Demise of the Republican wing of the family

This is one of the few known pictures of my great-grandfather, Judge John L. Thompson. He didn't like having his picture taken. What he and Grandmother were doing sitting on this stoop, all dressed up, but not really looking at the camera, I'm not sure. They don't seem to know what to do with their eyes. Grandmother seems to be looking far away.

I think they were photographed outside their home in Harrisburg, Illinois. Nothing is written on the back of this picture.

The Thompsons had three children: Herbert, eventually a San Diego Oculist, Clyde (McGeehee), eventually the wife of a "successful" car dealer, and Sam, my grandad. Grandmother Thompson was especially close to Sam, from what my grandmother used to say.

That's Sam in the picture below. The dapper fellow on the right in the boater. He was charming and chatty and loved a good joke as much as a bad one. Graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Illinois with a Juris Doctorate. This is his Debate Team photo. Note the 1,000 mile stare. Note that he, too, does not look toward the camera.

He was too small to be inducted into World War I until it was almost over. He always wore clothes that were too large for him. He rarely admitted he was wrong.

At 23 he ran for State's Attorney in Hardin County Illinois and won. He was charming and effective, reportedly winning 130 of 150 cases, many of them homicides. He collected angry, threatening letters, bound in twine, in a World War I ammuntion box, with other mementos.


Something about all those threats eventually got to him. He imagined a great conspiracy, a "syndicate", which plotted against him. The folks in the syndicate apparently didn't get busy until he turned 40. His mother died. He married my grandmother, whisking her off in his Pierce Arrow roadster. She imagined she would be living the comfortable Republican life her twin sister Averil lived, honeymooning in Europe and watching Noel Coward on Broadway. The folks in the syndicate had other ideas. Grandad left her in Long Beach and came back to Southern Illinois to the cabin he built on the Ohio river. The syndicate pursued him. He slept on the bluff to avoid their noxious gasses. He put an ad in the Hardin County Independent challenging his opponents to "fisticuffs" on the town square. (Actually, there isn't a town square in Elizabethtown. I looked for it last time. But that's how the story came down to me.)


How grandmother made her way back to Elizabethtown to have Grandad committed I don't know. In the end his money was put into a trust for her and she was granted an "allowance." Her brother-in-law, my dad's Uncle Jack Verdier (her sister Averil's elegant husband), became her trustee. Grandmother submitted reports and petitions to the court for increases in her allowance and accounted for her pennies to these men. She settled in with the hill people of Hardin County, their nasal accents and hill speech replacing the echoes of Noel Coward elegant characters.

This stretch of river is where our eyes turned. This water moving by us collected our glances and gave us a place to stare when we didn't know where to look. On the bluff to the left of the rising sun, my father grew up, raised by his mother and grandmother, women whose worries and fears filled him. He swam and fished and explored what was then a long, shady river bottom.

When we visited, I became increasingly aware, the older I grew, of how complicated things were there. Subtexts existed that I began to appreciate. My father's palpable tension increased as we approached and didn't abate until we were long gone from here.

Yet we went down to the river and watched and he stared that thousand mile stare and I could feel in him a rare peacefulness.

When we were last there, it worked for me, too. Good old river.