could graduate." So, I just got busy and did that, in spite of working about 15 hours a week at the library. Started for 22.5 cents an hour. But there you were, in those days, you could buy a family-style meal for 20 cents. You work an hour and you could buy a meal. So, it about comes out even. I don’t know what it is now today. So I graduated n three years at K-State and one half year from Friends University and I was out looking for a job when I was 21 years old. I s pent Easter vacation talking to four or five superintendents that you got in a town of any size. They’d say, "Well, I’d be glad to take your application, but when the board gets together, I’m sure they’re going to require that we hire somebody with experience.

I remember right in the middle of finals I caught the bus home and went to South Haven, Kan., which is about 60 miles or so south of Wichita to interview for a job. And as I remember, there were three other men down there applying for the same job. They took us in one at a time and talked to us. I got a letter in a few days offering me the job. Also that same trip down to South Haven that night and then staying at home, I had three finals the next day at K-State.

Interviewer: Oh, my.

Thompson: My father drove and took me back. I remember sitting in the car in the front seat and turning on a little heat and go good and sleepy and I slept most of the way up there. But at 8 o’clock, I had one in advanced grammar, 10 o’clock was in the form and analysis of music and at 1 o’clock it was analytic geometry and I was through with finals. The next day probably at 7 o’clock or 6:30 I caught a bus to Topeka then a bus to Emporia to meet a superintendent from a small town that was southwest out of Emporia. I don’t recall the name of it. I drove through it a few years ago, the high school is all boarded up and I kind of drove around the time and wondered, if I had gotten a job here, where would I have stayed. He called me in a few days and offered me that job, but the afternoon I went to South Haven, I stopped by to see my high school who was then the supervisor of high school bands in Wichita to see if he would write me a letter of recommendation. I thought having a letter in this area would carry a little weight. He wrote the letter, turned around and handed it to me and said, "I’d like for you to apply for a job in Wichita. I’m trying to get created, vocal teachers are doing what they can with bands and orchestras, but I want to get somebody in here just to do the bands and orchestras, so I wish you’d apply. Well, to make a long story short, I applied, I think there were two or three others that applied for it. I was lucky and got the job. I left Roosevelt in 1929 and in 1935 in the fall, I was back there teaching (both laugh). Probably set a record I guess. A lot of the teachers I had in class at Roosevelt were still there. I did that for 11 years, elementary and junior highs. I had four junior highs that first year, then went to an elementary school several afternoons after school. Which meant that you started about 8:30 and got through at 5 o’clock in the afternoon. A little bit longer days I think that teachers put in now. I did that for 11 years. In the summer of ’48, I was working as an inspector out at Cessna, a former physical ed teacher at Allison was personnel director and I saw him in a Safeway store long about the time school was out. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and I said, "Well, you got me a big job lined up for this summer, lot of pay, big title, not very much work?" He said, "Well, those jobs are to come by." And I said, "I realize that." But in a few days he called me and said, "Were you serious about working there?" and I said, "Oh, I was going to work for the Park Department again. Always something’s better." And he said, "Well, I’d like to talk to you, can you come out some afternoon after school" which I did. So they offered me a job as an inspector on the second shift, which kind of fitted in. We had bought this house and it needed a lot of tender, loving care. It was a shingle-sided house that had never been stained. So I decided I’ll stain it and paint the trim this summer and work out there. So you’d get up about 9 o’clock and work and then work on the house, clean up and go to work I guess about 3 o’clock or 3:30 in the afternoon, get home at 12:30. Made for kind of long days. It was about a week, maybe 10 days before school started.

I had just started one Saturday morning with this stain and it was real thin, a gallon of paint and a gallon of diesel fuel and a gallon of linseed oil, so it soaks in real good the shingles on the side, not the roof, but the side of the house. My wife came to the back door after I had been painting for about an hour, and I said take a number. She said, well, it’s Dr. Fowler, the superintendent of schools. So, I came down, tiptoed in the back door and picked up the phone and he said, "Well, we’ve had a resignation at East High School and we’ve kind of had a meeting and everybody think you’re the one that should go there. I’d like to talk to you about it."

Interviewer: Oh.

Thompson: I said, "Well, when do you want to see me?" And he said, "I’ll see you any time you want to come down." And I said, "Give me an hour, and I’ll be there." So I went down, that was a Saturday morning, and I, uh asked him a few questions and he told me a few things, like it won’t pay any more money. I said I don’t know this principal, I don’t know the assistant principal, my students, I was down to one junior high and a grade schools around that in my latter years which is a nice job, teaching junior high in the morning, go out to the grade schools in the afternoon. It was a nice job. But all my students had been going to North High, so I really didn’t know what was happening at East High. He said, "Well, I’ll call and make an appointment and see if the principal and the vice-principal are there." So I did, I went by and talked to them at East High that morning.

Interviewer: What they like?

Thompson: And I said, "What can you tell me about enrollment?" Well, they got out these great big sheets that principals used to have, they put tally's on for teachers. You put four marks and one for five and that’s the way they keep track. Well, it looked it was about 35 or so for orchestra, band, well, they couldn’t tell for sure and the principal said, "Well, it’s just inconceivable that a school with 3,500 students you couldn’t have a 100-piece band." And I said, "You know, you’ve probably got 1,500 boys out here, so you got potentially 1,500 football players. You’ve got 3,500 students out here, you’ve got potentially 3,500 glee club members, but if they don’t happen to play instruments, you could have 35,000 out here and you’re not going to have a 100-piece band unless you’ve got that many people that play instruments." It didn’t seem to make much difference to him. I’d asked the superintendent before I’d left that morning when he wanted to know. He said, "I’d like to know this afternoon." And I said, "If I have to tell you this afternoon, I’ll just tell you right now, I don’t want to go. I don’t make up my mind that quick, I sleep over one night at least."

What was going through my mind I wanted to talk to some of the private teachers around town to see what kind of material there was at East High. Well, I did call the first of the week, I guess it was Monday, and told him that I would do it. I did quit Cessna a little bit early because I wanted to go down to East High and get familiar with what was going on down there. The first day of school came, the orchestra was about 35. The band that was supposed to be the performing band there were 28 that showed up in it. I talked to the principal later in the day and he said, "Well, just take a little time to develop things." A school of 3,500 and 28 in the band. There was another band and what I did those first few days, I listened to them play a lot and go home and draw my picture of my band, how many flute players, clarinet players trumpets and so fourth and so on. And how many players I could get out of this other band. I finally found about 52 or 3 three that I called my first band. You can march six by eight, which is not a very large band, 48. The next year, I got in some excellent sophomores, particularly string players. The orchestra was just like a different orchestra the next year. I got in some good wind players and we had more of them and we marched 60 that year. Next year we did 72, the next year, we did 96. That’s about as big as I ever wanted it to be. That’s a good-sized high school band. That was about, I could take care of most of the better players in that band.

We started playing some evening concerts after a year or two. There was going to, West High opened in ’53. I lost two or three or four players, didn’t make a lot of difference. Southeast opened in ’57. I knew what was coming in the Southeast because I kept track of all the junior high, the incoming sophomores in the fall. So I knew exactly what was going to transfer from the East, what was going to Southeast. It didn’t look like the orchestra was going to be much. I could have my 60-string players at East High plus the wind players and have an orchestra of 80 or so. So, I stayed at East. I didn’t get too enthused about moving. And it turned out about that way. The orchestra started out pretty slow.

I stayed there until 1966. The Art Harold, who was director of music education asked me if I would apply for the job of coordinator of instrument music for the city that Harold Childs was leaving, going to Des Moines to take a job there. And I applied and was selected to do that in 1966. I stayed there for 13 years and retired in 1979. That’s a kind of a quick run down of where I was and what I did.

Interviewer: Goodness. What was it like to coordinate a whole city full of …

Thompson: We had about 40 some teachers. One of my responsibilities was to assign teachers in elementary school. Now about the time I went to East High, or just a year or two before that, they did hire one or two string teachers for elementary school. And they did start teaching in school time. When I first started in ’35, all that elementary thing I did was after school. And so, the year or two before I went to East High. Well, Art Harold came to town one year later, in ’49, and they hired some teachers. He had worked with Dr. Fowler in Jefferson City. So they got along real well, they got some budget money and bought some school instruments and really things got off the ground then a lot better. And by the time I was in, in’66, they had teachers for string instruments and wind instruments in all the grade schools at that time.

About the only change I made there was instead of spending so much time in one school and maybe having classes for an hour, just have them for 30 minutes. Elementary students get pretty tired pretty quick, so if you go just once a week, Thursday and Friday comes teacher’s meeting time, you don’t see them for two week. Thanksgiving comes two, three weeks later, you only see them, there’s a big gap in there. If you see them twice a week, well you only missed them once that week. I found that out in my junior high at Allison, that works so much better.

