To my delight, I soon realized that Pap was taking me under his wing.
Pap lived next door to us, and often I would go over and we would continue our conversations as he smoked his pipe. Just the two of us. Other times, I’d go over and sit on the porch with one of his old, outdated law books. I could not for a second comprehend the concepts in those books, but I wanted to know the things that he knew about.
Given the men she had grown up with, there was not a day that went by that I didn’t feel the need to prove myself to Sarah; I knew that, whether she knew it or not, she would always be measuring me against them. This was now my focus.
The next April, Sarah gave birth to a beautiful little boy. Sarah wanted to name him after me. I wanted to call him Tony. So we did both. My name is not Frederick but “Freddie.” While a fine name for a little boy, Mom said later that it did not occur to her or Dad that it might not be too appealing to a grown man. However, I acceded to Sarah’s wishes that we name him Freddie Dalton Thompson II instead of Jr. I didn’t like “Junior,” and I didn’t know that the “II” was not normally used for one’s own children. Thus, I succeeded in adding my own unique naming scheme to the “Freddie” offense that had been visited upon me. Happily, Tony, now a lawyer in the Nashville area, has been able to overcome it successfully and keeps any grudges to himself. All of this does add to the argument that everyone should be allowed to grow up and name themselves.
I was getting an expedited course on growing up. But it was not as if I was a passenger on a train who had looked up and suddenly found himself in a foreign land. I was more like a passenger who had barely noticed the foggy scenery quickly move by but then looked up and saw that he was out of the fog and into the clear. I found myself in a good place where I felt I was meant to be. I had the girl I loved and the miracle of this little boy whom I adored. I also had the eyes of everyone on me. I had to try to make something out of myself. I just didn’t know what it was going to be.
Sarah and I had already decided that our next step was going to be college. The nearest and probably least expensive one was Florence State College in Florence, Alabama, forty miles south of Lawrenceburg. Fortunately, these were the days of not much in the way of entrance requirements. The next fall we both enrolled and, after commuting for a little while, moved into a government-run housing project built on the side of a bluff and inappropriately named Cherry Hills. It served as the residence for poor people and married college couples. We qualified on both counts. So we moved in, and I commuted back to Lawrenceburg on weekends to work at the furniture factory, after striking out in trying to find a part-time job in Florence.
So there I was, head of my own household—an independent man ready for anything. I went against habit and bought a six-pack of beer to celebrate my new worldliness. However, there is nothing like an unexpected demonstration of incompetence to help a young man adjust his attitude. My first one is known in Thompson folklore as “the Washateria Incident.”
It started out simply enough. Since we didn’t have a washing machine, Sarah assigned me the job of taking the dirty diapers to the Laundromat down the road—a place called the Washateria. It was the evening of my first major fatherly mission. I dutifully loaded the odorous bundle into the 1950 Chevy that my dad had given us and took them to the Washateria, mindful of the necessity of following the instructions that were given me. I walked in among several grizzled veterans of life’s wars (other non–washing machine owners), including several women waiting for their clothes to dry. Trying to act like I knew what I was doing, I matter-of-factly put the heavy load of diapers into the machine and generously sprinkled them with the detergent that Sarah had given me.
Leaving nothing to chance, I had already obtained an ample stash of quarters for the machine. I fed them in, pushed the button, and started to look for something to read. However, I immediately noticed that I was getting strange looks. Then I heard a rather loud rattling sound, like someone had fed small particles of gravel into an air vent. I couldn’t quite make it out. People were elbowing each other and nodding my way. Finally, it dawned on me. Completely unfamiliar with the machinery, I had put my entire load of dirty diapers into the big dryer, not the washing machine. Looking through the dryer window, I saw the dirty diapers tumbling in what looked like a snow blizzard of detergent, which was making the racket. Unfortunately, everyone else could see it as well.
I had a decision to make. Did I keep feeding quarters until everyone left the premises? Did I leave, go home, and try to convince Sarah that someone had stolen our dirty diapers? No, I decided to man up. When I opened the door of the dryer, the smell was almost enough to bring a man to his knees. People cleared a wide path around the area, some laughing, others just shaking their head. I quickly transferred the load to the real washing machine and hunkered down behind a newspaper. This father business was going to be tough.
My misspent youth proved to be a challenge for me academically in terms of going back and learning the basics, but my classes soon opened up a whole new world for me—ideas, history, and a host of other interesting things. After about twelve years of trying just about every other approach—including osmosis—I hit upon a new strategy: studying. I found that undertaking this innovative technique actually improved one’s comprehension. It resulted in pretty fair grades right off the bat. And I had the irritating example of Sarah, who continued to get good grades with seemingly minimal effort. We found a nice middle-aged lady to stay with Tony while we were in class. I started thinking about the future. I thought of becoming an accountant. But there was a ready antidote for that thought: I took a course in accounting.
