After nine years of contending with certain industrious athletes from Santa Barbara High, an Oxnard coach asked, “Is that Thompson kid ever going to graduate?”
It was a droll way of recognizing the impact that five Thompson brothers — Dave, Leroy, Bob, Charles, and Ed — made with the Dons on the basketball courts and baseball diamonds from 1964 to 1973.
A more serious question was posed on December 26, 1962, as 10 members of the Thompson family embarked from Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the back of a Greyhound bus, bound for Santa Barbara: “How are we going to make it?”