Jean Marie Thompson
Homemaker, art lover, neighbourhood watcher. Born on May 8, 1926, in Hespeler, Ont.; died on Sept. 26, 2014, of complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, aged 88.
Jean Marie Mitchell was born in her family home, a rambling, drafty house in the town of Hespeler, Ont., where her father, Lorne, worked as a wood finisher for a furniture company. Money was scarce and her family knew hunger and cold during the Dirty Thirties. Young Jean and her four siblings helped their mother, Stella, to dig the family garden – a vital source of food in those hard times.
When she was in grade school, Jean contracted polio. She later recalled lying for long hours at home, but she recovered and learned to walk again. As a teenager she was active in community work, helping to organize a parallel town council for young people, known as Teen Town, to encourage youth involvement in civic action.
During her last year in high school she learned bookkeeping. At 18, in the midst of the Second World War, she was hired at a Kitchener factory to work on a line that prepared radios for shipment to Europe for military use. She was a quality control supervisor, an unusual position for a young woman, and took her responsibilities seriously. She lost that job on her 19th birthday – VE Day – when the war in Europe ended and the line closed, but rejoiced in knowing that her brother in the army would be coming home.
Jean longed for more education – she would have liked to become a journalist – but her father wouldn't support her. So she left home and spent the next eight years as a bookkeeper at an insurance company in Kitchener. There, in 1950, she went on a blind date and met the love of her life, Charles Thompson, who was studying for his B.A. degree. He proposed by dropping a diamond ring into her glass of wine. They married in 1953 and moved first to Deep River, Ont., and then to Ottawa, following his career in human resources with Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.
Jean loved the Group of Seven and insisted that her four children – Marie, Frances, Michael and Larry – pay regular visits to the National Gallery. At home we wore out her records of Carmen and Camelot. She joined in as we belted out songs from the opera, and swooned with her daughters over Camelot star Robert Goulet. She sat with us at the dining room table to make sure our homework got done. She doggedly pushed us to finish what we started and to aim for freedom through education. Jean's belief in the promise of youth, learned at Hespeler's Teen Town, never faded. Her door was always open to our friends; some of them strayed temporarily from their homes to ours, where she opened up the rollaway bed and her cookie jar.
By 1991 Charles had retired and they moved to Perth so that Jean could explore her family's roots in Eastern Ontario. They were active volunteers, driving cancer patients for treatments in Ottawa and Kingston, and serving meals to schoolchildren. Jean made many new friends; on her 75th birthday three of them stood on the street to serenade her.
By then, Jean's arthritis had worsened. So, too, did two new afflictions: COPD and untreatable macular degeneration. She quietly raged against the "dying of the light" but her smile could illuminate a room. It did so until the end.
Marie Thompson is Jean's daughter.