Teaching the Pig to Dance: A Memoir (16 page)

I learned when the subject of Sarah and me had first come up at a family meeting that my name had met with less-than-enthusiastic support. In fact, the board of uncles subscribed to the “ducks to the pond” analysis totally. However, after everyone had had their say, Pap rendered his verdict: “If Sarah sees something in this boy, then there must be something there.” That was the end of that. I was going to be in the family and I would have a seat at the table. Before long I was listening to the discussions and even chiming in from time to time. And I was learning about politics, current events, and old courtroom war stories. Mainly, I was learning about myself. This was interesting stuff. I thought maybe I was not as dumb as the evidence would indicate.

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 Other times, I’d go over and sit on the porch with one of his old, outdated law books.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 the 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.