Before becoming a cabinet-maker in his hometown of Maple Valley, Jim Thompson was for a brief period of time a coal miner. It happened in 1973 when Jim was finishing a job with the Boilermakers union. Bob Morris, a friend from their Tahoma class of 1967, told him of a position at the Rogers No. 3 mine where Bob was working. The picking table operator was injured, and the job needed to be quickly filled. The union wages were good ($44 per day or $292 in today’s dollars), and Bob Morris issued a dare, so Thompson started work at the tipple processing 5-ton rail cars filled with coal as they were regularly dumped into a hopper above. Inside the tipple building working on a metal table, he separated large pieces of coal from rock after the raw mix passed across a vibrating four-inch screen that sorted out smaller pieces.
One cold December day, a newspaper crew consisting of a reporter and photographer showed up at the Ravensdale mine operated by Palmer Coking Coal Co. Rogers No. 3 was the last underground coal mine to operate in the state of Washington. The reporter wanted a picture inside the mine but didn’t want to go down under, so the photographer, Thompson, and two lifelong coal miners descended. Lou McCauley and Grover Snail, both in their sixties headed further inside the mine, so Thompson, age 24, posed for this photo taken at the bottom of the sloping 1,300-foot entryway. He was 800 feet underground at the beginning of the gangway tunnel on the mine’s fourth and lowest level. Behind Jim was the man-car which transported workers into and out of the mine. He carried a metal lunch bucket in one hand with the standard battery-operated headlamp attached to his hard hat.
Thompson performed the picking table job for about six months. Occasionally he was sent underground to muck rock, drill coal, and help the experienced miners, almost all of whom were approaching retirement age. One day he was assigned to work with Joe Ozbolt, a lifelong coal miner from Roslyn who lived in a nearby trailer park during the week and traveled home each weekend. They were tasked with reopening a previously abandoned level of the mine. About that time, Thompson decided that greener pastures lay elsewhere, so went back to welding for the Boilermakers union.
After a string of odd jobs and different career paths, he met Brent Ranton, an Enumclaw woodworker who had constructed cabinets for Thompson. Jim took a liking to the business and Ranton helped him get started in 1984 to build bookshelves and other simple cupboards. Otherwise, he was mostly self-taught. Today Thompson’s company, Room Maker, LLC operates in Black Diamond and produces a full line of custom kitchen and bathroom cabinets and can be reached at the following website: http://www.roomakerllc.com/
