‘That’s just Mom’

By Lyndsie Kiebert-Carey
Reader Contributor

Many mothers will receive cards and novelty coffee mugs this May dubbing them “#1 Mom,” but only one Sandpoint woman could ever boast the titles of both Idaho Mother of the Year and National Mother of the Year: Helen Thompson.

I heard about Helen in January, when a friend of my grandfather called me. I answered the phone in the early evening, after his second attempt to reach me, sometime between removing sopping wet snow clothes from my toddler and preparing dinner.

Someone needed to write a story about Helen Thompson, Pat Gooby insisted. She was National Mother of the Year in 1982; raised seven children as a widow; sent them all to college; worked for the U.S. Forest Service; really neat lady.

I wrote this down on a pink Post-it note and stuck it to my dormant computer monitor. Mr. Gooby followed up soon after. I did some cursory research. I pitched the story to the Reader. Winter turned to spring and the marvel that is time passing while in charge of a small child marched on. In the time I’ve spent learning about Helen, Liam has grown from a babbling tornado of incoordination to a talking, running child. I combed the library’s newspaper archives while he brought me toy trucks and farm figurines. He helped, in his own way.

National Mother of the Year Helen Thompson with her horse in Dover on May 7, 1982. Photo courtesy of the Bonner County Historical Society & Museum, donated to the collection by Loren Evenson.

I won’t attempt to sum up Helen’s life (whoever wrote her obituary on the Coffelt Funeral Services website did an incredible job), but I’ll hit the main points. 

Born and raised in a small North Dakota town named for her rancher father, Helen and her husband, James, moved to Wrenco in 1957. James died in 1960, when their youngest (and seventh) child was only 2 years old. She had a college degree in mathematics and a 30-year career with USFS. All seven of her children went on to earn degrees of their own. She died in January 2012 at the age of 95.

I called Helen’s eldest child, Jim Thompson, a few days before my deadline for this story. I sat at the picnic table in my sunny yard while Liam ran his perimeter with our dog, Mac, collecting dandelion heads in an old mixed nuts container. Jim was kind enough to talk to me for more than half an hour, fielding my questions about his mother.

He said he was 16 when his father passed and in his 30s when his mother earned Idaho Mother of the Year honors, then national recognition. He is now 82 years old.

“I remember thinking it was no big deal,” he said. “That’s just Mom.”

Jim lived in California in 1982, but now lives back on the family’s Wrenco ranch. He was kind enough to confirm a lot about his mom’s early life — she was one of a dozen children; her brothers were “tougher-than-nails” cowboys, who Jim said were his “heroes” while growing up — and some about her later life, too; like how she could “pinch a penny” better than anyone and managed to travel the world.

Resourceful, Helen was — and generous with her time. She served on community boards for decades. People were always eager to give back. Jim said Mr. Gooby’s father, the owner of a slaughterhouse at the time of Helen’s widowing, offered to give the family any meat they may need. A villager, Helen was — giving, receiving.

I jotted notes as fast as I could, looking up every so often to see Liam wreaking his casual havoc — scribbling on our barbeque with pink chalk.

Pick your battles, my inner monologue spoke as I continued talking to Jim. Chalk washes off.

Jim said Helen loved young people, and many will remember how she served as an unofficial information officer on Schweitzer Mountain in her later years. But when it came to skiing: “Mom wasn’t very good, but she was tough,” Jim said.

Tough, Helen was. 

I continued to write my notes, envisioning for a moment what I would do if my husband died while we had small children at home. Push the thought away. I looked up. Liam was in the hay field, cautiously approaching the squabbling geese, Mac by his side.

Helen loved horses her whole life and she baked “tremendous” pies, her son said.

“Mom’s idea of a good thing was when she’d be in the kitchen, maybe making a pie, and visitors would come by,” Jim said. “She’d insist they go for a ride, and when they got back after an hour, the pie would be ready.”

I never met Helen, but I can imagine sitting at her table, the North Idaho sun-bathed scent of horses on our skin mingled with fresh-baked pie, the clinking of forks and plates being passed around the table. A good thing, indeed.

Helen and several of her children appeared on Good Morning America following her National Mother of the Year win — I read about it in a May 1982 edition of the Sandpoint News Bulletin. She remains the only Idaho woman to earn the national title, bestowed each year since 1935 by the nonprofit American Mothers.

At the time, she expressed shock at earning the award; said she had met many of the other 1982 state honorees at the national convention and thought they were more deserving; had “done more.”

But the judges decided Helen had done enough. I concur.

I’d argue that the feeling of inadequacy experienced by so many mothers has its purpose — we should strive to do our best in raising our children, shouldn’t we? — but there is something to be learned from Helen’s story. Children are not raised by one person, but rather by a community.

“I was very fortunate that if I had to raise them alone, that I could raise them in a community like Sandpoint,” Helen told the Bulletin in ’82. “People were very supportive.”

May we all remember our part in that grand effort this Mother’s Day.

Lyndsie Kiebert-Carey is a mother, writer, volleyball coach and editor emeritus of the Sandpoint Reader. Read more of her current work at lyndsiekiebertcarey.substack.com.