Elizabeth Jane Thompson

On the evening of Sept. 16, we lost our matriarch. Elizabeth Jane Thompson died at her Longbranch home one month shy of her 100th birthday.

The daughter of a naval officer, she spent most of her childhood in China and Hawaii. Her whole family was witness to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Her father was on the U.S.S. Yorktown. The rest of the family watched from their home in the hills above the harbor.

As a student at the University of Hawaii, Jane wanted to learn to drive. Her father’s driver offered to teach her. He survived the ordeal and they were married in 1944.

While stationed in Germany in the late 1950s, the family fell in love with Bernese mountain dogs and brought home several to raise on their farm in Longbranch, a descendant of which was with Jane when she passed.

It is difficult to distill a full life into a few paragraphs. Jane was a lady of a bygone era. Grace, reliability, and proper grammar were paramount. She wrote wonderful letters. She was the original Google. You could ask her a question on any topic and on the rare occasion she didn’t know the answer, she’d find the book that could.

She is survived by six of her seven children.