As I said before it gets kind of tiresome where little kids holding up an instrument for a whole hour. Just get them into and work and send them back to class. Because they’re coming out of a class to be in there. We had then started elementary concerts, vocal concerts, with all the sixth graders and then they’d started some area elementary orchestras. They’d do these programs in gymnasiums. I don’t know, there were about a half dozen maybe of those groups. In a year or two, they decided to do away with the vocal thing, and I talked to some of the instrumental teachers and I said, "How about us start some elementary bands along with these orchestras? Get out of the gymnasiums and play ‘em in the auditorium where they ought to be. With this many students, we’ll get a decent crowd. Won’t have to worry about that." So we did make a change there. There were three areas across the north, northeast—north central, northwest, east central. There’s not a mid-central, there’s hardly any schools down there. So you had two west central and three across the south. So there actually were eight elementary bands, eight elementary orchestras. And some of the people that conducted them were high school people, some junior high, some elementary school. We had a way that we organized them that worked reasonably well.

Then along came this cross-busing thing. The superintendent, Al Morris, asked everybody, what is it going to affect your department – good, bad or indifferent. What’s going to happen? So I sat around and thought about it and here’s the situation, say the northwest that student is bussed to Ingalls School, north of East High. So Tuesday afternoon at 4:30 he should be over at East High to a rehearsal. So how’s he get from Ingalls over to East High. Well mother probably comes in and will take him over. Now I watched these things work, and it was the carpools of the mothers that brought ‘em, carpools of the fathers that came and picked ‘em up, mothers home cooking. What’s mother going to do, is she going to stay there until 5:30? Or is somebody going to make another trip to East High. Now we’re doing this for black students, the cross-busing. Ok, the black student is bused out of the Ingalls district to the northwest area. He’s in elementary school and he ought to be over at Wilbur Junior High at 4:30. How does he get over there to rehearse? Well, there’s white families that would probably see that he got there, but the worst part is, it’s now 5:30 at he’s at Wilbur Junior High and he lives in the northeast corner of Wichita. How’s he get home? And I mentioned this to the curriculum director who was my immediate superior. And he said, "Oh boy, I think the superintendent’s cabinet ought to know this. Do you want to present it to them?" And I said, "Oh, yeah, I’ll do it." You’re talking about the superintendent, the deputy superintendent, director of elementary ed, secondary ed, personnel, the money person, maybe one or two more, the curriculum director and what not. So I mentioned and went over it with them down at South High that we were meeting that morning. And the superintendent looked at me and said, "What are you going to do?" And I said, "Well, I think you have to be honest in this business. We can just do away with it, but we’ll have to tell ‘em why we’re doing away with it." And they said, "Oh, no, no, no. Don’t do that." And finally some them asked me some questions, and the superintendent said, "What are you going to do?" and I said, "We’re going to do it." I said, "I never keep track of black and white, it doesn’t make any difference to me. But I’ll venture to say we’ll have less black people taking part in this that we did before. And here we are, doing a project that we’re supposed to be helping, but in my case, I don’t think it is. I never kept track, but I think we had fewer taking part in it. Oh, I don’t know what else I can tell you. I’ve had some interesting experiences with students. Maybe you want to hear about that?

Interviewer: Yes.

Thompson: I didn’t know this until years later, but a black student that came to East High told me this years later. He said he was enrolling at central, they called them junior highs, that’s the old high school on north Emporia. That was a junior high. And he was working with his counselor, and they had three subjects, gym and study. But you have to have six. So he needed one more, so the counselor said, "What about music?" And he said, "Well, I never did anything with it?" She said, "What about band?" and he said, "Well, never did anything, always kind of wanted to." And she says, "You know, I think they start them out there out at East High in the second band, let’s write band down." So he said that what she put down. He said, "I remember coming to class the first day. There were some other black students and I asked one what he played and he said they played the drums. So when you called roll, and I said, yeah, I played the drums. But he said, I didn’t. But it wasn’t anything unusual, every semester I had one or two or three. There were several that year that wanted to be drummers. It’s the cheapest thing you can do, buy a pair of sticks, a practice pad and a book. So some of them would show up the next day with their equipment, and some would take two or three weeks to get it. But I remember he did real well. What I would do was put them in practice rooms by themselves, beginning of the hour, show them what to do, go back at the end of the hour and and, yeah, that’s fine, turn the page over and do this. And if they go home and practice, they’d come back the next day and could do it. And you’d see them the first of the hour, that’s fine, turn the page over and now do this. So he did, he did real well, and I said to him one day, "You got such a late start, if you’re real serious about this, why don’t you see if your parents will give you private lessons? That’ll be the quickest way to catch up." So he told me yeah, they would. So I got him with Bob Buggart who was the percussion teacher at Wichita State and played in the symphony. And I kept checking with Bob how he was doing. And he said, "Well, he’s doing all right." Finally, he said one time, "You know, he’s really catching on, he’s really doing all righ." Well, he learned solos I think it was his senior year, I don’t think it was his junior year, but his senior year, I remember he got a medal at Emporia in the state festival playing a snare drum solo. So that’s doing pretty good. Now he didn’t tell me all of this until years later. He said, "I was not accepted in my community. This is in the 50s, I was not accepted in my community because I achieved some success. I got into Sons of American Legion Drum and Bugle Corps and it was mostly whites and that didn’t go over very big either. So it seemed like a tragedy, here he is a role model in the community, but he wasn’t accepted in his own community. He went to Wichita. He got to talking to me about it. He said, "I’d like to be in the business you’re in." So I asked the head of the music department of Wichita State, if he did, could you get him a job. He said, well no trouble in the South, they’re begging for music teachers in the South, we’ll get him a job all right. He did have Ds in English and English is a subject that they sort ‘em out real quick in university as you probably well know, so I talked to one of his English teachers and said, what do you think, should I encourage him? And she said, I think he’s got the ability, he’s just never got turned on. He just didn’t do too much in English. I think if he put his mind to it he could do it all right. Well, he went to Wichita State and then along about his junior year, I think somewhere along in there, he went left and went to UCLA for a few quarters. And then he came back to Wichita State and I had him as a student teacher. And I was real impressed with him, the guy was a good conductor. He could stand up there and say, "Trombones, that’s A flat, third position, and clarinets, that’s F sharp, play with your middle finger" and stuff like that, which kind of startled me and I told Art Harold if he had a vacancy he ought to hire him, but they didn’t seem to have that year. Some of the university people told me he got married and she was teaching in elementary school and she kind of hit him over the head and said, get with it now and get out of school and they got jobs in Michigan. And I kind of lost track of him. And years later, he told me some of this. He got involved in the civil rights thing in Philadelphia and Washington and what not. Now along the way there, he got his master’s out of, oh, the Michigan school in Detroit, I’ll think of it in a minute, it’s in Detroit. Anyway he got involved in sociology and that field.

Interviewer: Oh, he did.

Thompson: Now this’ll surprise you. Where do you think he got his doctorate? Stanford.

Interviewer: My goodness.

Thompson: So he got involved in that, and he ended up, and has now been at Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Mich., for 25 years. He’s head of the department there now. Now he didn’t tell me a lot of this stuff until the last few years. He’s been here to Larksfield a time or two. He came down here to the apartment six or eight years ago and spent a couple of hours. And he said one thing General Motors laid off 25,000 people in the state of Michigan. And I said what are they supposed to do for jobs and he said we don’t have jobs for them. And I guess he ought to know, knowing a sociologist what the situation is. Said for instance if we could ever figure out what to do with trash, we could employ a lot more people in this country, if we could figure out what to do with that. He’s been back to some class reunions, I’ve seen him. A year ago last April, my wife and I were headed for New Orleans, a granddaughter that lives there is a landscape architect, and he called me about something, I think he had been in town, but he didn’t have time to come and see me and got to talking about he was going to a convention in New Orleans and I said when you are going to be there and it turned out we were going to be there at the same time. So we decided we’d call each other exchanged phone numbers and we finally got together and had lunch down there. I think that’s the last time I’ve seen him now; we get Christmas cards. There’s a reunion of that class coming up this fall, I don’t whether we’ll make it for sure or not. That’s, that’s I think is a classic example of what maybe music does. Now he didn’t follow through in music, but that’s kind of beside the point. At least it kept him in school and he got interested and, look what he’s done for himself. You can’t help buy think if I’d have said, "Well, I don’t really have time to get you started, maybe you ought to go get your schedule changed and build radios or go to woodwork class or something, what would have happened to him?

Interviewer: May have been all together different, hadn’t it?