It was increasingly obvious to me during that first year that, although I didn’t know how we would sustain ourselves for the six or seven years it would take, what I really wanted to be was a lawyer like Pap and A.D. I read Yankee from Olympus, about Oliver Wendell Holmes. I read Clarence Darrow’s autobiography and was inspired by the idea of defending the little guy, taking on the government, strutting my stuff in a crowded courtroom, and weaving a spellbinding argument that would make men cheer and women weep. And I could be my own boss, independent, beholden to no one except my clearly meritorious client. These were the same thoughts that I’m sure many young people have to this day after watching Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. But I was aware that neither life nor law practice was like the movies. From listening to the stories at the Lindsey gatherings at Pap’s house, I already had a real solid idea about what it was like to live the life of a small-town lawyer. So at the age of eighteen I decided to become a lawyer. From then on, I never had any other thought about what I wanted to do.
However, it was clear that, even with some help from our parents, a part-time job was not going to be enough from a financial standpoint. So we decided that I would drop out of college for a semester and we would move back in with Sarah’s parents in their new house and double up on the work.
The major employer for Lawrence County was the Murray Bicycle Manufacturing Plant, a company that had moved down from Murray, Ohio, and provided a major boost to our largely rural economy. It allowed men all over the county to “hurry for Murray” for an eight-hour shift and still work their farms. And the wages were the highest around. So after moving back, I got a job at Murray working the graveyard shift—11 p.m. until 7 a.m.—in Department 44 on an assembly line.
A fellow would send bicycle frames down a slide. I would grab one, place it on my machine, and drill out the sprocket area on the frame where the pedal mechanism went. Then I took it out of my machine and sent it down the next chute. My tooling machine was loud and wet, with a constant stream of water hitting the drill to keep it cool. If a heavy dose of that kind of work doesn’t make a scholar out of you, nothing will. Working that shift also totally scrambles your body clock, but it freed me up most of the day to work other part-time jobs. I delivered parcels for the post office and worked weekends at my uncle Mitch’s drag strip, keeping freeloaders from sneaking in across t
he field without paying.
Everything worked out, but a schedule like this is better as a plan than it is in its implementation. I was tired all the time and seemed to be eating breakfast three times a day. It was about 4 a.m. one morning on the assembly line, with the machines roaring and my feet wet, that it occurred to me there was a pretty large gap between my aspirations and what I was actually doing, and that when I got back to school I would embrace it with a new and unbridled enthusiasm.
And that is exactly what I did. My uncle Wayne was living in Memphis, so we decided to enroll in Memphis State University. It was a long way from home, but it seemed that that wasn’t all bad either. So the next fall we packed up Tony, a few sticks of furniture, and off we went to Memphis.
It is said that the Old South meets the New South in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel—that grand old landmark two blocks from the Mississippi River—and it has been the place where cotton tycoons and politicians of all stripes have congregated for 150 years to put together big deals and drink good whiskey. In Memphis politics, racial diversity and music share the same multifaceted history to produce one of the most interesting places on earth. Memphis is the commercial home of the delta blues, as well as W. C. Handy, B. B. King, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Across town another young man by the name of Isaac Hayes, one day younger than I was, was laying the groundwork for his own legendary status. Walking down Beale Street and then along the Mississippi River, these two Lawrenceburg kids felt the excitement not only of being on our own, but of taking in a rich, historical, and different place that was far bigger than anything else we had experienced.
But practical considerations had to be dealt with. We rented a little house on Mynders Avenue just a couple of blocks from campus, across the street from a fraternity house. There was a swing in the backyard for Tony, and we were a couple of blocks from both the Church of Christ and a public library. The only downside besides the fraternity noise was the $65 a month we were paying in rent. It was entirely too steep. But soon I had a sales job, after classes, at Lowery’s, a mom-and-pop children’s shoe store. Sarah had a 7 a.m. class. She would walk to class, and I would dress Tony and we would get in the car and drive to the campus. I’d meet Sarah, get out of the car to go to my 8 a.m. class, and she would get in and drive home with Tony. At Lowery’s, amid the squawking kids and the flustered mothers, I was learning to deal with people instead of heavy machinery or stacks of lumber. Sarah put together whatever she had for my lunch bag each day, and I got to experience different combinations I had never thought about, such as peanut butter and jelly on rye.
Money was going to get tighter, but for a happy reason: the birth of our little girl, Ruth Elizabeth, or “Betsy” as we called her. She was a sweet little thing with reddish auburn hair that soon developed into ringlets. We had to find some new housing that would meet the needs of our shrinking pocketbooks.
What I was finding, as I settled into a stable, responsible life of husband and father, was that my hard work and focus, along with Sarah’s, could create opportunities, and sometimes good things just happened. For example, just when we needed more-affordable housing, a vacancy opened up in “Vet’s Village,” the married-student housing on campus. Built decades earlier with little more than plywood for returning vets, they were one- and two-bedroom apartments with three apartments to a building. The joke was that you could sneeze in the apartment at one end of the building and be heard on the other. But they were $35 a month, including utilities, and it was on campus. That allowed us to develop the routine that we followed for the rest of our time in Memphis: Sarah and I would schedule our classes so that we could alternate. She would go to class and I would stay at home with the kids, and then I would go to class while she was at home. Then, in the late afternoon, I would go to work until 9 o’clock, at which time I would return and we would have dinner.
