Sounds of service

By Doris Wedge
For The Transcript

April 27, 2008 11:27 pm

— When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Jerry Thompson was a junior at Norman High School. Thompson felt a responsibility to do his part as the war effort rose to a fever pitch, but he was too young to enlist.
A year later, he was president of the senior class and business manager of the yearbook. A member of the state championship football team, he played saxophone in the Norman High and University of Oklahoma marching bands.
His grades were good, and he had the support of his parents when he took advantage of an option to leave high school in the last semester to enlist.
“Somebody had to step up and protect our freedom. I wanted to kill a Jap,” the 82-year-old says today. “I am not proud of feeling that way. I have changed.”
So when not quite 18 years old, and with his father’s signature on the enlistment papers, Thompson left for basic training at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Although he was awarded a high school diploma, he wasn’t present to receive it.
Thompson was a few weeks into basic training when an opportunity arose, one that opened doors to experiences for the teenager that he enjoys recalling today, experiences that help shape the young man and allowed him to hone musical skills that he has used throughout his life.
“It was announced that if you had ever played a musical instrument professionally, you were to report to a certain place in the morning.”
It sounded intriguing to a young man with years of experience with bands, and even playing a few “gigs” around Norman.
He reported to the designated spot the next morning and was handed a saxophone. “Play this,” he was told. He played the piece. Then they gave him another sheet of music. He performed well, and was told “you are done with boot camp. You are now in the Navy band.”
The next day he was en route to New York City and his duty in the war effort, as a musician. He was assigned to a band stationed at Hunter College in the Bronx, where the WAVES (Women Accepted in Voluntary Emergency Service) were in training. “We were doing our part in the war effort,” Thompson says.
“There were maybe 100 men there, and hundreds of women,” but band duty left little time for fraternizing with the women. The work day extended from “playing colors at 7 a.m. to evening performances.” In between were rehearsals, concerts during the lunch period, then more rehearsals and other performances.
“We had four or five new arrangements to learn every week,” he recalls, and after rehearsals, each player had to hand copy their own set of arrangements. Engagements for the band included parades, variety shows, recruiting activities, war bond rallies and radio shows. The band even played at cocktail parties. “I think I had that horn to my mouth 15 or 16 hours a day,” he recalls.
Some of his fondest memories are of the professional musicians that he worked with. “Musicians with the big bands were drafted into service,” and it led to some amusing incidents, he recalls. “Most of us had experience with marching bands in high school, and marching in basic training. But these guys were professional musicians, even musicians trained at Julliard. They hadn’t ever been in a marching band. They didn’t have to go through basic training. They didn’t know how to march.”
He laughs as he recalls “in parades, we marched and they shuffled. But boy could they play their instruments.”
Thompson says that he learned a lot from them and became a better musician, he says.
“I was playing the saxophone that my Daddy bought me when I was in the seventh grade,” he said. The sax served him well for several decades when he played with different bands in the Oklahoma City area, including Norman’s Talk of the Town, though he later switched to an alto sax. Of playing the same instrument for years, he says “it’s the guy that makes it sound good. It’s not the horn.” Songs like “Tuxedo Junction,” “Star Dust,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” and “In the Mood” were among the popular tunes that the Navy band played. The group even played as the background to a recording by movie star of the day Robert Taylor to be used on the radio the day the war ended.
“We were at sea, so I don’t know if they ever played the tape,” Thompson says.
It was while stationed at Hunter College that he met his beloved wife, Penny, a WAVE drill instructor. They wed in New York City, and when their first child was due, she came to Norman to live with his family while he began a rotation of sea duty.
At sea for several months on the USS John Pope, the 11-member band played for the troops as they were shuttled, 5,000 at a time, to the European and Pacific war theaters.
“Once, we picked up soldiers in France and carried them across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal and on to the Pacific theater.” The band’s schedule ship-board included playing during meal times. “They only served two meals a day, so the lunch serving started about 10 and lasted until about 2, then a couple of hours later, we started the evening mealtime concert.” In the evening they entertained at talent shows, with many of the troops eager to sing or tell jokes to lighten their spirits as they approached war duty.
The band members would share favorite arrangements of songs, and one fellow had an arrangement of “You’re Driving Me Crazy” that the band members particularly liked. “We asked him who arranged it and he said ‘oh, no one you never heard of.’” But Norman’s Jerry Thompson had heard of the arranger, Kenny Harris, who taught at OU and who Thompson had taken lessons from.
Since the USS John Pope was designed to haul troops, it was equipped only to protect itself. Band members were gun captains, manning 20mm anti-aircraft weapons.
“Nobody came at us, thank God. In practice we could never hit the target.” The closest he came to the war action was seeing the lights of the battle going on in the Philippine Islands. The USS John Pope carried the first U.S. military personnel to Japan, 5,000 MP’s who were the first occupational forces.
Thompson was in the mid-Pacific when word arrived that the war was over.
“We struck up the band and played for hours” while the troops on board whooped and danced “and threw their hats and some other parts of their uniforms overboard.”
He was discharged in December 1945 and hurried home to his family in Norman. Thompson joined his father and two brothers in the Thompson Moving and Storage and Thompson Paint and Glass. The family later entered the liquor business, and Thompson worked for 40 years as a liquor wholesaler.
He and Penny, who passed away on their 51st wedding anniversary, reared nine children. The family were the first residents of Hall Park.
The seven sons were athletes, and all attended college on athletic scholarships. All of the Thompson children “were exposed to music, but it didn’t take,” the father relates. Though some of the nine moved from Norman at one time or another, seven of his children are now Norman residents. They include Bob Thompson, Frank Thompson, Joe Thompson, Cindy Ferguson, Mary Ann Bass, Cotton Thompson and Toby Thompson. John Thompson lives in Columbus, Ohio and Tucker Thompson lives in McKinney, Texas.
An avid OU sports fan, Thompson uses a scooter to get him around while attending the football, basketball and baseball games. He also is a volunteer at Norman Regional Hospital and is a lifelong active member at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. He describes himself as a “yellow dog Democrat” who grew up in a time of racial discrimination in a town with a “sundown” law.
“We didn’t know any other way. That was just the way it was then.” Now, he is proud to say “times have changed and now I am supporting a black man for President of the United States.”

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