Frances Tompkins wants you to know that every family has a
wealth of stories
– favorite narratives filled with charming episodes and quirky
characters.
But sadly, Frances will inform you, those stories are too often
lost forever because they’re not recorded before the storyteller
passes from this world
San Juan Bautista – Frances Tompkins wants you to know that every family has a wealth of stories – favorite narratives filled with charming episodes and quirky characters.
But sadly, Frances will inform you, those stories are too often lost forever because they’re not recorded before the storyteller passes from this world.
That’s why the 71-year-old San Juan Bautista resident is passionate about researching and writing books sharing the histories of interesting San Benito County families.
“It’s the thrill of the discovery,” she says, a fervor of conviction in her tone. “Everybody has interesting things in their lives.”
On a quiet Tuesday morning, as she relaxes at her kitchen table in her charming Polk Street home across from San Juan Bautista’s public baseball field, she described how her unique occupation began so innocently years ago.
Always interested in writing, she one day found herself putting pen to paper in recording the life story of Grace Tompkins, the grandmother of her husband Tim Tompkins.
The book’s catchy title: “I Was a Cantankerous Little Cuss.”
Frances’s tome revealed the adventures of an orphan adopted at the age of two weeks by an “old maid” seamstress in the late 1800s. The woman and child moved to a farm near Shelton, Colo., and Grace grew up in a Wild West environment. She later became a beloved part of Frances’s life.
“I loved Gracie,” she says with wistful remembrance. “Oh, she was just wonderful.”
That personal history turned out so well, her husband suggested a second book. This one focused on Tim’s grandfather on his mother’s side, an English physician who spent 35 years in southeast India during the days of British rule.
Frances labored with interviews and old documents and finally finished “The Letters of Doctor Arthur Boggs.”
It described such adventures as Boggs surviving violent riots in Calcutta and helping injured passengers after a dramatic train wreck.
“It was amazing, amazing stuff,” Frances says.
Word got around. One San Benito County man – who Frances insists must remain “absolutely anonymous” – found out about her writing skills and hired her to write his own family history. She sat down with him, turned the tape recorder on and he poured out all the fascinating stories he could remember.
That book led to her next one. “I was down at the post office selling tickets for the library’s chicken barbeque,” Frances says. “A man with a cane came up.”
That man, Joe Cullumber, chatted with Frances and discovered she’d been blessed with a gift for research and writing local family histories.
Frances agreed to document the Cullumber family history for posterity.
“When you want to start?” she remembers Cullumber innocently asking. “Tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock in the morning,” was her quick reply.
Frances didn’t mess around. The research took up hundreds of hours in interviews and sifting through files and photographs.
“Joe is very well organized in his house,” she said. “He has file cabinets and file cabinets of pictures and memorabilia.”
The result of all that hard work: “Life In Our Time: The Cullumbers of San Juan Valley.”
Frances’s attention to detail paid off in a book sure to be treasured by many Cullumber generations to come.
Her current project is a personal history of her neighbor Mary Velasco Sellen. Velasco was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1921. Her family moved to San Juan Bautista two years later.
“Mary’s a wonderful story teller,” Frances says. “She just talks into the tape recorder and magic happens.”
In one of the interviews taped for the book, Sellen describes how she came to make her home in the mission village:
“My folks came here because of my uncle Dave, Dave Caloca. He was working at the cement plant at that time and he kept writing to my dad, ‘Come to the United States, because you can shovel the money.’ So my father decided to bring his family over. And instead of shoveling money we were shoveling prunes. Prunes and everything else. But we got along all right.”
Frances’s own family history is filled with fascinating anecdotes. One ancestor on her father’s side was Manuel Butron, a soldier who sailed from Spain to Mexico in the 1700s. He accompanied Father JunÃpero Serra in establishing some of the California missions. Butron’s body was buried in the Carmel Mission cemetery.
Frances’s father was Roy Herman, a professional animal trapper for San Benito County.
“He died on Quien Sabe Ranch deer hunting,” she says. “He was 70 years old… carrying a deer on his back in 105 degree temperature.”
Herman’s favorite dog protected the body for two days before someone found it, Frances said.
“He was such an active guy,” she recalls. “That’s the way he wanted to go.”
Frances was born in 1933 on a farm along Santa Ana Valley Road. She began playing the violin at the age of 5, and it has been a treasured instrument for her ever since.
She and her family stayed in San Benito County until she was 13 years old when they moved to other towns.
Over the years, Frances has led a life worthy of her own personal history book. She raised six kids, and now has 13 grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
In the 1980s, she worked for a time in “psych hospitals” in Santa Cruz and San Jose. Here, she developed her skills in listening to people’s personal stories.
“Find out one good thing about them and focus on that,” she says, giving her secret in drawing people out. “People have to trust you. People trust me. I’m at the bus stop and people always tell me their whole story.”
In 1995, Frances earned a bachelor degree in literature/creative writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since then, she’s put her natural storyteller talent to good use, weaving larger-than-life tales in her plays and short stories.
Recently, Frances has been hard at work on a mystery novel titled “Corpse Finder.”
“It’s about the bad drug guys wrecking it up for the little people,” she says.
She and her husband Tim share a common love for music. They often perform with the El Teatro Campesino company in Christmas productions at the mission church. And their Gallop-away Music Company is scheduled to come out this fall with a jazz CD with several songs Frances wrote. It’s title, “San Juan Chickens,” comes from the CD’s first track comically incorporating the clucking of the mission town’s famous chickens into the music.
And, with her passion for preserving local stories, Frances is actively involved with historical preservation in San Juan Bautista through the town’s historical society.
Frances Tompkins is a restless and energetic woman. She’ll tell you she likes it that way.
“I’m enthusiastic about life,” she says. “There’s so many interesting things to do, I don’t know how people can ever be bored.”
To contact Frances Tompkins, call 831-623-4259 or e-mail [email protected].
