Bill Thompson 1946-2017

Bill Thompson in 1968, on the back porch of the
Galesburg Home for the Bewildered.  The pose
was a kind of joke--we were riffing off the rural
cover of Bob Dylan's then new album "John
Wesley Harding."  BK photo.

Not hearing from Bill for months wasn't unusual.  Although I was a little surprised he didn't email me or comment on the Sergeant Pepper post that mentioned him (I was with him when he bought the album and we listened to it straight through for the first time together the week it came out) I knew he was reading this blog, because he always did.

But it turns out he never read that Sergeant Peppers post.  About a week after his last email to me, and a few days before that post appeared, Bill Thompson died suddenly, as his obituary says, while fly fishing.  He was 71.

I knew Bill in college, especially in our senior year of 1967-68 when we shared a great old Victorian Gothic house on West First Street in Galesburg, Illinois, that Bill dubbed the Galesburg Home for the Bewildered.

When I learned of his death only recently, from the Knox College alumni magazine, memories both specific and vague spun through my mind.  Fried chicken and Riesling wine, Vietnam teach-ins in the Gizmo and silent vigils in the windy town square, ceremonies of the weed in the attic alcove we called the temple,  the party we had on the night of the 1968 California primary to celebrate whoever won (Bill backed Eugene McCarthy, I backed Robert Kennedy), which ended with the news of Kennedy's assassination.

In one of our recent e-mail exchanges, we tried to figure out whether I had been with him when he first crossed into Canada the summer of 1968.  I know that Mike Shain and I had at least driven a trailer of his stuff to his new home, though my only real recollections of that trip are of a stop at Stratford on the way back, to see a couple of plays.  But thinking about it since, it seems maybe we did drive him there.

In the subsequent half century, Bill established a life in Hamilton, Ontario.  I visited him there in the early 1970s, but lost touch with him later in that decade. We missed connections when I had a speaking engagement in a nearby Ontario town in the 1980s. Which is by way of saying that there's a lot of his life I missed and know little about.

a more recent photo he sent me,
wearing a cap a friend brought back
from Albania.

 Exactly how we reconnected in 2002 or so I'm not sure, but it had to do with my blogs.  I was one of the first bloggers, and now am one of the last, and Bill was a devoted reader and occasional participant for all of those years.

 When I created the blog that became American Dash, I invented the Dash family of brothers to represent different facets of writing (Gabriel the poet, Morgan the fictionist, Christopher the playwright, Phineas the philosopher and Theron the political pundit), partly so I could have arguments with myself.  Bill became a fan and a participant, so that I soon made him a cousin of the brothers, and called him Lemuel Dash,  after the hero of Gulliver's Travels, though I'm no longer sure why.  Bill was delighted and was still signing comments and emails as Lemuel (which he spelled Lemmuel.)  He was the official Canadian correspondent for this blog.

In what turned out to be his last email to me, on May 24, he wrote that he was mentoring young people.  "I believe I provide value by sharing my experiences, coaching, and acting as a 'living relic' to show that you can have a life in modestly radical politics and still have a moderately sane and healthy family."  These young people, he added, "provide me with a great gift: hope."

Bill was a local official in the New Democratic Party of Canada, and had been considered for nomination as a candidate to the federal legislature.  His activism in the NDP and otherwise led him to be an official witness to the dismantling of some nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union.

More recently, he helped build a community coalition of labor, environment and business people that built the first offshore wind power assembly facilities in North America, and spoke at the dedication.

He managed a training program for unemployed workers and their adult children living at home, and helped build a local coalition to push city government to use property tax to finance energy-saving refits of low income housing, hiring unemployed youth to do the work. The last project he mentioned was a cooperative credit union for the working poor.

He started on this road in college, where he organized Citizens for Independent Politics that ran several Vietnam teach-ins, where faculty and students exposed facts about the war and the region's history.  (At one of these in the campus coffee shop, I recall reading from Frank Harvey's Air War: Vietnam until I found myself choking back tears.)  Though at different times, Bill and I were editors of Dialogue, the campus discussion magazine edited jointly by faculty and students.  He wrote a satirical piece for that magazine about privacy invaded by technology, which has taken on new relevance.

In these decades our email exchanges tended to be about political matters, so we didn't discuss much about our personal lives.  In consolation over the 2016 elections, he wrote:" My wife Shelley is from Manitoba and is of Scottish background. Her advice would be 'lye thee down and bleed awhile then rise up and join the fray.' Your voice is needed."

But he told me enough that I knew that he had succeeded in family life.  In recent years he accompanied his daughter to her cancer treatments (and noted that his daughter and son-in-law received upwards of a million dollars worth of medical treatment, thanks to Canada's single payer heathcare system) and he gloried in his granddaughter.  I hope I made it clear to him how much I admired him for this.

Bill liked this blog's emphasis on the future, and integrated that perspective into his commitment to "think globally, act locally" and "all politics is local."  That he was actually doing things that I was only writing about seemed to be the necessary other half of the process, and I was grateful to know he was doing that.

50 years later, maybe the same hat?

Years ago, when I was in a particular career funk, he invited me up to Hamilton to do some fishing. I couldn't make it, but it was clearly something he loved. That's what he was doing on May 31 when he passed away.

Apart from the shock of learning this, especially so long afterwards and in an almost accidental way, it's hard for me to believe he's not out there reading these words.  He was always one of the people I thought about when I wrote for this blog, and I don't think that is really going to change for as long as I keep writing it.

I can pretty much name the day in 1990 when I realized that the quality in friends likely to be most important to me for the rest of my life--and most important for me to return in my relationships-- would be loyalty.  Bill Thompson was a consistently loyal friend for all these years.

I'm sure Bill's family, friends and colleagues were devastated, and I can only offer my belated condolences. May he rest in peace.  His work lives on, not only through his projects and accomplishments but through them-- his family, his friends and colleagues, and those young people he mentored, who gave him hope.