Robert N. Thompson

Robert N. Thompson

Times were very tough when I was growing up. When I was 10, my mother had to send me to foster care because she couldn’t afford to take care of me. After about a year and a half, however, Mom was able to bring me back home.

I landed my first job at age 15 as a water boy for a construction crew. After graduating from Shortridge High School, I followed my brothers into the military and helped build air bases in Korea.

At 24, after studying civil engineering at Purdue University for three years, I had no job and only $12 to my name. I wanted to get into construction so I bid on a housing project being built by local developer John Hart. I won the bid and used the only money I had to rent a grading tractor and get to work. I worked after hours, late at night, on the weekends and in bad weather on that first job and John noticed. One day, he called me into his office and told me he wanted me to do work on a 240-home site he was building. I asked him, “Why me?” He said to me, “When I leave work at night, if I turn my engine off, I can always hear a tractor. And it’s always the same guy behind the wheel. I need you.” John co-signed a bank loan to get me the equipment I needed for the new job.

That entire experience was my big break.

I then founded R.N. Thompson and Associates in 1960. Through the years we’ve worked on more than 50,000 lots for living in the central Indiana area. We’ve built houses, apartments and golf courses throughout central Indiana.

At a time when we were developing more than 1,500 residential lots a year, I needed something that would make my communities rise above others. I decided to build and design golf courses at the center of new housing communities. My goal was to create a country club atmosphere for the average-income family, featuring moderately priced homes in communities that would include swimming pools, tennis courts and nature trails.

My company built, developed or managed nine golf courses and golf course communities including Riverside, Coffin, Saddle Brook, Crooked Creek, Winding Ridge and the Gary Player-designed Southern Dunes golf course, all in Indianapolis; Ironwood and Gray Eagle golf clubs in Fishers; and Wood Wind in Westfield. We also built and managed courses in Bloomington and Homestead, Fla., and marinas, the Just Add Water boat company on the east side and two Indianapolis sports complexes.

Many of the people I hired more than 40 years ago are still with me today.

I’ve supported numerous charities over the years. One day 25 years ago, my friend Bill Carson, CEO of the Indiana Builders Association, came to a job site to take me out to lunch. We stopped by a downtown building he wanted me to see that housed a non-profit educational program for at-risk youth. The building, in the shadow of the multi-million-dollar Market Square Arena, was hideous. I thought to myself, here are these beautiful children with real needs suffering even more by having to be in a building that should have been condemned a long time ago.

The center director was looking for some help to simply fix the building. I asked the director if there were more children out there who needed help and he said yes. Then I told him that I didn’t know how and I don’t know when but they’d have a new building for these children soon.

In 1986, I was among a group that banned together, built and donated a 10,000-square-foot building to St. Mary’s Child Center. Recently, we bought and donated a 15,000-square-foot building f0r St. Mary’s to relocate from downtown to Lawrence. I have stayed close to St. Mary’s as a godfather to the program and I serve on the center’s senior advisory board.

Not too many people know this but R.N. Thompson and Associates manages Riverside Golf Course and built the Riverside Academy and its par 3 golf course to financially support and sustain St. Mary’s Child Center. One hundred percent of the revenue that those three facilities bring in, in addition to the earnings of my personal 401K, fund St. Mary’s Child Center and the children it serves.

Many people ask me when I’ll retire. I don’t see myself ever retiring. I’m done building communities and making money. Today I’m all about St. Mary’s.