Thompson: You don’t know. Another example, this was entirely opposite. There was this student at Roosevelt that had been giving the teacher all kinds of trouble, sitting in the office, hard bench more times that he’d sat down in the music room, I think. He was coming to East High, he was a good trombone player. And, I sent out cards ahead of time, maybe a month before school started saying when I would be down at school to give out uniforms. I didn’t want to do that on a hot afternoon after school when students are busy. So I was there half a dozen times, they were working, they could drop in at noon hour, they come before or what not. And it worked very well, most of them would drop in sometime and get a uniform before school started. I didn’t send him a card because I had a deal with the person who did the enrollment: These are the ones I wanted in my first band. These were pretty well selected, so many flute players, clarinet players, saxophone players, trombone, trumpet, percussion and so fourth. Anybody else that enrolls, just put them in second band. But if it’s convenient, give them study or gym, so it would be real easy to change if I decided to move some of these people, which I did during the years. Well he didn’t get a card, and he called me at home and wanted to know if there had been some mistake, and I said, no there really hasn’t, this is the way I planned it. You had a problem over at Roosevelt, spent a lot of time sitting down in the office. You came to summer school and you had two or three different teachers and they didn’t have very good things to say about you. No, you’ll be in second band. Then this little meek voice said, "Well, then would I have a chance?" and I said "I’ve never had you in class." And he said, "Well, Ok, thanks a lot." So the first day of school came and he came to second band, and the rest of them got out their instruments and played which doesn’t bother me, it bothers some people, they can’t stand all that everybody playing (laugh). He sat with his trombone across his lap. So I explained that this band doesn’t do much; sometimes we’ll play a program around here and you can invite your parents, but if you want in the band at football games, basketball, parades, concerts, that’s the band before this in fourth hour. Anybody interested in being in that band? So the hands go up like this. So you hand out a little march book and you play a little bit altogether and you say now you were interested in the other band and you were interested in the other band, the trombone player, and yeah. Let met hear you play these three people. Well if you can play, you can play your part. Sometimes a clarinet player got lost in two measures and all we had left was a saxophone player and a trombone player. But boy here was this beautiful trombone.

Interviewer: Was that him?

Thompson: By himself, you know, everybody else quit. And I, did I ever need trombone players. So after about three days, he walked up after class and said, "I wonder if you thought anything I said anybody can take care of themselves for a few days" and just walked on by. End of the week, I walked back there, and I said, "Is this the way you’ve taken care of yourself?" And I could see him getting red in the fact, and I thought well, I’m getting through to him I think. I said, "I’ll go over right now and get your schedule changed and you’ll be in the other band Monday." "Oh, thanks a lot," he said, "I really appreciate that." I took about three steps then turned around and looked him right in the eye and said, "You just remember, its just as easy to change you back."

Interviewer: Oooohh.

Thompson: He turned out to be a good student. I made drum major out of him when he was a senior. I knew he wanted to be a doctor, he had expressed an interest in that. The last thing I heard he had gone to KU and had got his degree and had been admitted to medical school. I didn’t hear any more until I belonged to Downtown Kiwanis Club and a doctor that took care of the interns at Wesley talked that day, and I never thought about them fighting over interns, they want 'em. He said, we get some of the best graduates out of KU, that’ why we want these nice dorms for them and their wives to live in so we can get those top graduates. This had never occurred to me. So after the meeting was over, I walked up and I said have your ever come across the name of so and so, and he said, he’s the most sought-after graduate of this medical college.

Interviewer: Oohhh.

Thompson: He said, "We think we’re going to get him." My daughter had a son that had a little cyst on his eye and they took it off in the hospital and she says he’s down there working in the emergency room so I went down and talked to him. Then he got into practice with some older doctors about my age up on north Hillside and then I heard that he left there and was down at St. Joe during the emergency room. I saw him, and I said I understand you moved down there. Yeah, he said, I didn’t. I just didn’t like patients controlling my life. And I said what do you mean, he said, they can’t take an aspirin without having to call you up and asking if its all right to take an aspirin. He said, now I know how much money I’m going to make, I know my hours and all that. And I said, well, you get in all the good, gory stuff. Yeah, he said, but you do what you can with ‘em, turn them over to the family doctor and you’re through with them. I heard this from another student at East High who was, his mother was a nurse out at Wesley. And this was when he was in practice with these doctors up on north Hillside with the doctors. An older lady came in and wondering, you know, have you ever any older patients. And he said, "Well, I’ve had three." And she said, "How’d you get along with them?" And he said, "Well they all died."

Interviewer: Oh, my word.

Thompson: (Laugh) I thought that sounded exactly like him. I went to one of these area band rehearsals one night. I was just elementary thing I was talking to you about. I’d go someplace every afternoon to hear one, I didn’t conduct any of them, but I just went to see how they were getting along, and by the time they had rehearsed all these weeks, I had heard all of them. Maybe some of them two or three times. This mother walked up after rehearsal and said, "You don’t know me but I’m Myron Hulkman’s wife." It’s this doctor. I said, "How’s Myron?" She said, "Just as ornery as he ever was."

Interviewer: (Laugh). Is that right?

Thompson: When I retired, I have two sons and two daughters and they wanted to come home. Said, let’s have a Sunday afternoon. We still have friends in Wichita and we’ll invite some of our friends and give us a list and we’ll invite them to come by the house. I got a nice note from him saying, "You made me grow up in about five minutes after I got to East High school." Also they had one of these class reunions, and then Gary Ray that runs Wichita band was in that class and he wanted to have a luncheon and invite the graduates. So I went that luncheon. They went around the table talking about East High and the things that we did. It came his turn and he said, "A guy made me grow up real quick at East High." (Interviewer laughs) Now I could have lost him. This is what went through my mind: Here’s a good trombone player, what am I going to do to him. But he isn’t going to be much good to you, I don’t mind them, maybe they got a streak of go-go-go. But turn it loose in the right way, and then you’ve got a great student.

Interviewer: Well, evidently. That’s another one.

Thompson: I don’t know, I’ve rambled on, is this what you want to here?

Interviewer: It is, it definitely is.

Thompson: My family, I guess you ought to know about them. I was married in 1937 to Dorothy Seward, whose father was a well-known artist here in Wichita and his estate and what-not. If you look on the walls around here, you’ll see a lot of lithographs particularly. He did lithographs and etchings and some oils and block prints. There’s a block print right over there. That’s take pieces of linoleum and the lower one on the right-hand side, the lines are real wide, that’s what you call a block print. Take battleship linoleum and you dig out where you don’t want it printed and you ink what’s left and that’s where you want to print. It’s backwards, of course. This is a lithograph pencil. You do that on a zinc plant. Ink it then you wipe it off and in the process this ink stays where that lithograph pencil has marked. It’s backwards, of course, when you do it. Now etchings, there’s some around here. I don’t think there are any in this room. They’re real fine lines. You take a zinc plate and put wax on it. Then you scratch out the wax. And where ever you scratch out the wax is a recessed part. Clean the wax off, ink it, wipe it off and the ink stays in this recessed place. Put on the press and that only inks the paper where that recessed paper is with ink. That’s what you call an etching. There’s one in the other room in here. Now maybe you’ve heard of Son Seine, the artist that was as Bethany College for years. That top one that was our wedding present when we got married. She brought some of these oils, this one and one over there. That stitchery, the rabbit up there? My first wife got real interested in doing that. You just take a needle with some thread (chuckle) I can’t draw a box hardly. But she could just sit of an evening and make a little porcupine down below. She taught some of those classes at our house for a number of years.

Interviewer: Oh, she did? Well, she had some artistic talent too, just like her father.

Thompson: Her younger sister, that’s an oil there, a sunflower, that she did. She lived in Middletown, Ohio, then in Kansas City then in the latter years in Columbia. This is my four.

Interviewer: Your four children?

Thompson: Yep. This is the grandchildren. This was taken in '87. That’s the year I, ’89, that’s the year I retired. Now, that isn’t right. ’79.

Interviewer: That sounds right.

Thompson: Is that right, ’79. No, I’m wrong again. This was our 50^th wedding anniversary which was in ’87. Yeah, I was right the first time. That’s Jim, the oldest. We lost him to pancreatic cancer about two years ago. Jane is down there next to him. This is Barb over here on the left-hand side. That’s Dave on the right-hand side. Dave is the one that wrote those articles.

Interviewer: For Better Homes and Gardens?

Thompson: Yes, that’s him. Jim called me, did I tell you that, in February two years ago.

Interviewer: No, I don’t think so.

