The Log Cabin syrup can, Dad’s gift of a morning science lesson If memory serves me, I was about five or six years old, having breakfast in the kitchen at Gramma and Grampa Tompkins’ house in Portland, Oregon. But the old folks weren’t there, probably off at work or shopping on a Saturday morning. So […]
The Log Cabin Syrup Can Read More »
Timmy at two in Belmont, Mass. Origin of “The Thunder Song,” begun circa 1950 in Belmont, Massachusetts I am two years old, standing at the back door of our kitchen, formerly the laundry room of the big old farm house that we rented half of, watching the rain pour down and the lightening flash beyond the
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Three Memories of Mom from 1954-1956 [Letter from Tim to Charlotte on October 11, 2016, five days prior to her 96th birthday] Happy birthday!! Dear Mom, About sixty years ago you were a young mother and I was one of your two young sons, living at 10299 South West Eastridge Street, Portland, Oregon. Our home
Piano, Soap and Walnuts / circa 1954 Read More »
Timmy Tompkins at 2 with Suzy Abbott at 3 (his Eve?) holding apple. Photo by Charlotte Tompkins, 1950. Earliest Memories Watertown, Mass., near Harvard, 1948-1949 Electrical Introduction My first memory was seeded by my parents telling me in later years about running round and round the dining room table in our little apartment in
Suzanne and Tim performing, mid-1970’s (Written 2018July12, about a songwriting event in the dwindling months of 1973, on Seattle’s north side, as Providence slid quietly toward disbanding.) It’s an autumn evening and my girlfriend, Suzanne, is serving one of her big wonderful salads for supper. Baked sweet potatoes too. Perhaps we had already been tripping
Timmy, 706 S.E. 14th Street, Portland, Oregon, early 1950’s A vivid memory haunts me, in sight, sound, smell and mystery that no one has ever been able to corroborate because I was all by myself at the time. Was it a dream? Did my mind synthesize it from real bits and pieces? I was about three
Frances pins Tim while his son Gabe lowers a pulley from Erector Set crane.The following story takes place three decades earlier, no pictures survive. Portland, Oregon ~1952~ It is mid-morning, and I am with Mom in our small rented house up on Marquam Hill, 3417 Southwest 12th Avenue, only a few blocks from Doernbecher Hospital in
Lee Utting, Sunset High School, 1965 Leahy Road, Cedar Hills, Oregon, about 1960 Lee’s family lived about a quarter mile from our house, down beyond the school, on a dead-end gravel driveway. It was not fancy, but there was plenty of room on the acre or so for collecting junk and for kids to play.