Q.D. Thompson is an unlikely athlete. In team pictures, he sticks out as the shortest of the bunch. At a relatively scrawny 5’6” and 110 pounds, his size did not stop him from making All-State and All-Southern teams in soccer and basketball, or from being a contender in track and field and baseball.
That was in 1942. Today, his name is on the athletic wall of fame in Towson Center. Thompson, now 88, is many years removed from that athlete. He’s shrunk a few inches. He uses a walker to get around. One thing hasn’t changed, however: He never stopped playing for the Tigers.
Quinton Donald Thompson was born in Blue Ridge Mountains near Roanoke, Virginia, in 1921. He grew up as one of 14 children on a 154-acre farm, helping out there until the Depression hit.
“Everything was wiped out. I mean everything,” he said.
They moved to Sparks, Md., to become tenant farmers on a large dairy farm. Every day, Thompson would wake up at 3:30 a.m. to milk 16 cows before going to school. In the late 1930’s, he started at what was then called Maryland State Teachers College at Towson.
In high school, he wanted to play sports, but was often turned down by coaches who said he was just too small. He became jaded with athletics, but when he got to Towson, where other coaches saw Thompson’s size, one saw speed. The coach’s name was Donald “Doc” Minnegan. He approached Thompson during his sophomore year.
“He said, ‘Thompson, I want you to come out for the teams.’ I said, ‘Doc, I can’t. I gotta go home and milk the cows.’ He said, ‘I want you to come out for the teams.’ Lord have mercy, I didn’t have transportation. My stepmother agreed to milk my cows for me. So I went out for the teams,” Thompson said.
Minnegan, who died in 2002 at the age of 99, served as athletic director from 1927 to 1941. To many Towson students, he’s better known as “Doc,” the namesake of, among other things, the football field and the beloved mascot. To Thompson, however, he was simply “Coach.”
“I made the soccer team, I made the basketball team, I made the baseball team,” he said. “And that crazy man, he never took nothing for excuses. He kept me after practice for hours on end. Corner kicks, penalty kicks, dribbling. The same thing with basketball. I was the best two-handed shooter you ever saw.”
He stuck out in team pictures – other players towered over him – but that wouldn’t stop him.
By his junior year, he had moved down to Towson full-time. He paid for his tuition and books with a 22.5 cents-an-hour job at the Texaco gas station on the corner of York Road and Burke Avenue, where Starbucks is today.
He went on to continued success in sports as the captain of the basketball and soccer teams and the second baseman on the baseball team. To today’s student athletes, it may seem odd that one student could be involved in so many sports, but Minnegan was doing the most with what he had. Thompson still has the picture of his graduating class. He was one of just eight men in a class of 109 graduates. There were no male or co-ed dorms at the time. The men lived and dressed in the power plant. They trained in the basement of Richmond Hall. They played their games on the field where Prettyman and Scarborough halls sit today.
Minnegan had wanted Thompson to go on to Springfield College, his own alma mater, for a degree in physical education.
“Well, Pearl Harbor [happened],” he said. “I graduated in 1942; I knew where I was headed.”
Thompson enlisted, thinking that if he didn’t, he would probably get drafted. He signed up for training to be an officer in any agency he could find: Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force.
He was turned away.
“And they just laughed at me because I only weighed, at that time, I guess about 115,” he said.
But not much later, he got the call. By August 1942, he was shipped out for training. He was stationed in the Great Lakes, in Jacksonville, Fla., and on a patrol squadron in Norfolk, Va. He spent time as a radio gunner in a PB2Y gunner aircraft. After a while, he gained weight and reapplied. His persistence paid off.
“I got up, I stepped on the scales. ‘Oh lord, lord...’ 124 and I had to weigh 132. I had eaten bananas, I’d drunk water, I peed. But anyway, I knew I was probably going to have to pack up and leave,” he said.
But as he finished and went through a final evaluation, a vice admiral took a look at Thompson, noted his size, but decided to give him a shot as a communications officer anyway. He was shipped to Seattle and spent two years on the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier as a communications officer. He said he sometimes considered how lucky he was to avoid a hot combat zone.
“I can only think about what I was, if you want to say, fortunate,” Thompson said. “Some of them are still pushing up roses. But I guess I was fortunate.”
He came home in 1947, taught for three years at the McDonogh School in Owings Mills and was soon recalled by the Navy for the Korean War, serving for another three years in Washington state and later in Sydney. He made close friendships with soldiers from around the world, some of whom he still keeps in touch with today.
He said he owes his military success to Minnegan, his “second father,” and Towson, his second home. Minnegan, too, answered the call to serve. The Army sent him to Europe to establish physical fitness programs for servicemen. The two men often exchanged letters during the war.
“I would go into the lavatory [to read the letters] after hours,” Thomspon said. “I would sit there and cry like a baby.”
After his tours of duty, Thompson went back into education. He took a job as the headmaster of the middle division of the McDonogh School in Owings Mills and worked there for 35 years, retiring in 1985.
He also spent time during his career as president of the Towson University Alumni Association and president of the local Phi Delta Kappa chapter, among other things.
But even after retiring from McDonogh, he didn’t really retire. Instead, he went to work for Towson, mostly on a volunteer basis, as a development officer and member of the board of the Towson University Foundation, which handles University fundraising. He has been involved with the school and the alumni association since 1953. In 2004, the University marked his 50 years of volunteer service by establishing a $50,000 scholarship fund in his honor.
By his own math, Thompson estimated he has raised or helped raise $14.2 million for the University and helped create over 100 scholarships, including three he and his family established. Much of this money was raised through phone-a-thons and face-to-face visits.
Some of these relationships become more personal. Thompson recalled Beulah Price, an older alum whom his family “adopted.” She had no living family except her sister Naomi, whom she hadn’t seen in years. He and his family took her to doctor visits, appointments and shopping. She became a member of the family. Thompson said he even tried to reunite her with her sister, but Naomi died ten days before they were going to meet.
“She died with nobody else to look after her,” Thompson said.
When Price passed away, the family held a private service for her.
She left the University $1,000,000. There are now scholarships in her name in the colleges of education, fine arts and liberal arts. But Thompson didn’t do it for the money or the recognition.
“Story of my life in a nutshell, because if I can’t be of any help to anyone anymore, then my time’s up,” he said.
By the mid ‘90s, he slowed down. He moved into Edenwald Retirement Community in 1994. But even there, he never stopped working. He has served as the president of the community’s residence association and sits on their board of trustees. He helped establish a scholarship there, too, to help Edenwald employees and their children afford a college education. In nine years, the scholarship has given 500 people more than $1 million to help pay for tuition. He calls the feat “absolutely miraculous.”
He also kept in touch with Minnegan through all those years, visiting him in his last days at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson.
“The last time he knew who I was, I sat down and cried for half an hour and then I left and got home and got a phone call and he had died ten days short of 100,” Thompson said.
Thompson, who had become a close friend of the family, gave Minnegan’s eulogy. Then he sat on a committee to find donors to name the field house room at the newly-renamed Johnny Unitas Stadium. They raised $50,000 and named it the Minnegan Room. It was another way of saying thanks. To this day, he still gets a little bit emotional when talking about his coach.
“He gave me the motivation to do anything I wanted to do, because he said if you want it badly enough, there’s always a way.”
So in recognition of what Minnegan gave him, Thompson continues to pay it forward to future generations of Towson students.
“I always had a very rewarding life, not only for me but I hope for the benefit of other people too, because if they won’t appreciate it, then it’s worthless to me,” he said.
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