Okay, the glowering old waiter who ran the used bookstore in Sea Cliff would never call it 'magical' but it worked something like magic in many lives.  I have written about the store and about Thompson in our history, Look Back And Cheer, and that description brought an interesting note from Lucy Gray.  I wish I had had it in time for the book.  So here it is:

"He was a true friend to a young girl who had a difficult home life and through him I could purchase an escape to faroff western ranches and ride wild stallions. I still have every one of the horse and dog books I bought from him (enter through the double doors, take a sharp right and there they are on the end bookshelf, about four shelves up... if you went when he first opened up for the day, you could easily read the titles by the light of that window on the west wall). MY books were all priced at fifteen to twenty five cents each, "Navarre of the North", "The Magnificent Barb".plus a hundred more.  I never even erased the penciled "15" or "25" written on the flyleaves. I discovered James Oliver Curwood though Thompson's Book Store!.. Mr. Thompson even sold me a slipcased edition of  Steinbeck's "The Red Pony"- originally priced at $4 but he let me have it for 75 cents! I realize now that he did not stock the animal classics just for me, but he made me feel that he did.

"His ravaged face, unwashed old man odor mixed with stale cigarettes, ratty old grandpa sweater... when I left Sea Cliff for the last time I knew I'd never see him again but he remains vivid in my best memories of childhood and reading. Your essay filled in many of the details I longed to ask him about himself but his gruffness was quite offputting and I am sure if he had told me to butt out, I never would have gone back! I seem to remember that he had a mentally disabled son and I often wondered if that was what had driven him to drink. That he jumped from the Roslyn Bridge is somehow understandable and yet very sad. He was a very important figure in my early life in Sea Cliff, outside of family. No doubt it is the elders like him who shape our later sensibilities, and Sea Cliff was chock full of them.