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Photo: Abby Fox Mark Thompson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at Time Magazine, came back to East Greenwich recently to receive an honor from the East Greenwich High School as an indictee into the school's Wall of Honor. Thompson is pictured here at his former place of employment, The Pendulum.
BY ABBY FOX
Today, Mark Thompson is a deputy bureau chief at “Time,” as the magazine’s defense correspondent. Thirty years ago, he was finishing up his stint at a very different weekly publication, the “East Greenwich Pendulum,” then called the “Rhode Island Pendulum.”
Knowing those two career book-ends, one could guess Thompson takes himself very seriously or doesn’t concern himself with his life previous to Washington, DC. Both assumptions are untrue, as his recent visit week to East Greenwich proved, to accept his placement in the high school’s Wall of Honor.
“It’s a lot of fun, that’s the important thing,” he said of journalism, which is an unusually cheerful statement to make, in the light of newspapers’ decline. “I have a happy-go-lucky approach to what I do, which makes life a lot easier,” he said. “If you want job security and to get rich, you don’t become a journalist.” Thompson would know: after graduating from Boston University, he started his career at the Pendulum, making about $100 a week and living in a rent-free apartment next door. Ten years later, in 1985, he earned probably the ultimate job security in the newspaper business, by winning the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles about a design flaw in helicopters that had lead to the deaths of a few hundred servicemen.
Beyond his disarmingly light-hearted mien, Thompson also, for years, served as a good authority on plenty of serious subject matter. A couple weeks ago, for instance, he had a big story in ‘Time’: “Why are Army Recruiters Killing Themselves?” He’s dealt with major figures, from President Ronald Regan to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and written in-depth about some big issues, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But back to home.
East Greenwich people here from 1975 to 1978 know Thompson, a 1971 EGHS graduate, best as the man whose reporting led to the police chief and the school superintendent losing their jobs. “What I like are clashes of people,” he said, which he learned you can meet as easily in small towns as the nation’s capital.
“It was a lot of fun” at the paper, he said, even with the measly salary, which his wife, Diane, who came with him to the Wall of Honor, remembered as $98 a week. “Psychological income,” he called it.
Thompson knew how to get a lot of bang out of those bucks. Not only did he investigate three men’s charges of brutality at the hands of local police – “it was a tough story to report,” he said – while only in his young 20s, but he also scored a meeting in May 1977 with then-President Jimmy Carter, in the cabinet room of the White House, as part of a pack of other small-town journalists Carter had invited.
“Despite the presence of these media mega-powers, Thompson didn’t feel alone,” Thompson wrote, third-person, in the May 25 edition of the “Pendulum,” proudly chronicling his trip. “Your editor was the youngest of the reporters at the White House on Friday, and managed to garner stares – from the president on down – due to the handsome Tercentary tie he sported.” (East Greenwich was celebrating its 300-year-old birthday.)
Judging by those lines, you can call Thompson cocky or goofy; either way, early on, he showed an independent voice and a feel for how to enjoy a job, especially the telling of it. “The day was fast-paced and non-stop,” he wrote, “which didn’t fit in too well with the muggy weather which was gripping the national’s capital last week like a day-old dishrag.”
Thompson has held that unromantic view of Washington, DC, but he’s clearly felt comfortable working among powerful people from the beginning. It wouldn’t be long before he’d return there for good. By a stroke of luck and excellent timing, Thompson landed a job reporting about Washington, DC for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in Texas, after writing for a daily newspaper in Pontiac, Mich., which was his first daily news job post- “Pendulum.” He would be working in Washington from then on, and after work, raising two sons with his wife Diane, whom he had met years before in Rocky Point Park, shortly after graduating high school. They’re an interesting couple: a combination of seasoned journalist and kindergarten teacher, still married and living in Kensington, Md.
You might expect that with a résumé as long as Thompson’s, there’d be a long interview detailing career triumphs and critical comments about the crippled newspaper industry; the Pendulum, for example, enjoys about 1,500 fewer subscribers than during the Thompson’s era. But because Thompson obviously has learned to out-interview any interviewer, he managed to keep it short, and work in a few words about the purpose of small-town news.
No matter how thrilling Thompson’s day in the White House must have been, readers most all, he was eager to say, “care about their community, and they’d be more upset if you got the school hot lunch menu wrong. Most people will never get their names in the ‘Journal’ or the ‘New York Times,’ but their names will be in papers like the ‘Pendulum’ and it’s important we tell as many good stories as bad ones, so that when people look back and them ten, 20 years from now, they can smile.”
Long-standing civic participant Carl Hoyer is still smiling about Thompson. Hoyer was on the school committee when he knew him and was around when Superintendent Bob McCarthy tried to fire Lou Lepry, Cole Junior High’s principal. McCarthy “could be arrogant at times,” Hoyer said in understatement, and was “ridden out of town on a rail” after the Lepry-McCarthy hearings turned the community against him.
“Mark was a snoop,” he said. “He was the original investigative reporter. He’d come in and would drive people crazy because he’d stand at your desk, and as you were talking he would leaf through the material on the desk. People used to tell him, ‘Stop it,’ and he’d stop for about ten seconds, and do it again, and he’d find all sorts of stuff, which he’d subsequently print.”
Bill Foster, publisher of the Pendulum for 20 years, who hired Thompson, called from Bradenton, Fla. to share some memories.
“He’s a lot more than he looks,” he said affectionately. “We used to call him ‘the ferret.’ He had a way of finding things out I never dreamed was going on. He would say, ‘Just because we aren’t printing it, Mr. Foster, doesn’t mean it’s not going on.’ He found out what we weren’t printing and printed it. We had to hire a lawyer just to read his copy.” The Pendulum feared getting sued because of Thompson, but never did.
“He was good,” he said. “He drove a police chief and a superintendent out of town and he had sources like you couldn’t believe. He grew up in East Greenwich so he had access to all sorts of resources. He used to boast that if he didn’t have five new stories in the paper every week the ‘Providence Journal’ didn’t have, he considered himself a failure. That was the standard.”
Foster said Thompson thrived by being well-known – he knew the police, and the teachers, for instance –for having a curious mind and work ethic, and a knack for getting people to talk. “He’d visit each town councilor in his office, he would ferret out of each one what they knew, and by the time he was done, he knew more than all five of them put together,” Foster said. “He wouldn’t mind working 60, 70 hours a week,” Foster said. “He was on duty all the time. You don’t expect that of every employee. He went up fast.”
Thompson “was short, maybe five foot six, heavy, wore glasses – he was not an imposing figure,” he said. “But by the time he finished doing a story with you, he sure was.”
Besides the more famous stories involving the police chief and the superintendent, Foster remembered Thompson for reporting on the bug the police chief had hidden in the town manager’s office, uncovered during the town hall reconstruction; the “Pothole Pete series,” that documented the town’s potholes; and the April Fools’ edition. “Boy, did that raise hell with some of my fellow Rotarians,” he said.
“To do what he did, you have to have a burning desire to be a reporter,” Foster said. “He made a lot of friends in town and a lot of enemies, too.”
Local news “isn’t not like a big-city paper,” Thompson said. “People don’t go away in small towns. You keep running into them over and over again. You have to have a mutual respect thing going, or else you won’t last.”
Alan Clarke, who worked with Thompson as a typesetter, among other things, for the newspaper when it was on London Street, is an example of someone Thompson still carries that mutual respect philosophy with. Clarke said he most remembered Thompson’s tenacity. “If there was a story, he went for it and he didn’t let go,” he said. “That’s probably why he went as far as he did. It was inborn; he obviously found his calling right away.”
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