Thompson: In the middle of the day, Thursday before Valentine’s Day and said, are your doing all right. And I said, I’m fine, and he said I knew you had some trouble a while back. And I guess you’re talking about that tumor I had in my bladder that they took out which was malignant. Yeah, that’s it. Are you all right? And I said, yeah, I went back to the doctor in three months and four months and six months, and I said I been going a year now. Are you guys OK, and he said, yeah, we’re fine. And we talked about the weather, it had been raining quite a bit out there, and I said are you getting the reservoirs filled up? He lives in Alameda, Calif., which in on the east side of the bay from San Francisco, right next to Oakland. I hung up the phone and my wife said, "What was all of that about?" and I said, I don’t know, he wondered how I was doing. And she said, well are they OK, and I said, well I guess so, I gave him room to talk and so I kind of stirred up my curiosity so I called him the next day. And he said, "Well, I’ve had this back ache they couldn’t account for. They did an MRI and I go in next Tuesday to see the result." And he called my Tuesday about 10 or 11 o’clock in the morning and said they had diagnosed that as pancreatic cancer. I’ve got about three months to live. Three weeks from that day, Dave over there, called me and that’s when they gave us some people that were therapists of some kind at WSU. The feeling was that they had never been with older people, they don’t live with their families any more, older people. And here you’ve got a people growing up that have never been around older people much, so they assigned two to me and they had a little finger food down in the auditorium for the people, these people from WSU, and I had two assigned to me. I took them around the show them the health care and the fitness center. And I said, you want to see my apartment? And they said, yeah, I’d like to see it. It was a young man and a young woman. We walked in here and walked into that room in there and the phone rang. I picked it up and it was Dave. And we never call much through the years in the middle of the day, we always called each other in the evening. And he said, have you talked to Barb recently and I said yeah, I talked to her last night. And he said have you talked to her today, and I said no. He said Mary Lou died this morning, that’s Jim’s wife three weeks after he was diagnosed with having pancreatic cancer. So I called Jim and he said, well, I had trouble sleeping recently and this Lazy Boy chair downstairs. He’s retired about a year, she was still working. She was head of the dental hygienists at a community college there at Alameda. Said she ought to be getting up and going to work, so I went upstairs and she was leaning against the bathroom door, couldn’t get her breath and said, "You gotta do something for me." I got her laid down in bed and called the 911 and they were there in just a few minutes and said what you tell us and I said I can’t tell you a thing, she’s never done this before. I don’t know what’s going on. They thought she had an aneurysm but when they did an autopsy she had a blood clot in her lungs or heart area down there. Kaiser, a retired surgeon here, I was talking to him about it and he said those things are fatal. Said they usually start in a vein in your leg and get up back in your heart and lung area. So we, that was the first part of February, well, it was the day before, that would have been the end of February. So we went out for the memorial service for her. Jim had lost quite a bit of weight, he was going pretty good. Now my second wife is a retired nurse. When all this came up, she said, well, he’s going to need help, we’ll go out and take care of him. I said are you sure you want to get involved in all this and she said oh yeah, we’ll do it. So he said no, I’m doing pretty good, why don’t you go home and I’ll keep your informed. Well, he called about the end of April and said I just am beginning to need some help. So we went out. He was still doing pretty good. He would dress for a day. We would go on some nice walks and sit around and visit and what-not. But you could think back a week before and he was doing better than he is now. You could just see him going down. My wife, Jane, says, "You know this is different. I spent most of my time in nursing as in pediatrics and orthopedics. You get them in, they’re ill. They’ve got broken arms, they’ve got pneumonia or you get them well and you send them home. But this is the other way, this is all down hill." He lasted until the 10^th of July.

Interviewer: So you were out there how long with him?

Thompson: Well, he was diagnosed in February. We all together up in Green Bay, Wis., with Jane on Thanksgiving. I don’t remember him saying anything, but I think Jane said that he mentioned then he was having trouble with his back. Well people have trouble with backs, that’s as old as old. It was kind of interesting while we were there for the memorial service. I think what he was going to do he was going to starve to death, that was the route he was going to go. Because he couldn’t get any food through him. And your pancreas is I found all this from Dr. Kaiser from talking to him, is back of your stomach. The head of it is over on this side, the tail is over on this side. The head of it is fastened into your liver and your gall bladder. And he said when you get it over in here, there’s nothing you can do for anybody. They put a tube in here is actually three tubes of pretty good size, a smaller one and then a smaller one inside of that . The larger one, with a button sewed to his skin here on the outside held this in place. The next two were in his stomach. When he got nauseated, he could drain this fluid out. The little one was to give him food to feed him directly into his small intestine and also for morphine. Now I talked to Breckbill, she’s still here, Phyllis Breckbill. Her son is a radiologist sat Wesley Hospital. He and Jim were in school down there and when we were getting ready to go and I said, what about keeping people comfortable, and he said, "Well, there seems to be a new philosophy with a lot of doctors. It used to be you don’t give ‘em too much, you’re making dope fiends out of them, don’t give ‘em too much morphine. Well, he said, a terminal case, it’s a case of keeping him comfortable." Fortunately with Jane, she knew that stuff forward and backward, she could talk to the doctor and the hospice nurse about doses they were going to give him and so fourth. He was still eating some, sometimes he’d lose it all a few minutes after he ate, but he was still eating some when we went out there. That would have been in, toward the end of April. Then it, then, they were feeding him, uh I don’t remember, Ensure is one, isn’t it. There are two or three brands, I don’t believe that is what it was. But they’d feed him through this tube. And when it finally got down to the latter weeks there, he said just forget it, which is tough to sit and watch someone go down hill and there’s not a thing anyboyd can do for it. Dr. Cash out here, was talking to me the other night, he lost his wife about a year ago with the same thing. Jack Benny had it. If you remember Jack Benny. He went in a sort time, that’s what he had, pancreatic cancer. The organist around town for years, Murf Cope had it. I remember her and an internist I was going to them and we were going out and he said, "Boy, that’s what Murphy had." And I said, "You remember she didn’t last much." And he said, "Yeah, I remember." Jim had worked for EPA all this time. He went to KU. He talked about being a pharmacist. And he, mentioned this to Dave who has written some of this about the family, I took him down to see a pharmacist I knew who was on the school board and just let him talk to pharmacists and see what things are like and maybe have a summer job for him. He said well, I don’t know what you’d do for us. And he said that really turned me off of being a pharmacist, the way I got treated. He went up to KU and took his entrance exams in the summer then, before school started, he said, "You know, I’ve always liked math. I just think I’d like sometime to try engineering." And I said if you’d like to try engineering now’s the time to do it. So KU is about the same if you wanted to be electrical, architecture, mechanical, you name it, it was all about the same for two years. Then at the end of two years, you gotta declare, well I want to be this. And they just started this new department of, there’s a better name for it, but it’s water supply and sanitation is what it actually meant to. It was a new department, so he chose to go that way. And he stayed and got his master’s in ’57 and in, five years, ’62, then he finished with his master’s up there. The draft was on, he could go to work for the (pause) public health service. You haven't heard that name, have you, for years.

Interviewer: No.

Thompson: OK, it was the Department of Navy. So he took a commission in the navy, had a uniform. If he flew on the airplane home he could fly for half price and all that good stuff. But he was at the research lab in Cincinnati then he was in Chicago for a while, then he was back in Cincinnati. Then he found out that they would pay his way to work on his doctorate, so he went to UCLA for five quarters. He finished everything but his doctorate, except finishing his dissertation. He took his orals and written, but said I don’t plan on finishing it, I want my engineering license in California. That means more to the job that I have than a doctorate degree. That doesn’t mean much, but an engineering license which he got all right.

Well, let’s see. Jane was, she went to Wichita State one year, she wanted to be an elementary teacher and she’d read to the kids in the neighborhood and play school and just always wanted to be a teacher. Well she went one year and the first semester was not very good. I talked to one of the people I knew in the education department out there and said what’s she enrolled in and I said, well, social logy and biology, psychology and she said, well, she should have had some fun courses. And Jane told me the first day in the biology course said, I had 160 students last semester, 50 of them got Fs, something like that. Make you real enthused. She studied hard, she had a D in biology at the end of the nine weeks, and she said, well, I’m going to transfer over to business, go a couple of years, go downtown and get me a job. Forget this. So she went over to get her folder from the education department, and some of the education profs standing around in there made some remarks, "Well, what’s the matter? Is it too tough for you over here? You can’t make it?" I said something about six or eight years about this and asked, do I remember this right, and she just got red in the face even thinking about it and said, that’s exactly right. I was so fed up with that department. So the next years, she said Jim’s had such a good experience at KU, couldn’t I go to KU? So I just as soon she was in business, my wife and I, but she called us, I think she wrote us a note, and said you’ll be surprised but I went over to the education department to see how long it’ll take me to graduate. They said I could graduate in three years so I’m back in the education department. So that’s what she did. She taught school one year outside of Lawrence. She married a fellow she went with in high school. He was a football player at KU, and engineer. They red-shirted him when he was a sophomore because they were knee-deep in tackles which he didn’t care for because it meant they’d have to pay his tuition, room and board and books for another semester. Which was all right with them. So they got married just before Jane, he graduated in ’64, yeah, Christmas of ’63. She taught in a little town outside of Lawrence. Then he took a job with Bell Telephone the next year and she got a job in Topeka. And they were going to make a manager out of him, and when you’re going to be a Bell Telephone manger out here in the city you go through the whole works. They sent him with a man, in those day when you wanted a phone hooked up, they sent a man out and he crawled up on a pole and hooked up his telephone and went through all that. And he was telling me, you wonder what’s going on. What’s happening, that guy hooks up his phone and dials Joe down here and says I’m down here at so and so, hook me up with line so and so. Joe calls to Jim down in the basement and says hook up so and so to line so and so. So he does and the guy out here on the line says, well, we got quite a bit of noise on that line, tell him to try another line. So he calls down and says they got noise on that line. So he has to unsolder the wires and solder them over here on another line. That’s what’s taking them so long out there.

Then he had worked for Boeing and they wanted him to come back go to work, so they came here and she taught a year here in Wichita system. And he worked at Boeing and worked on his master’s at WSU and got it. And then was teaching part time out there. Come the end of the summer, I think it was, he taught a course. And this fellow says well, I wish you were out here all this time teaching. He said, well, make it worth my while, I probably would. And they said it wouldn’t be any trouble to pay you what Boeing’s paying. So he taught a year or two out there. But he decided to get his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin so they were in Madison for quite a while.

Interviewer: Did he get it yet?