For the first time since she had been married, my mom took a part-time job out of the house. She became a bookkeeper at an appliance store to help us out.
My daddy may have been a “car man,” but I was showing an affinity for shoes. Soon, I had moved from the kiddie set at Lowery’s to Chamberlin’s and Lowenstein’s East, where I sold ladies’ shoes. Eventually, I moved to Bond’s Men’s Store. However, before I started selling men’s suits I had to buy one, since I didn’t have one at the time. I had one gray sports coat, which actually belonged to my dad. It was a little short, but I didn’t have much call to wear it. So my first sale at Bond’s was to myself. It was the easiest sale I’d ever made.
A LOT OF CHANGES were taking place, many of them within me. School was taking me to places that I had never been before. I felt like I’d been thrown in the lake and was discovering I knew how to swim. In fact, I loved the water. The professors, the subjects, the library books I checked out for extra reading, all presented me with a vast array of new ideas and questions that sparked my imagination and made me hungry for more. In other words, college was doing for me exactly what it was supposed to do. Never far from my mind was what was enabling this transformation: If I had been a single guy living in that frat house on Mynders Street, the only serious ideas I would have had could have fit in a thimble with room left over. And they would have had nothing to do with Socrates or Plato unless they sold beer or wore skirts.
I was drawn to the subjects of philosophy and political science, even serving as president of the Philosophy Club. I suppose imprecise subjects where all ideas are on the table were natural choices for a guy who had still not quite mastered the multiplication tables. How do we know what we know? Is it through our experience or our senses, which can deceive us, or do humans inherently know certain things? Are ethics and morality objective or subjective? I was especially interested in the interrelation of the two subjects and how powerful ideas precede political movements—how the supposed nonpolitical conclusions of philosophers like some of the Greeks, Locke, Hegel, and Bentham form the basis of political movements for years, even centuries thereafter. Philosophy had to do with the purpose and nature of man. It seemed to me that once you resolved those questions in your mind, then your politics are pretty well defined for you.
I read all I could get my hands on about the French Revolution. The French Revolution served as the opening salvo—starting with Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—in a war of ideas about the nature of man that has been fought ever since. Rousseau viewed man as essentially innocent, corrupted by society, and if unfettered, he would live happily ever after. He supported the Revolution, in spite of all its excesses, as a good thing that would serve as a beneficial example for mankind. Burke believed that man tended to err and would engage in excesses if unrestrained by tradition, authority, and God. He predicted that the Revolution would lead to more bloodshed and misery than good. To me, Burke won the first philosophical battle between liberalism and conservatism. However, my own political views were developing rather slowly.
I didn’t quite yet see how all of this translated into the politics of the day. Back home when someone would ask me what my major was in college and I would say philosophy, I could invariably tell they were thinking: “What in the heck is he going to do with that?” So I would add with a straight face, “I am planning on coming back to Lawrenceburg and opening up a little philosophy shop on the square.” Some would laugh, and some said they thought that it would be a good idea.
For me—with all that I learned from my parents around the dinner table and my long talks with the Lindsey men—the basic political issue was “What is the proper role of government?” I was affected by countervailing factors. There was the Scotch-Irish Southern part of me that didn’t want anybody telling me what to do—especially the government (although I didn’t mind taking government school loans). I saw myself as independent (even if I wasn’t). Mainly, I saw myself not as I was—on the bottom rung of the economic ladder—but as the man I planned to be. There was simply not one of my acquaintances who had worked hard and behaved himself who wasn’t doing prett
y well.
Dad was a good example of that. As I was growing up, my folks had very little tolerance for people who were “lazy and no-’count” (with the possible exception of myself). The first question upon hearing of a good girl’s impending marriage was “Is he a hard worker?” If so, then morals and character were pretty well assumed. And identifying with “the little man” was part of my heritage. Ma and Pa Thompson had a little bust of Franklin Roosevelt on the “whatnot shelf” in their living room. Memories of the Great Depression never completely left them—and never left my mom and dad, for that matter.
In my various jobs I had never been particularly respectful of authority. Even at my in-laws’ factory I had a run-in with the foreman who didn’t like the way I was stacking lumber and made what I thought were some unnecessary comments about it. If you were a “working man” you understood your position, but nobody that I knew would put up with disparaging comments even from his boss. None of this had translated into any particular sympathy for a political party. Oscar had actually taken me with him to an organizing meeting of the Lawrence County Democratic Party a year or so earlier.
On November 22, 1963, I was walking home from class when I heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Like everyone else I was shocked and dismayed. Not knowing anything else to do, I went to the office of the head of the Political Science Department, Dr. Edwin Buell, whom I respected and who taught two of my classes. Others were also gathered there. We all had the need to share this terrible experience and talk about it. There was an immediate and substantial sentiment that right-wing rhetoric had instigated this tragedy. Dr. Buell pointed out that even if that was true, the conservative leader, Barry Goldwater, could not be blamed for such talk.
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