Interview with James Thompson # IST-A-L-2013-054 Interview # 1: July 17, 2013 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge. DePue: Today is Wednesday, July 17, 2013. My name is Mark DePue; I’m the director of oral history with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Today, I’m in downtown Chicago, Illinois, and I’m sitting across the table from Gov. Jim Thompson. Good afternoon, Governor! Thompson: Good afternoon, Mark. DePue: We’ve been talking about doing this for a long time, (Thompson laughs) so it’s about time we get started. I always like to get a little bit of background, and in your case I’m hoping to get a lot of background, and have you talk about growing up, your memories about the family, and things like that. Thompson: Sure. DePue: Let’s start with the basics and ask when and where you were born. Thompson: Born in the city of Chicago, on the West Side in the old 28th Ward, at Franklin Boulevard Hospital on Franklin Boulevard in Chicago, on May 8, 1936. James Thompson Interview # IST-A-L-2013-054 DePue: The biography that Robert Hartley wrote in 1979 said that you were born in Lutheran Deaconess Hospital.1 Thompson: No, I think that’s wrong. DePue: So the very first fact that he lays out in his biography on you is wrong! Thompson: (laughs) Like most of his book. DePue: Well, I’ll keep that in mind as we go forward on this, then. Tell me a little bit about your parents. What was your father’s name? Thompson: My father was James Robert Thompson, so I’m a junior. His mother always called him Bob, the diminutive of his middle name, from the time he was born. And his friends and colleagues later in life called him Tommy, the diminutive of his last name. So he was never a James or a Jim. But I was always a Jim. DePue: How come he wasn’t Jim himself? Thompson: I don’t know. His mother was, I guess, funny like that. She liked nicknames. One of my aunts, whose name was Mary Genevieve, was always called Jay. In fact, when I tried to find her one time in a hospital, I couldn’t find her for twenty minutes because she was in there under her original name and I had never heard it. (laughs) They were a farm family out in DeKalb County, and his mother, my grandmother, called her kids by variations of their names. DePue: Do you know how the family ended up in farming in DeKalb County? Thompson: Well, my grandfather was a Thompson and my grandmother was a McAlister(??), and their parents were immigrants from Ireland and Scotland. As the families came over, maybe a couple of generations back, they landed on the East Coast, then moved to Ohio, and then eventually ended up in Illinois like a number of immigrant families did, whether they were Irish or Scottish or English or Swedish. The same thing happened to my mother’s side of the family. They were Swedish immigrants and eventually wound up in Illinois after moving through the country from the East. DePue: What was your mother’s maiden name? Thompson: She was Agnes Josephine Swanson, and she was born and raised in the city of DeKalb. My father was born and raised in the southern part of DeKalb County, and he lived in various places in the south county until he met my mother one day at the library in the city of DeKalb. They eventually got married, and they moved into the city of Chicago so that my dad could study 1 Robert E. Hartley, Big Jim Thompson of Illinois (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1979). This is the book DePue refers to throughout this session. 2 James Thompson Interview # IST-A-L-2013-054 to be a doctor. They were the only ones of my relatives with the courage to leave the countryside (laughs) and move into the city of Chicago. DePue: Apparently, your father wasn’t enamored by the farming lifestyle? Thompson: He enjoyed it. I mean, he went to a one-room schoolhouse, and he detasseled corn, and he did all the things that a youngster would do out there. But he wanted to be a doctor, so he decided that he’d have to finish his education in the city of Chicago. He spent one year at the University of Illinois, in the School of Agriculture, and then decided to move to Chicago. He took a job as a morgue attendant, and later met a doctor whose family owned a coal company. And that doctor loaned him the money to get through medical school, which he did. DePue: Did he like the work of being a morgue attendant, or was it just a means to an end? Thompson: I think it was a means to an end while he went to school at night. I’m not sure what school he went to at night. Lewis University, does that sound right? DePue: Lewis Institute.2 Thompson: Lewis Institute. DePue: And the years, I think, are important here, to get that frame of reference. From what I read—again, a lot of this is going to be from the biography today, so — you have to forgive me for that—he was at the University of Illinois in 1929. Thompson: Okay. DePue: There’s a lot going on late in 1929, and apparently he’s trying to do this medical school thing, or maybe just get his undergraduate degree in the midst of the Depression? Thompson: Right. DePue: He was a morgue attendant during those years? Thompson: Yes. DePue: When did he get married? Thompson: I don’t know; ’33, I guess. DePue: Was he in high school? How old was he when he first met your mother? 2 Lewis Institute was located at the southeast corner of Madison Street and Damen Avenue until 1940, when it merged with the Armour Institute of Technology to form the Illinois Institute of Technology. 3 James Thompson Interview # IST-A-L-2013-054 Thompson: You know, I’m not sure. I would think maybe after his first year at the university. But I haven’t thought about that in a long time, so I’m not sure. But they got married, I thought, three years before I was born, so sometime before that. DePue: The biography says 1934. Thompson: Whatever the biography says. DePue: You just said, though, that you can’t count on what’s in the biography. Thompson: That’s later. (laughter) DePue: I have other sources to get to by that time, and not have to rely so much on that. Thompson: All right. DePue: Was it always his intention, while he was trying to get his college degree, that he was going to be a doctor? Thompson: I think so. And where that came from, I don’t know, because there weren’t any other doctors in our family. DePue: When you were growing up, did your grandparents still live on the farm? Thompson: Yes. DePue: Did you have a chance to go out and spend some time with the grandfolks? Thompson: I did, a lot. We lived on the West Side of the city of Chicago in Garfield Park, and I spent a fair amount of time during the summer out on my grandfather’s farm. He didn’t own it, he was a tenant farmer. He worked in a barb wire factory in the city of DeKalb for U.S. Steel, and my grandmother raised chickens and sold eggs and milk. They rented this farmhouse from a family named Doulder(??), who owned a fair amount of property in the Hinckley area, Hinckley, Illinois. His farm was just outside the city of Hinckley. So while I was growing up, my dad would take us out there for a couple of weeks in the summer while he went back to the city. And I stayed with my grandparents. It was sort of an idyllic time, having that opportunity to be on the farm in the summertime. And then, of course, we’d go out there for family occasions; Christmas, Thanksgiving were always spent out at the farm while my grandparents were alive.3 3 The home of inventor Joseph Glidden and investor Isaac Ellwood, DeKalb was a center of American barbed wire production. In 1898, Ellwood sold his interests to the American Steel & Wire Company, which became a subsidiary of U.S. Steel in 1901. The company moved production to Waukegan and Joliet in 1938. Cindy Ladage, “Isaac Ellwood, Illinois King of Barbed Wire,” Illinois Times, May 27, 2010.