Thompson: Oh yeah. He got it. They broke up about ’83 I think, it has been quite a while. Then Jane remarried, a fellow that works for IBM. Let’s see, it would have been about this time maybe. The boys came a different times and stayed with us. I remember taking Jason out to a soccer game. They played soccer when they were kids in Madison. And food always helps a little bit. You know, after the game, go eat someplace, you know, people like to talk. And I said I was sorry that his mother split up and he says, "Granddad." I said how Fred was always nice to me. And he said, "Granddad, he had a motive in that. He wanted you to think that it was her fault instead of his that they split up." I thought, well, that’s pretty straight.

Let’s see, we’ve talked about Jane. I can tell you more about grandkids. Barb, she was an interior major. If you want your new carpet, couches and kitchen redone, a swimming pool built, she’s got a business in Denver and she runs it. And then Dave is the one that is back at Longwood Gardens.

Interviewer: In Pennsylvania?

Thompson: Yeah. He the two boys went to KU. Their parents went to KU. Jason got acquainted with a student from South America, Paraguay, I think that’s right. So this fellow says why don’t you go home with me for the summer? So he finally decided to. So he said before they were going to leave a week or so they were talking, and this fellow says, well my parents won’t be there when we get there. Jason after while said you got a key to the house so we can get in. He broke up laughing and there’s six servants in the house. The father owned an automobile agency and a whole bunch of stuff down there. Well he and two or three others got started I think beer was one thing they sent so South America, they want beer and we’ve got stuff they need. They need machines to pick cotton down there and they were going to go big guns. They did it for a year or two but I don’t think they did any good at it. Jason got hooked up with some guys in Chicago and started being a bond salesman. Then he went to school at the University of Chicago and got his master’s in business. Now Drew got his degree in business from KU. Barb, he finished in the middle of the year, so she says come out to Denver I’ll get you a job someplace. Well she finally ended up the only thing she could get was the Denver Post, writing on the financial page. And I was out there after I lost my first wife for a week or 10 days and he’d have an article almost every day in the Denver Post. Drew Elder, that’s my grandson. (Interview laugh). And he said you get the information over the wire about 2 o’clock in the afternoon and they want it downstairs by 3 o’clock to start printing. But she finally got him caught on, I think he was selling bonds. Yeah, that’s what he was doing. Then Fidelity Investment in Boston which is a big investment company, I think they’re the ones that started wooing him and recruiting. They flew him back twice about a job back there. This would be, as I understand it, manage a certain fund. You invest money some way for this fund, you give them the money and they invest it to make you money. Well, he’s one of the guys that invests money for the company. He got married, it will be two years this fall. We were in Denver, he married a girl their in Denver. They flew her back once before they were married to find a place to live. Moved them all back there.

Interviewer: That company did that he got on with?

Thompson: The company, Fidelity, they flew him back twice, they flew him back with her again with her to look for a place to live when they got back there. Schools never did that kind of stuff. Well Jason caught on as a salesman now and we were there a year ago. We were out in Denver when Drew got married. Jason and his wife were there and she put her arms around me and said, why don’t you guys come to our place for Christmas. And I said oh, you don’t want us for Christmas and she said oh, we’d just love to have you to come. And Jason called, it was in October and said are you guys coming for Christmas? I said well they must be serious about it. So we talked about it, do we drive or fly. Well let’s see what the fare is. I called the travel bureau that I’ve done business and says you won’t believe it, but for $62 you can fly round-trip. Said there are certain seats, United flights that they sell cheap. See this was the first part of November. Well we quick like called and figured out when we’d go and come back. When I called back, I talked to a different person and I said there’s something about some $62 seats. Oh, yeah, she says, yeah there are some. So we got on it.

Interviewer: Wow.

Thompson: So it was a hundred and what, 20 some dollars for both of us to fly round trip. Had a great time. It was kind of interesting. I said to Jason talking to him before I was coming and said, I’ll bring some dress-up clothes, what are we going to do? And he said well you might bring a dress-up outfit. He became a Catholic when he was going to KU. And I thought I bet we’re going to Midnight Mass. I don’t know, are you Catholic?

Interviewer: No.

Thompson: I’m not either. None of my family. So Ann that works down here in the pool, had the twins, maybe you know who she is. She doesn’t work very much, but well anyway, I said to her, what do we do if you go to Midnight Mass. She said, well, if you want to stand up when they stand up. I wouldn’t bother to kneel and go through that. But if you want to stand up. And it was a beautiful service. They live northwest of O’Hare Airport. And this church, we drove and drove the four-lane road and rode and rode. It’s about it was going to start at 11 o’clock. So we’re down there at 10:30 shortly after and I said to Jason where are we? And he said we’re about a half mile west of Michigan Blvd., in the old part of town. Great big older church with beautiful sculpture all over and what not. At 11o’clock they started music up in the for one hour up in the balcony, up in the back. Beautiful string players, brass, woodwind players, beautiful soloists, vocal soloists, Christmas chorale, Christmas concerto which I used at East High. It has nothing to do with Christmas, I don’t know why they call it Christmas concerto, it’s just string music and I hadn’t heard that in years and they played it. And they played a lot of Christmas carols. Then at 12 starts the service. There must have been three priests, I don’t know what’s going one up in front. One climbs up in the tower and preaches for half an hour or so. The last thing they did when you came in, they gave you a candle about this big, about so long, everybody that came in, and the last thing they did, the usher came down the aisle lighting the candle of the person on the outside and you passed it down the aisle. I asked Jason afterward how many people and he said about 2,000 in this church.

Interviewer: My.

Thompson: We got home, see that was at 2. We got out of there at 2 o’clock, it was a three-hour deal. We got home about 3 o’clock I guess. He got up and put the turkey in the oven about 4:30 cause his wife’s relation and all. That’s the granddaughter that lost both of her parents. She’s a landscape architect. She went to school in Davis in California. That’s the engineering school and architecture. You never hear much about it. It’s a bigger than K-State is. It’s close to Sacramento. It’s in Davis, Calif.

Interviewer: I think I’ve heard of it.

Thompson: Yeah. A big school. I went out there when I lost my first wife and I went out for the commencement, probably the last of May, the first part of June. It’s hot there. Alameda where they lived on the east side of the bay, there’s this breeze in the afternoon and you have to have cover at night. No air conditioning, you really don’t need it. You can tell the people that water their lawns, they’re pretty good shape. There’s green lawns and brown lawns in Alameda. Some don’t do anything with it at all. These two are Dave’s. Of course, they are 11 years old, ’87, ’88. Scott was born in ’83, she was born in ’86, so Scott’s he’s getting up about high school age. Remember the basketball player at WSU for a while, Scott Thompson?

Interviewer: Yes.

Thompson: I didn’t have any trouble remembering his name because that’s my grandson’s name. (Both laugh)

Well, what else can I ramble on and tell you about?

Interviewer: Humm. Where did you say you met your first wife?

Thompson: At church.

Interviewer: At church?

Thompson: Fairmount United Church of Christ. It’s about a block south of Wichita State on Fairmount Avenue.

Interviewer: And.

Thompson: She was going there to church. I’d finished school in ’35. I think the first place we ever went was in ’36, probably January or February of ’36. We got married in ’37.

Interviewer: Was she a housewife? Was she a housewife?

Thompson: Yeah, she worked some. After the four kids were grown. She was a secretary at Mea, uh Mattewson School when it opened, she was one of the secretaries there. She’d substituted some at East High in the office, and at West High. When we moved away from the university. She was the secretary to the dean of business at Wichita State for a while, a year or two. Then we moved away from the university and she said, I’m not going to work any more. And she actually was the first one to open the mental health office here in Wichita. It’s still going I think. Then she developed arthritis, a real bad case of rheumatoid arthritis. And the pediatrician that lived across the street form us. She was diagnosed about ’69, we worked on our house, two downstairs bedroom, peeled the paper off and painted and repapered them and what not, when we got through doing that, it took us about two weeks working at night. And she said my hands are just killing me. And I said mine don’t feel too good, but they’re all right now. And I said you better go see a doctor. And I came home one afternoon and she said feel my hands, how hot they are. I’ve got arthritis. Says that’s when its doing damage, when it’s running temperature in the joints. So there was a pediatrician that lived across the street and after she had it about a year, he says do you know what arthritis is and I said, well I have a vague idea. I read about it try to find. He says, it’s a very simple disease. Your joints hurt. You’ve got spurs on your cartilage that scratching. If we knew how to get ‘em off when you get ‘em and keep ‘em off, we’d have it whipped. But he said nobody knows what to do for it. The family doctor had taken care of the whole family there for a number of years. After a few months, he says you ought to go to a specialist. So she went down to Wichita Clinic and they put her on gold shots, which is actually gold I guess in some form.

Interviewer: Is it really?

Thompson: Yeah. Then she developed, which is not unusual, lungs fibrosis they call it. And this, what do they call it, there’s a name for chest specialists. He said we have to get you off of that. Then you’re kind of up a creek without a paddle. I said to this pediatrician one time, why do you, if aspirin did pretty good with her controlling it. Aspirin controls the pain but also tends to retard the progress of arthritis. They don’t really know exactly why. I said to this pediatrician what do you do if you have someone allergic to aspirin, you know stomach, tears your stomach up. He said, boy you’ve got real problems. There’s not a whole whale of a lot you can do. I used to ask him, this was back in the latter 60s, 70s, should we be going someplace for treatment and he said you’d get just as good a treatment in Wichita, Kan., because nobody knows what to do for it. And he’d say, I been to Boston to a pediatrician thing and he said, I see a lot of little kids with arthritis and nobody knows what to do about it yet. And he was pretty good to us through the years.

