BOOTH WHO? - Washington State Digital Archives

ecord on the turntable. It was playing over and over again. Joan tells what happened next:
“There’s the sound of a telephone ringing in the middle of the tune – ‘Ring, Pennsylvania
6-5000!’ Brick would run to the bottom of the stairs and shout, ‘Booth, I told you, stop
that! Get off those phones! I’m going to come up there!’ ” That’s how soused he was.
Needling “was his method of communication. He never cut Booth any slack whatsoever,”
Joan says. “We were always up there in our bedrooms. Booth would be shooting baskets
behind the door, or practicing ping-pong in the basement so that anytime he lured in a
competitor he could beat the socks off of them. I mean, he was so competitive at such a
young age. Our parents would be fighting downstairs and we’d sort of meet at the top of
the stairs and see if we thought everything was going to be all right or not. We bonded
over those kinds of fears and looking out for one another.”
“The only whole person in the household,” Joan says, was the part-time handyman,
Isaac Thomas. A kindly young African American, Thomas was in the Army at Fort Lewis. His
wife Dorothy did the cooking and other domestic chores. Thomas doted on Booth and Joan.
He drove her to skating lessons “and would come in to applaud as I tried to learn various
tricky stunts.” Thomas quickly realized Booth desperately needed a nurturing grown-up. He
called him “Big Shot” – not because the boy was haughty, but because he lacked confidence.
He taught him to play the saxophone and offered to coach the ragtag neighborhood football
team. “Thomas came up and watched us one game,” Booth recalls. “We were all sitting
around after getting beat again and he came over and said, ‘Do you guys want help?’ And
every kid on the team looked at him. There was silence, and finally we said, ‘Yeah.’ So he
started coaching us and we did well. He treated us like human beings. We learned a lot from
Thomas. The thing was, I didn’t know blacks were supposedly bad. I didn’t know they were
mistreated. I didn’t know they were secondary citizens. I didn’t know any of that. It was
just Thomas and Dorothy. They were great. I kidded with them all the time. He was firm
with me because I was not the greatest kid in those days. He kind of settled me down. So
when I got to the Central Area to volunteer when I was in college I wasn’t afraid of being
around blacks, but I didn’t know the other side of the equation – how tough life was for
Coach Isaac Thomas standing far left, with his sandlot football team. Booth Gardner is at right, behind the quarterback
wearing a dark shirt. Steve Merrill is at center. Ted Griffin, Jim’s brother, is at far right. Photo by Lee Merrill.
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