This blogger recently caught up with Brewer “Buck” Thompson (born 1931), patriarch of the J.R. Thompson (1873-1927) side of the family, for a series of short interviews. In the family tradition, Buck, at 13, left for Exeter, where his father and grandfather also received their education. He later attended Stanford and spent two years in the Air Force, stationed in Texas. Buck began working full-time at the family’s Tacoma, Washington-based Mountain View Funeral Home, Memorial Park & and Crematory in 1956, training as an embalmer. He took over the business when his father retired.
Buck’s father, James Arthur Thompson, died in 1973, leaving the company shares to his four children. Buck had 50 percent of the stock, and over eight years, the company retired the three girls’ stock, making Buck the sole owner. Once the loans were paid off, he returned earnings to the business, building several new facilities during the 1950s and 1960s. These included the Garden Mausoleum along with a new well and maintenance shop and an expansion of the lower grounds. He added the Valley Chapel in 1962-1963. Mountain View Memorial Park has developed 120 of its 160 acres for cemetery use. More than 100,000 interments have been placed in the cemetery, which does about 1000 burials annually and helps about 1400 families with yearly funeral services.
Me: How did Mountain View Get Started?
Buck: My father was J. Arthur Thompson, son of James Richard Thompson. He was born in Butte in 1904 and came to Tacoma, Washington, with his family shortly after. He bought 12 acres on Steilacoom Lake, built a house for the family, Holly Hodge, that burned down in 1912, and then built another that still stands. He and his friends bought 83 acres of land in 1915 and started Mt. View Cemetery. The first burial was that year. J.R. Thompson died in 1927.
Me: When did the family get in the funeral business? I read that in the early 1900s, you had to be in one or the other and that some states made it illegal to combine the two.
Buck: In 1939, my father, J. Arthur, went to Los Angeles to visit Forrest Lawn Funeral Home and Cemetery. Enthused by what he learned, he borrowed all he could from the bank and took the cemetery into the funeral business. He built a funeral home and converted the 1933 crematory into the Garden Chapel. We became one of the first combined funeral home/memorial parks in the country. The funeral home opened in 1943.
Me: I read that the move was opposed by funeral home directors in Tacoma, who boycotted the cemetery and banded together to start their own burial site, the New Tacoma Cemetery in University Place. How did you get around this?
Buck: It was a hard task, with slow growth, until my father hired a sales manager in the cemetery. He hired salespeople who went door to door. They received a 1 percent bonus if they brought a family to see the funeral home. We bounced back in 1948 by offering pre-need funeral and burial services. At that time, we built the Garden Court Terrace for double-depth burial. That was key for future pre-need sales.
Me: I read that you buried many soldiers in the cemetery. The cemetery currently has four special veterans’ burial grounds.
Buck: During the war years from the 1940s to the 1970s, we had contracts to handle all active duty deaths from Japan, Korea, and Alaska. We would deliver caskets and shipping containers to the train and then attend to the burial services. Sometimes, we were the only ones present.
Me: Tell me about your fire at the Garden View Chapel in 1992. I read that an arsonist started a fire in an outside trash can and that the hydrant on Steilacoom Boulevard had no water pressure.
Buck: The chapel burned, but we rose to the challenge. We moved two of the three scheduled services for that day to other locations. We rented chairs, organs, and everything else. We immediately started to rebuild the Garden Chapel, using the original bricks and recreating the pews, alters, and other furnishings. We referenced plans for the original chapel when we built the new one.
Me: How big did the operation get under your leadership?
Buck: When I came to work in 1956, the volume was on its way to 1400 services per year. Mountain View became the largest provider of services in the Northwest. I retired in 1996, and my daughter, Cindy, replaced me in 2001. She built The Wildwood and Garden of Remembrance Mausoleums and completed The Celebration of Life Building. It includes a chapel and two large rooms for after-service receptions. Cindy sold Mountain View in 2017.
(Editor’s note: Mountain View Memorial Park, according to its website, currently consists of an on-site funeral home, three chapels, two reception areas, an on-site cremation chamber, and 120 developed acres of cemetery grounds, including 53 separate burial gardens.)
Me: As I understand it, your aunt Connie (1901-1975) took over the mining claims, and your father got the cemetery operation. Did you ever visit the mine in Montana?
Buck: Yes/ My grandfather, Fred Brewer (1870-1940), took me on the train before WWII to Butte and Bannock, Montana. As I recall, we went to the silver mine, put on miner’s lamps, and went to the face of the mine and saw the silver shining. My Dad and Stan Staatz (1894-1968) were all excited to build a stamping mill to process the mine. But then the vein petered out. They dug all over and never found the vein. That was the end of the mining business. As an afterthought, my Dad would buy stock in various mines and even had me fly him up into interior Canada to look at a river that had tailings from a mine. However, there was nothing of value there.
Me: Tell me more about the Staatz family.
Buck: When I was young, we spent a lot of holidays with the Staatz family. Stan was a daffodil bulb grower in the Puyallup Valley, and his son Wally developed the farm into a golf course and housing development. We also visited Jan (1931-2014) and Bob Mortenson (1930-2019) at their home on Puget Sound between Tacoma and Olympia. We had a boat and pulled up at their beach home.
Me: Tell me about your education.
My family (father, grandfather, great-grandfather) went to Phillips Exeter Academy. The latest magazine from the academy had a picture of the new gym with the name William Boyce Thompson carved on it.
Me: Did you have any contact with that side of the family?
Buck: In September 1945, my mother and I went to Yonkers, New York, and visited the Thompson estate where Gertrude was living. In the basement, as a result of Wm Boyce Thompson’s trip around the world, were the third largest Aztec gold collection, as well as jade from India and huge chunks of amethyst.
Me: Tell me about your trip to Phoenix.
Buck: At one time, I had an airplane, and on the way to Puerto Vallarta to visit my parents, I stopped in Phoenix and visited with Billy and [Ned], and Aunt Gertrude Lytton-Smith, as my father called her. As I recall, the boys were going to Los Angeles to get a sailboat and sail to the South Seas with their wives. End of story.