She had both hips replaced, she had joints in one of her hands replaced, it didn’t do much good. But her hands were a mess, and her knees were a mess. In the latter years, we went to an orthopedic doctor and he said well I don’t think you’re going to do a whole lot more walking. If I thought that you knees would survive and you would, we shouldn’t do it. But if you want to we’ll just go the route to keep your comfortable. I’ll give you a cortisone injection. That is not good if you’re going to preserve you knees to just do it continuously. But if this’ll keep you quiet, so what we said let’s do that. She she’d go about every eight weeks and get shots in her knees and be reasonably comfortable. She was in a wheelchair most of the time, she couldn’t walk down to the dining room when we moved here, she was in a wheel chair then. She developed some heart problems and died in Eden, Okla. I’d been going down there for a number of years to judge. I was going to quit when she developed this, and they’d still write me and want me to come and I said well the only thing we can do they put us up in a nice Ramada motel, new one. You could go, I could go down and eat breakfast and you tell me what you want for breakfast and I could bring it back and I could probably tell them what you want for lunch and they’ll bring it down to you for lunch. So if you want to go with me and she said, well, yeah, that sounds all right. So we went a number of years down there. But I’d been down there one day, judging, like we’d go down Tuesday, and I’d judge Wednesday and we were sitting in a motel room. We carried nitroglycerin and she said I’m getting an awful pain in my chest so I gave her one, then I gave her another one and she was still not very comfortable and said well, get a cool washcloth and put on my forehead which she had asked for a number of times. When I came back she was sitting in a wheelchair. She was just laying back like this. So I shook her and said can you hear me. I didn’t get any response at all so I called 911 and told them where I was and they were there in nothing flat. The first one in the door was a man and she was in the wheelchair and he said help me lay her on the floor, and we laid her on the floor. By that time in came four or five with all this equipment. Got up and started pushing on her chest, finally one of them stood up and looked at me and says we need to take her to a hospital, where do you want to go. And I said I don’t know this city, where should we go and he said they’re all alike. There’s three here, how about the closest one. I said it makes sense to me. And this lady looks at me said do you have a car or you can ride with us and I said I’d rather ride with you cause I don’t know this city. She said come on, get in the passenger’s side. Did you ever ride in an ambulance going down the street? Well, it’s kind of an interesting ride. By the time we got out to the street, she turns on the siren and you start down the street, then you come to about there were four or five stoplights before we got to the hospital. She’d pull out around all the cars on the wrong side then reached down here and turned on another Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! And like that you get through the intersection and on you’d go. I don’t know how fast she drove, 40, 50 miles an hour when it was flat, but went pretty slow when we went through the intersections.

They worked with her and the doctor came to me and talked to me several times and said she was not responding. After about an hour and a half, he said, well, I think we might as well quit. Her heart is still beating some, but she hasn’t had any blood pressure for a half hour, 45 minutes. You know what happens to your brain when something like that. So that was the end of that. They, when I got there, they said do you want us to call a chaplain and I said Oh, I don’t think so but they did and he came in. We sat there in a little office and visited and they came in and talked to me a number of times. So when they came in and told me this was the end of it, I said to this chaplain, well, I have two brothers, she has three sisters I’ve got four. When do you call them. He said, call them this evening, don’t wait until morning. So I started in with my four kids I guess, and I talked to Jim in California, Jane was, she was in Green Bay I think at that time. I was talking to Barb and got through with here and they said you’re wanted on the line and so and so and Jane’s husband, Paul, he’s in Chicago, he works for IBM. And Jane had told him, Paul’s not here, he’s in Chicago. He said I’ll come down and drive up with you tomorrow if you want me to. And I said oh you don’t have to I’ll be all right. He didn’t argue, and said, let me call you in the morning and see how you feel. So he called about 7:30 or 8 o’clock and I said well I didn’t sleep too much, maybe it would be a good thing. It’s a 130, 40 miles, and you don’t sleep very good. So he said that morning what’s the best place Tulsa or Oklahoma City I checked and its about the same and I said I don’t think it makes much difference, it’s about the same. And he said I’ll probably come into Tulsa, how do I get there? And I said get on the Turnpike and when you cross 35, just keep on that four-lane it will take you right into Enid and it’s right on the west side of Enid, stay right on that street and highway and you’ll come out on the west side of Enid on the left hand side is the Ramada and in the southeast corner on the first floor. So he came about noon, I guess, I think I went down and ate lunch. I think maybe about 1 o’clock. He drove in, said he came to Oklahoma City and he asked how do I get to Enid and they said go ask that lady over there, she commutes all the time. She says stay on old high A, 81, don’t bother to get on the four-lane its about 20, 30 miles east to 35. You come right up 81, it’s just about straight out of Oklahoma City.

So I lived a while by myself and I didn’t like it. (both laugh). No, I don’t know, I guess I’m a people person.

Interviewer: How long did you live by yourself.

Thompson: I lived almost three years. Yeah, yeah. I finally went down after a year or so and asked John down here, what, I’m not connected with anyone, but before I do I want to find out financially what happens, what do you have to do here? You don’t have to pay another entry fee. You pay a sizeable entry fee, equivalent to the price of your house when you move in here. That they refund to your heirs when you sever all connection, not just go down and live in the health care center because you might get well enough to come back and you’ve given your money away. So they keep it until you sever all. You either move out or you die, but you don’t have to pay more than that. Then there was the question about the health fee. I said to him you know, my wife Dorothy never spent any money down there in the health care thing, we paid 10-5 at that time, maybe they’d give me credit for that. I didn’t think they’d do it, it’s set up on an insurance thing. Just because you don’t have any wreck with your car they don’t give you’re your premium back. I said if they won’t to that, then maybe they’ll give me credit. It was then $23,000. They give credit for that $10,500. He talked to me later said there was no discussion on the first one but on the second one there was quite a bit of discussion, but they didn’t do it. Because I didn’t really want to get into that responsibility because she could get into something terminal and she didn’t have any insurance and you could have got yourself into a pickle. So she got this insurance.

And she had a house to sell. And I’d already sold a house and taken a one-time deduction you can take, capital gains. And then the Internal Revenue looks at it, what was your status when you got married. So we waited until after she sold her house so she could take it so the government kind of dictates to you a little bit.

Well, I’ve rambled on and on, I guess.

Interviewer: Well, I think probably we’ve covered most of it and it has all been very interesting to me…

Thompson: I don’t know, it’s kind of dull.

Interviewer: No, it wasn’t dull at all.

Thompson: I’ve had a I think a reasonably good life. I I said to my kids one time, the bad part of what I did is is I didn’t make any money. (Interviewer chuckles) And they said, yeah, but we had some pretty good times together. We got to take a few trips together. I remember I belonged to the East Kiwanis Club and I guess the first time, the president couldn’t go to the national, the international convention they called it. It was in Cleveland, I believe. I was secretary and they said how you going, we’ll give you $200 I think or something to go. Well it only cost me $100 for a room and transportation. I came home with $200. So I told my wife, let’s just get on the train, let’s find out how much the train costs to Chicago and what we can get reservations for. The train deal I think was around $98. We stayed at the Hilton, the Conrad Hilton on Michigan Ave., $20 a night. Had two rooms with a door in between. They put a rollaway in each room. There was room for six. We saw a lot of Chicago, went to baseball games and museums and all that stuff. And my kids for a long time talked about that. And it really was great, you could go up in the dome car and sit and visit with them and talk with them, you know, instead of having to drive all the time. It really turned out to be a good trip

We went to Colorado, let’s see Jim didn’t go on one of those trips, but all four of us went to Crested Butte, that’s quite a resort out there. Now it was just getting started when we were out there. My wife got acquainted with somebody that had an old house that they had fixed up and rented for I think $25 a week. Course $100 rent at that time for a house was pretty good rent would get you a pretty good house in these days. Well at this time, Jim would have been about nine years old. And then I begin to hear about students just blowing up and quit coming to school and even some faculty members. Kids that just having all kinds of trouble with them. And I thought, oh dear, I’ve got four coming along, what’s going to happen to me. And I’ve really been proud of them. The first one went sailing through no trouble, the second one goes on through the third one and the fourth one. And four years after they got out of high school, they all had a college degree. So you can’t say anything bad about that.

Interviewer: That’s wonderful.

