March 4, 2007 — In a wide-ranging conversation frequently interrupted by diverging flights of memory, it becomes clear that the life of Rudy Thompson cannot be distilled into an orderly, chronological account.
There are just too many stories.
What follows, then, are bits and pieces of the life and times of one of the island's legends, renowned for his stories, his joie de vivre and his decades representing the Virgin Islands in international sailing at the Olympics, the Pan Am Games and five world championships. His conversation happily turns from time to time to his months-long charter with Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck.
At 77, Thompson, is still, in part, the 20-year old who arrived here in the late 1940s from San Diego on the Jack Tar, a small Bahamian wooden sloop. He talks about getting shipwrecked off the coast of Puerto Rico for six months shortly after his arrival.
He pulls out an aged photo showing him climbing a coconut palm tree, holding a machete in his teeth. "Most people can't do that," he says. "In fact, I don't know anybody else who can."
At this juncture, however, Thompson hasn't let on that he was an accomplished acrobat.
He was climbing the palm to get some coconuts to share with his buddy, Bob Kingette. "We didn't have any money, or anything to eat," he says. "We were headed back to St. Thomas from San Juan, when we hit the edge of a hurricane that put us right up on an island. There wasn't a thing we could do. We were taking on the waves."
The conversation takes place with a view toward Hassell Island, an area where Thompson cut his teeth. The place is as familiar to him as the back of his hand. Dredging up some little-known history, Thompson talks about a hospital that used to be on the island.
"It was on the hill right up there, behind the marine railway," he says. "That's where the government put people who had a disease. I can't remember what it was — some sort of flu that was contagious."
For a while in the 1970s, Thompson ran the restaurant and hotel at Villa Olga in Frenchtown across from Hassell Island, where he relished telling stories of the ghosts who walk the grounds. "People really loved those stories; they love to believe them," he says. And he once tended bar at the old Bar Normandie, a crucial experience in growing up on St. Thomas in those days. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Thompson became friends with the future artist Eric Winter, also a boating guy, in his very early days on the island. They had more than boating in common — turns out they were both acrobats.
"We used to go to the schools and put on shows," Thompson says. "We'd walk on our hands — really had fun."
It was in the 1950s that Thompson began his chartering career, the highlight of which was the three-to-four-month sail with his most famous guest, Steinbeck. Thompson met the author of Travels with Charley and Of Mice and Men in a somewhat auspicious way, through Robert Oppenheimer, a key figure in the development of the atomic bomb.
"Oh, I knew him in the States, and he referred Steinbeck to me," Thompson says.
Thompson recalls his travels with Steinbeck as though they were last week. "He was such a great storyteller," Thompson says. "He made you feel just wonderful. You could feel his personality when he walked into a room. It's like you're imprisoned just sitting listening to him.
"He'd go ashore at the islands, and we always wanted to go with him. We'd hire one of the local kids to watch the boat for less than a dollar, but that was a lot in those days. He'd meet with the kings, presidents or whatever you call them. Everybody had heard of him by then, and he'd draw people out."
Meantime, Winter and Thomspon would contribute their two cents, entertaining the locals with acrobatics.
On board, Steinbeck was the perfect guest, Thompson says: "Gosh, we just wanted to be around him all the time. He was always courteous. The first thing each morning, he would go into the head, and he would stay for awhile in there. He liked looking out the little porthole. He said he could see better, get a better picture from the smaller view.
"He took notes about what he saw from the porthole. In fact, he would joke with me that he was going to write another book and call it The View from Rudy's Head."
And then there were his drinking habits. "He was very particular," Thompson says. "He would buy Cutty Sark scotch by the case, and he had me number each bottle. He drank a bottle a day, but if there was any left at night, after he went to sleep, I had strict instructions to pour it overboard."
However, Thompson says, " I never saw him act tipsy. He just had a huge capacity. He would often steer for hours at night, with just his bottle for company."
Thompson suffers from dyslexia, which threw him a little later when he would correspond with Steinbeck. But he needn't have worried.
"He wrote back to me with a whole bunch of funny things — words spelled a little wrong to make them ridiculous, or too long," Thompson says. "He was a true gentleman."
The correspondence might be worth a lot today. It was reported last week that a first edition of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's tale of depression poverty, sold for $47,800.
We take a jump to the beginnings of what is now the well-established St. Thomas Yacht Club.
"There was this area on the East end, sort of a big puddle," Thompson says. "We had lots of things to do to make it turn into a yacht club. We had a kind of bar set up. It was lots of fun. The water was ankle deep, knee deep over where the condos are now.
"I didn't get into it as much as I would have liked to. It wasn't possible for me to go along with the actual work, because I had other things that were making me good money. John Foster was the early person in charge."
The "other things" were Thompson's real-estate career, which took off in the 1960s. "Ron de Lugo had property in Fortuna," he says. "I started selling lots for him, and that started it off."
"It was busy as hell, with people buying and selling," Thompson says. "I was enjoying it all the time, and it allowed me to buy a couple of very fancy yachts."
Many years, many sailboats: Sea Saga, Tropic Bird, Wind Song, Cold Beer. Many international races won, a wife (now of more than 50 years), the English model and Antilles teacher Sheila, a son and grandson, both professional sailors like him. Thompson is a happy man.
He still has all the boyish tendencies he must have had when he first hit these shores. His conversation is liberally sprinkled with repetitions of "oh, gosh." He has a quick laugh, lively hazel eyes, a slender build and hair that's gray, but starts to look blond again the more he relives his youthful adventures.
His son, Chris, he says, literally grew up around sailboats. "Gosh, yes," Thompson says, "We took him to St. Croix sleeping in a drawer we pulled out."
Thompson and John Hamber won silver medals in the 1966 Caribbean and Central American Games, sailing the two-man centerboard Olympic Class Flying Dutchman. In 1970, Thompson organized the Caribbean's first Sunfish World Championships.
The sailing gene has been passed down. Chris's son, Cy, has begun to win championships of his own. At 18, in 2006 he won the International Sailing Federation Men's One Person Dinghy Central American and Caribbean Games in Cartegena, Columbia. That is one of many. (See "V.I. Scores Big at Youth Sailing Championships.")
And, after such a bountiful life — the sailing, the adventures, the friendships, the laughs, the ch
ampionships — what does he treasure most?
Big smile. "My wife, Sheila," Thompson says. "She's was the prettiest girl I ever saw."
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