Who Was Samuel Thompson?

Samuel Thompson with Arthur Hunt(my father) David and Hubert Woodard (my uncles)

    My great grandmother, Ida Sanford Brown, married a man by the name of Samuel Thompson after her first husband, Thomas Brown, passed away. Great Grampa Sam, was my great grandfather, through marriage, and my memories of him are mostly from stories and pictures with me and my cousins.  I was very young when he passed away. I never knew my great grandmother. I never knew my great grandfather, Tom Brown.   Grampa Sam, as I remember him in his 80's, when I was only 3, loved his family. But the story of his life, coming to America, as a Protestant Irish immigrant, was one that was shrouded in secrecy.
     As a young man, perhaps 17 or 18, he had sailed to America on a ship from Ireland, illegally. He told my grandmother, a few years before he died that he had gone down to the ship with a friend to see him off, but his friend chickened out, so at the last moment, he took his friend's passport and boarded the ship, assuming his friend's identity.  The friend's name was Samuel Thompson and so, that is who he became. What was told to me was that he had no family or none that he ever spoke of. What his real name was, no one ever knew; only that he said he was born in the north of Ireland but lived most of his life in Scotland. He called himself an Orangeman (Protestant Irish) and on St. Patties Day would go to the local bar in Springfield, MA;  usually wearing an orange tie. My aunt remembers he would have too much to drink and when he came home would stagger down the hall. This made my grandmother very angry with him. 
He used to sit atop of a building in downtown, where my grandparents lived, and listened to the bands that were playing new numbers and then would copy their music and play it on his flute. The bands would be very mad, he said, as he was very good at it. He loved the bagpipes and had played them at some point in his life, although noone remembers ever hearing him play. He did play the black flute, an Ocarina, shaped like a potato with 4 to 5 holes that he put his fingers on.  He played it very well and my aunt said she loved hearing it.
He loved to tell my aunt stories too, one in particular about the rabbit and the 3 bears and how the rabbit out foxed them and would get away to his hole in the ground. His Irish brogue was so thick that my father always had a hard time understanding him. He would always ask my mother what he had said. He loved to play board games like Parcheesi and Checkers and he taught my mother and my aunt and uncles to play when they were little.  When my Uncle Hubert left to serve in World War II,  he cried and said, " I will never live to see my boy again". Then after that, every time he got sick he would say, “I’m going to die and never see my boy again." When my Uncle David went to war he did the same thing. Of course he lived to see them both come home.
    In later years,  he and my great Grandmother  lived in an upstairs apartment  in my grandparents' row house. My aunt remembers having lunch with them and how he  loved pea soup which my great grandmother seemed to love making for him. When he drank tea he had 2 saucers and he poured the tea into one saucer and drank it out of the other saucer. My grandmother said that was the custom in Scotland and Ireland.

He loved all the pets but especially Mike, my mother's Collie. He would buy a box of little biscuits and would give her 3 every day. One Christmas, my aunt says  my great Grandma opened a present from him and was so thrilled with it she turned to him and said she was going to give him a kiss. He had said,  "later" and they both grinned. After my great grandma died, my aunt tells me she heard him sobbing for her and calling her name and saying how much he missed her and that he wanted to come to her. Once, he told my grandmother that Ida had come to see him that night before. She had sat on the bed and they had had a visit.  I remember those big hands he had and how he would smooth over the crocheted armchair covers that my great Grandma had made. Maybe it made him feel closer to her. He would sit in his chair by the big window with his Pipe, after dinner and supper, his big fingers pushing tobacco into the pipe and puffing to get it going, watching the world go by. His  pipe holder had a Scottie dog fastened to the top. Now the pipe holder part is long gone but my aunt gave me the heavy iron Scottie dog. One vivid memory I do have is of him reading his bible that my great grandmother and my grandmother had bought  him in August, 1941. In those last years, he read it through and through. I now have that too, the only objects left along with photos and scanty memories of a man we knew as Samuel Thompson. My grandmother told me that he had made her promise that she wouldn't let anyone take him away. He was always so afraid that someone would find out who he really was after all those years.  He never told my grandmother any more than that.   A man who spent his entire life loving an adopted family of sorts. After almost 70 years, I guess he really was Samuel Thompson, for that is who he had become, for us, and for himself too.