JOHN THOMPSON: THE RIGHT STUFF

by John Vance

Bandleader John Thompson blends his passion for music with his love of service work

“Suzi, we’ll need to move your microphone stand,” says John Thompson, director of the Kings of Swing band. “I’m hearing the drums coming through the PA speakers.” The fifteen-piece orchestra is warming up for its weekly performance in the main room at the Plano Senior Center. In a few minutes, the doors will open, and the room will fill with ballroom dancers along with folks who love the seldom heard sounds of a live band playing hits from yesteryear.

As the band cruises through a 1940s era swing tune, John stands on the opposite end of the room with his back to the musicians, eyes closed. “At a sound check,” he explains, “I can hear the music more clearly when I’m not looking at the band.” After a moment, he turns to face them and says, “A little louder on the bass and a little softer on the drums, and we’ll be ready to roll.”

Giving directions to his bandmates is a far cry from the type of orders John gave when he was leading a small group of F-100 fighter jets in the skies over Vietnam almost 60 years ago. As the team’s top gun, he communicated most of his directions to the other pilots by hand signals, dipping a wing, or blinking his taillight to signal a dive. Once the flight team accomplished the mission, John might break radio silence with something like, “Okay, let’s safe ‘em up and RTB,” coded pilot-ese for “Disarm your remaining ordnance and Return To Base.”

John Richard Thompson was born on Christmas Day, 1938 in Shreveport, Louisiana. His father, Fred, owned a chain of small restaurants, which he managed with the help of John's mom, Mellie. Music was always a part of everyday life in the Thompson household. “My sisters would sing harmonies while they did the dishes, and sometimes I’d back them up on ukulele.” A neighbor overheard them and suggested that they perform on a live Saturday morning radio show that featured child performers from all over Shreveport. “We sang ‘Mockingbird Hill’ on the air, and the studio audience voted us best in show,” John smiles. “We won a $25.00 war bond, and the producers asked us back a few times to perform.”

John started playing the saxophone at the age of twelve as a result of a hard-fought family compromise. “My mother wanted me to play piano, and I hated the piano.” John’s grandmother intervened and brokered a deal: John would play saxophone in exchange for not having to take piano lessons.

By the time he was fifteen, John was playing sax in various bands around town. “I put myself through college playing the saxophone.” He earned “pretty good money” by performing weekends with the Grand Ole Opry Travelling Band, and he rubbed shoulders backstage with some contemporary stars like Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, Little Jimmy Dickens, and guitar ace James Burton. John also made friends with a few future stars. When Elvis was in Shreveport to perform for the Louisiana Hayride before he became famous, he and his bandmates, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, would drive to the club where John’s band was playing and hang out with them. John recollects, “We were all just a bunch of kids trying to earn spending money doing something we loved, playing music.”

After graduating from Louisiana Tech with a degree in industrial engineering, John joined the Air Force. "In my family, everyone assumed that you served in the armed forces. I've got ancestors in the military in every generation, all the way back to the Battle of New Orleans.”

Training to fly jet fighters proved to be one of the most significant challenges to John's physical and mental stamina. “Everybody in flight school wanted to fly fighters, but to get to do that in the USAF, you had to jump a pretty high bar.” Out of the 50 cadets who entered flight school with John, 14 graduated, and only the top six pilots were chosen to fly single-seat, supersonic fighters. John flew an F-100, a fully armed beauty that could easily power through the sound barrier to a speed of Mach 1.5.

The graduating class of John’s flight school was the first in the country, possibly in the world, to train using supersonic jets, which were still new to aviation and extremely complex airplanes to fly. Chuck Yeager, the first human to break the sound barrier, presided over their graduation ceremony at Webb Air Force Base in Big Spring, Texas, and personally pinned the wings on the uniforms of John and his fellow graduates. Yeager subsequently chose John and a couple of his classmates to join his squadron of elite pilots, basing his choice on their exceptional high-resolution eyesight as documented in their medical records. Keen eyesight served as one of a jet pilot's greatest assets. John explains, "You have to be able to identify an enemy plane that’s twenty miles away, because at these speeds, he can be in your face or on your tail in a matter of seconds.”

By the time John finished advanced fighter training, the Air Force brass had promoted Yeager out of his squadron, so John didn’t have the opportunity to fly with one of his heroes. The Air Force brass assigned him to Miami around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then sent him to England where he served for four years during an extremely tense period of the Cold War. While stationed abroad, he spent most of his time in the skies over Europe on high alert for potential threats from Russia.

It was in Vietnam that he saw the most action, flying a total of 175 combat missions during the twelve months he served there. Many of the missions John flew required him to lay down ground fire to keep the enemy forces occupied, allowing helicopters to extract our ground troops from tight situations. “Sometimes it was a group of Marines that needed rescuing off a hilltop, or it might be a downed Aussie pilot alone in the jungle,” he remembers. “Whoever it was, we all did everything we could to get them out of there.”

John spent his downtime in Vietnam playing sax with a small group of musicians called the Phu Kat 6, named after the town where they were stationed. They often played Saturday nights, providing live background music while his fellow pilots and the ground crew relaxed with beers. His band opened for the 1968 Christmas Day USO show, featuring Bob Hope, Ann-Margret, and Les Brown and his famous “Band of Renown.” After hearing John’s band play “Thanks for the Memories,” Hope quipped to the crowd of several thousand soldiers, “Send Les Brown home. These guys are just as good, and they’re probably a lot cheaper.”

Following nine years of active duty in the Air Force, John headed stateside and certify as a commercial airline pilot, flying large passenger jets until retiring at age 60. When asked what he liked best about being an airline pilot, he said, “I liked that it was so much easier than flying for the military. When you’re airborne and you don’t have people shooting at you all the time, you have a whole lot less to worry about.”

The current iteration of Kings of Swing was born of humble origins in 1969 when John and several musically minded pilots formed a small jazz band that played for senior centers around Dallas and Fort Worth for tips and grins. The band evolved into a full fifteen-piece community orchestra. For over 40 years, the Kings of Swing have been playing tunes from the 1940s to the present for the sheer joy of making great, professional-grade music for the people who most appreciate it — our community seniors.

Leading a large band is a major commitment for the 86-year-old bandleader. The tasks are many and time-consuming, including arranging the sheet music, scheduling the musicians, developing a new song list for each performance, conducting the rehearsals, and personally hand-trucking the large boxes containing all the charts for all the songs to every performance. When asked why he does it, he smiles and shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says. “I must love it because I seem to keep doing it.”

The Kings of Swing perform every Thursday afternoon at the Plano and Richardson Senior Centers, free of charge for Center members. For dates and times, contact either Senior Center.