Thompsons Together--Coeur d'Alene ID Aug 2009

Here are the Thompson brothers and their wives sitting on their roots at Corbin Park on the Spokane river on the Idaho Washington border. (Spencer, Donna, Chris, Pamela, Roger, Caroly)

Little brother Tom Buckley couldn't make it so we had to get this picture of him at work in Pullman.


Here we are in our finest after church in Coeur d'Alene.


Of course we had our get together at our lake cabin near Bennett Bay on Coeur d'Alene Lake, where the first versions of our Florida Thompson Grandma Camp were held further up the hill at Aunt Lois's for all the Thompson cousins every summer in the 1950's. Whenever the Thompson boys get together we repeat many of the fun activities we had then...


such as swimming in the lake...


eating Paul Bunyon burgers and drinking huckleberry shakes...


and playing pinochle and other card games while we wait the hour and a half between eating and swimming.


Here we are down at the Spokane river not far from where Grandpa Thompson's apple orchard and farm was. The farm is gone so we can't play in the irrigation ditches and the river is too busy now for fishing and skinny dipping.


The old stone school that my dad went to and grandma Thompson taught at is now gone but the nearby stone church is still there. In my dad's time this was a "holy roller" church. The Thompsons went to another church in nearby Post Falls. According to Thompson folklore one Halloween as a teenage prank, my dad and his buddies locked a cow in the church. In those days, teenage boys were expected to do crazy pranks at Halloween. Come Sunday they say the church stunk pretty bad. They were never caught.


We went into Spokane to see the falls. Great Grandfather Dexter Thompson was one of the early bankers and real estate developers who planned the first dams, irrigation projects, apple orchards, and housing developments in Spokane in the 1880's when the city was just getting started. He was also a state legislator.


This is the congregational church he helped found and build in the 1890's. All of my dad Robert's sisters were married here.


We went huckleberry picking in the mountains near the cabin, but all we found were deer. They must have beat us to them.


We also made a trip up to Bayview on Pend Oreille Lake to see where we used to go with grandpa to his houseboat so we could cruise around, swim, and fish with his cabin cruiser, the Ranger.



On the way we think we spotted mounted on a rooftop at a junkyard the 1956 Dodge station wagon with pink trim that we had so many boyhood adventures in. It has to be our car--we'd be the only ones to have a station wagon with custom painted pink trim, mom's favorite color. Even our house was painted pink!! (Correction--"Canyon Mist") This is the car I learned to drive at age 14. It had push button automatic drive--mom was a pushover for the latest gadget. At that time, 14 was the driving age in Idaho not the age 16 of Washington so I could be a wild and crazy teenage driver only in the summers in Idaho. (I wasn't really that wild and crazy no matter what my younger brothers might say)


On the way back to Florida we went by Pullman to see how the house looks today. Notice a more masculine pale blue has replaced the pink. That was Spencer's doing after Mom died.