Thompson: And that’s a little tough to do on a school teacher’s salary. I had two in university there for a number of years. Two dorm bills and two tuitions. And they were all out of town except Jane who stayed that one year at home. And of course Jim went five years up there. He was interested, as I said, in water and sewage and that sort of thing. He built a miniature water treatment plant for his master’s. Go down to the Kaw River and start it in here and it was out of plastic and it was glued together and then it would come out pure down here. I wish he were around now. They’ve been having trouble with the algae out here on these lakes. They’ve had them sprayed, Jim would have known that stuff forward and backwards. It didn’t happen in his time when he was around. I think, now I could be wrong, I think he said one time there’s not much you can do for it. I’m sure he was the one that old me, I just wish he was around to verify it. That all this fertilizer that they’re putting on lawns, see a lot of this water is piped in, it’s piped in across the street, you see these big things coming into these lakes, well that’s, I think that’s a good thing to keep from flooding out here in the streets when you have a five-inch rain here’s this thing to carry it off and get rid of it, but I think you get a lot of fertilizer out here in the lake. I think that’s part of the problem.

Interviewer: I don’t know. I know ponds, farm ponds have been known to get a lot algae.

Thompson: They did on the farm growing up as kids, but not as bad as this. This just gets awful out here. They’re supposed to put fish in that would take care of it, I don’t think it did any good.

Yeah, you probably wonder how did we happen to get up here? We started living in an apartment. We lived there from July to about September or October and we both said this apartment living is not, we ought to be getting a house. So we ran on to a little house that was about oh, 15 years old I guess at the time. They wanted $2,500 for it. The real estate agent said I think if you offer them 24, I think you can buy it.

Interviewer: And that was in what year do you think?

Thompson: ’37, it was ’38 when we made the deal for it. And then there was a nice house out there by the university. I came home from doing my church choir one Sunday and my wife says so and so’s house is for sale out here. I called about it. They’ve got a price of, I think, $9,250 or something. She said we can go see it this afternoon, I said, won’t do any good. I don’t know how we’ll finance that. She said, well, we’ll go. It had a coal furnace and that was in ’45. This real estate agent said they’re desperate to sell it. If you’d offer them $7,500, I think you’d buy it. And this little house that first bought had a coal furnace and we put coal in it for a couple of years and in 40 we put a gas furnace in, this was in ’45. So we made them an offer with a contingency that we could sell our house and this guy was going to list it. He sold it in about a week for about twice as much as we paid for it which paid a big chunk on $7,500. The we lived there until ’56 and about doubled our money on that and bought a house on south Glendale; Glendale’s one block east of Oliver, and we were about a half a block north of Kellogg. We begin to get a little big jumpy, we began to hear about what they were going to do to Kellogg. Then my brothers stayed on the farm out there with my folks. Then they passed away several years ago. Then the Koch Co. had been wanting to buy the farm out there. Finally they all at once offered $500 more than they’d ever offered for it. We talked about it and said if they’d give us $500 more than that an acre, we might consider it. Which they did and we sold it. That was in ’83. So Dorothy was having trouble with arthritis and I said we need to do something with this house. Well, Jane and her husband were home and Jane said, yeah, if you fix the kitchen, it’s going to cost you a chunk. And I said yeah, 10 years ago they wanted $3,500 and she said, you’ll pay $8,000 or $10,000 if you do very much. Why don’t you look for another house? You won’t have an attached garage when you get that done, you’ll have these steps on the front of the house. So we started looking and we finally found another one. And we sold that house for more than twice as much as we paid for it as I remember.

Interviewer: The one on south Glendale?

Thompson: Yeah, we got there in ’56 and that was ’83. Sold it in about a week or 10 days. We had looked but didn’t find anything that really just appealed to us. There was one on 17^th St, west of Woodlawn. We went back up there a second time to look at it, it was then empty. These people were pretty anxious to sell. And finally we decided on a price and this real estate agent said well come on down in the morning and we’ll write up a contract on it and see if we can buy it. We’d sold ours so we needed something to get going. So my wife read the morning paper and there was a house in Pine Valley Estates ranch house, three bedroom, family room, tra-la-la. So she showed the ad to this real estate agent when he came in and he said I don’t know that house. And they know all of them, everybody’s got everybody else’s..

So he called said, well, it belongs to one of the ladies that’s an agent there. She married one of the man agents there. She had a house and he had a house, he sold his and they bought another one and now she’s selling hers. That’s her house. You can see it about 4 o’clock this afternoon. So we agreed and he wrote up this contract and I can take it up and get it typed up this afternoon. We met him at 4 o’clock and walked through this house and I thought we must have looked at 10 or 15 houses and boy I like this house better than any we’ve looked at. We kind of went our separate ways, walked around. And I finally said to my wife, what do you think? And she said well I like this one. I said well I like it better than any we’ve looked at, so we walked out the front door, and he said I think if you’d make an offer of about such and such, I think you’d buy this house. And we said, well here’s that contract on that other one. You can mull that over on what you want to do. So he called a time or two in the evening, finally I said we want to see it again. I’m either this way about people, cars, furniture's, TVs, you name it. I don’t know how you are, but I see things I don’t I don’t like the second time, or I see things, yeah, this is better than I really thought it was. I’m that way. This has features I didn’t see in it when I looked at it before. So he says, well, if I give me a check for down payment I think you can buy this house for what we were talking about. And he called in about 30 minutes, and said, yep, you bought a house. (both chuckle)

Now the problem was they had bought another house, they’d gotten married, they’d bought another house with a swimming pool for their kids. They were anxious to get over there. But those people who had that house were having a house built. So these people couldn’t move until they got the house built and we couldn’t move out of ours and these people are on our back wanting to move. One of those kind of things.

Interviewer: How’d you handle it?

Thompson: I think we did all of this about the first part of June. We moved up to that house in September, the Saturday before Labor Day. And then Dorothy begin to get more trouble with arthritis. She fell when we were back in visiting Dave. Didn’t break any bones, cut her head and kind of a bad trip coming home, trying to keep her comfortable because we were driving. I’d talked to the nurse in the orthopedic office here and I said when we get to town, we’ll come up and see you which we went straight to the clinic down there and talked to her. She said well the way you describe it, she ought to be in the hospital. So the doctors over there is seeing patients right now, and the clinic’s to Wesley. And she said let me call, he’s still in the hospital, go around and go in the emergency room door. It always pays to have friends in this world. A former student of mine was on was a security person down there and he came over to the car when we drove in and I told him what the deal was and he said see that no parking over there, pull right over there and park there. And he pulled his walkie-talkie out and said, need a cart for a lady and by the time we pulled over there and parked, out came people to pick her up and he was waiting down in the emergency room. I think they did some more x-rays right then; she didn’t have any broken bones. But while she was in the hospital one afternoon, somebody came to see her, friends of ours, and I walked out with her and she said, have you ever looked at Larksfield? Said I understand that is a great retirement place. And I said, no, I really haven’t. So one afternoon when she said why don’t you go home and get some sleep, because if I wanted to see the doctor, I had to be down at the hospital at about 6 o’clock in the morning and wait for the doctor, sometimes they make rounds early, sometimes its later. If you want to talk to the doctor and see him, you gotta get there early and I tried to stay and help her eat and whatnot. So instead of going home, I came up here and walked in the front door there and walked over to the desk and I kind of think Kate Bohannon was sitting on the desk. And I said I know nothing about this place, is there somebody I could talk to. Said, yeah, have a seat. In a few minutes, Sharon Dillon came down, you know which one she is. So she took me on a tour, at that time her office was on the west side up on about the second or third floor. Went back up there, she wrote out all the financial stuff, that was December, along in January I said to Dorothy one day well I went up to Larksfield, I’ll get out the stuff and go over it with you.

And we started getting invitations up for lunch from Sharon. Well, I said we don’t have anything to lose, Georgetown did that. We went down there, I really was not too impressed with Georgetown.

Interviewer: Really? Why?

Thompson: Well two things. One is you have to go get your tray of food. Dorothy couldn’t carry a try. What do I do, go over and get in line and get her tray then do I go back in line and get mine. Most of the rooms, except for corner rooms, your windows open up out on this atrium out here with people walking by right there in your window. Your windows are not in the bedrooms. Now some corner apartments, some few corner apartments, the windows are in the living room, but most of them if you pull the drapes in the living room, that’s people walking right by there, which just didn’t appeal to me at all.

But we came up here and I guess a few days later we got to talking about it and she said you know, if we could afford to move up there, I think we ought to. If something were to happen to you, I know what’ll happen all four of them will come home and then they’ll say, what are we going to do with mom. Take her to California or the east coast or what. She said I don’t want any part of that. I’ve lived around here all of my life and I got to thinking then, gee, if something happened that she gets to the place where I can’t take care of her, boy the price you pay is just something else, $3,000 a month or so most of these care places are. Then I got to thinking the next 15 minutes, if something happens to me right now, there’s two of us. So, we better just take a close look at this. I sat for about three days, not that you sit all day long, but you kind of look at the figures and then you go back and see if you think you’ve got everything and the thing I never could come up with is what does it cost you to live in a house for maintenance. I’m not talking about what the gas, water and that stuff, you can pretty well get that. What does it cost you for garbage disposal, for paint on the outside, air conditioners? What per month. I never could feel comfortable. I finally said $150 a month, about that, $1,800 a year. I may have been high, I don’t know. I was trying to compare it with this. What are we paying per month in a house and what will we be paying up here? And it looked like we’d be paying more, which we are. Which sounds reasonable. So I wrote all this out and sent copies to my four kids and said, look it over and see if I’ve missed anything. Why don’t you see what you can find out about retirement places where you live, California, and so on. I remember Jim in California saying well there was a big one out here that went bottom up. They got it straightened out and it’s now open and going again. Dave on the east coast says oh, they’re a lot of them back here, they’ve been going for years. All of the nice ones have long waiting lists, can’t get in ‘em. Says sounds like you got a pretty good deal cause you can pay $90,000 entry fee and if something happens to you the next day and you don’t get any of it back. So it sounds like you have a pretty good deal here. I suppose you know the deal year. It’s something. You pay in addition to an entry fee, you pay an insurance fee if you’re insurable. Then if something happens to you and you have to go live over there, you pay the same the same monthly thing, except the feed you more, you have additional meals or something over there and you’ll have other cost that will come up. Basically that’s what you pay, the same thing that you’re paying here. But now if you’re out here and something happens to you and you have to go live in one of these care places, they’re awful. This place I think is charging outsiders down there it’s close to $4,000 I think some of those people are paying. Down in Larksfield.

Interviewer: In the care??

Thompson: In the care place. They save so many rooms for us up here because they can’t move people out of there to another place if they need the room. They may double up rooms, you may have a roommate for a while if you want a private place. But that’s kind of understandable. But that’s what kind of forced us to get real serious about moving up here. Now some of my friends, some of the people in the school business, something happen to them, they couldn’t move up here now if they wanted to because they’re not insurable any more, they ‘re too big a risk.

Interviewer: Oh.

Thompson: And most people will say, I’m just not ready to do that yet. What are you waiting for, to have a heart attack? Or be diagnosed with some terrible disease. You need to get here, which we did. Now Dorothy was a question whether she would be insurable or not. It took a little time and they finally took her as being insurable, and we paid the fee, $10,500. It’s almost $40,000 now, the insurance thing. But she never used any of it, so you can feel bad, but as we were saying earlier, you don’t get any of your car premium back and if your house doesn’t burn down, you don’t get any of that back. So, it’s one of those things.

Interviewer: So you’re still glad that you made that decision, right now? You’re still glad that you made the decision to move?

Thompson: Yeah, yeah. It’s an expensive place, there isn’t any doubt about it. But I guess it’s like cars and houses and clothes and shoes, if you want nice, you have to pay for it. It’s that simple. I think this is by far the nicest place in town. I’ve been in several of the others. This chorus I sing in we’ve sung in several of these others. They’re, some of them are nice, but they don’t have dining rooms compared with this. Most of them, the rooms are smaller than this. Now there are smaller ones that this, there are one-bedroom ones. I guess the living room might be bigger, I’m not sure. Across the hall here, the Roberts have a deluxe two bedroom which this is bigger. The bedrooms are the same size, but the living room’s . But are you going to bring your dining room table and eight chairs and buffet and entertain here? Nobody has to cook. You take ‘em down to the dining room and eat down there.

There are some big apartments here where they put three of these smaller ones together and they’re big. But, I, this is adequate.

Interviewer: I would think so.

Thompson: We were blessed that our daughter Barb when we decided to do this she said if you want me to I’ll come home and help you. So she got her clipboard and said, OK, and drew this room to scale and said I think you ought to take that couch, measure it. And I measured it and she drew a little couch and put it under this. Now measure the bookshelves and measure the chairs and she drew little ones and put ‘em there and moved them around and finally said, well, I think that’s your living room and drew on top of this big sheet, you know. Said, now there’s you living room, let’s do your bedroom. So she said I’ll come back when you move if you want me to. And she did, stood at the door with the movers and said put that table there, put that couch here and put this there, and all we had was a string of boxes out in the hall with pots and pans and books and records and things like that. But we were pretty well basically moved in. She hung the art work, moved it around a little bit. I did the clocks. (Pause) But we sold a bunch of stuff. She said I think the best thing to do is have an estate sale, move just what you want. So, a fellow that she went to school with, he and his wife, was working for , can’t think of his name, he’s been in the business for years. We used them. They, you get into things like we moved here the next day after Labor Day and they said give us two weeks and we’ll have an estate sale. In about two days they called and said you’ve got so much stuff in that house we can’t get it ready in time (interviewer laugh) and we’re going to have to have longer. So, see Larksfield Place agreed to take our house; they did that for a while. We never could sell it, we lost some money on it. It’s the only house I ever lost money on. But this was in ’89 and houses weren’t selling very good. So finally one day I said to my wife what they’re offering us we’re going to lose money, but I said what would we do with that money if we had it? We’d invest it. It would bring us in about so much. If we’re that short on money, we ought to just forget the whole business. I don’t think we’re that desperate for money. It’s just your pride, you hate to, let’s just tear the page out the book and forget it and go do it. So that’s what we did. And I’ve been glad we did it, particularly after I lost her. I would have been lost I think in a big house. It was a nice house. Are you familiar with Woodlawn, 10^th Street, south of 13^th and Woodlawn. Go about a block and a half east (Interviewer: That’s a great area.) on 10^th street. There’s some nice houses in there. This was a three bed-room; the master bedroom had two closets, had a half a bath I guess I’d say, a stool and a walk-in shower, which was good for Dorothy. Tubs were no good for her. Then you had a full bath at the end of the hall with two bedrooms on either side of that hall. You had a lavatory and a stool at the end of the hall where the washer and dryer were off of the kitchen by the garage door and the basement door. You had a large living room. In between the living and the family room was a dining area where you could put your dining room table and buffet and all that stuff. Then if you had a crowd of people in there, they’re all kind of in one place instead of being around the corner here. That house on 17^th that we looked at had a fairly small living room and to get to the family room you had to go around this way or go around through the kitchen. It had a huge master bedroom, huge, you could put a couch and desk and two easy chairs, and I don't know, you don’t live in a bedroom that much. I think you need, if you're going to have big rooms, you need it out where you’re going to spend most of the day. But this is a nice house, I really liked it, it was just petty good shape when we moved there, paint and paper and all that.

Interviewer: And you were comfortable after you moved in here because this would be somewhat smaller than what you lived in.

Thompson: Yeah. But you know I never felt that way too much. I was doing all the house work when we were living there. You get a house that big and when you run the vacuum today, well you got the family room, the living room, the dining room, the hallway, three bedrooms to vacuum, you ought to dust. Keep the bathrooms all clean, that’s one, two, three lavatories, plus the kitchen.

Interviewer: That’s a bit much.

Thompson: But it was nice, it was a nice house, we enjoyed it. When the kids came home, we had a lot of room to put up people. Had a couch, there was one room finished in the basement, carpeted. I kind of fixed it up for my room, and record player and books and filing cabinet and I had room to put my workbench that I worked on clocks. I’ve got a bench upstairs, you want to see it?

Interviewer: A bench?

Thompson: A workbench, and my tools upstairs. That was part of the agreement when we moved here. I didn’t want to give up my tools. And this guy that was kind of dealing with said, well, maybe just you make them gifts and kinds to Larksfield. I don’t want to give my tools to Larksfield. My kids may want them. And Kate finally talked to them and they said, well there’s a room down there at the end of the hall, but there’s weavers in there. You wouldn’t want to be in there with a bunch of weavers with all that dust and fuzz. And I said, Ah, if you’ve clock, cover it up when you go and leave. Doesn’t bother me. Then that’s where we moved and there was a weaver in there.

Interviewer: So you share a space with another person.

Thompson: Yeah, yeah. This is a pretty good sized room. Then Breckbill lived next door here. He was a clock man, and he had his work bench in there in the small bedroom. I said, no, you, bring it down here, there’s plenty of room in this room. So he was tickled to death to move down there. Then John Wells talked to us and they needed that room on the first floor and said would you guys move up on third floor? So we went up and looked at that room; I think that room’s actually bigger. It’s just a little more trouble to go up the stairway but that’s immaterial. So they said, maintenance can help you move. So I agreed, like an afternoon, well, we’ll move. I came home and saw one of them in the hall and he said, oh, we moved you this morning. I thought well I hope you got it all up there. (Interviewer laugh) I went up there that afternoon, Breck was there, and they came and said how would you guys like to have some cabinets on the wall?

Interviewer: Oh my.

Thompson: I said yeah, that one right there. That would look great over my work bench. And I’ve got a table up there. Dorothy’s dad did that did our work on that. I said that cabinet would look great right up there over that table. And Breck said, yeah, those corner cabinets, yeah that’d be great (Thompson laugh). And they said, how about some lights? And I said, yeah, you got any of those that you put under the cabinet. Yep, we got ‘em. Well, I’d like one here and I’d like…

Interviewer: Isn’t that something? That’s like being able to.

Thompson: You want to see it?

Interviewer: I wouldn’t mind it.

Thompson: OK, we’ll go up there. Unless you want to talk about something.

Interviewer: Well, I’ll tell you what though. I might need to make plans to do that on another day, but I’d like to see it. Would that be possible?

Thompson: Oh sure, only takes about five minutes if you want to see it.

Interviewer: Ok, I guess we could do that now. I want to thank you for the interview.

Thompson: Well, I’ve chattered and gone on, I don’t if that is what you want to know (both laugh)

Interviewer: It is, it’s going to be great.

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