THOMPSON, DONALD SCOUGALL (27 March 1899-16 May 1994) achieved national repute in both the field of statistics and the sport of fencing. The son of Fred and Marion Scougall Thompson, he was born in Kansas City, Mo., and reared in the Philippine Islands, where his father was working with the U.S. Army. After service in the U.S. Navy during WORLD WAR I, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in business and foreign trade at the University of California and married the former Esther Gilkey. He worked as a statistician fror the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Silberlingt Research Corp. in California. During the 1930s he was an economist for the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in Washington. From 1944-6 he was director of the Urban Real Estate Finance Project of the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York. Thompson came to Cleveland in 1946 as a vice-president and general economist for the FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF CLEVELAND and became the district bank's first vice-president in 1953. The author of numerous articles on statistics and economics, he was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Ass'n. in 1950. He was also a trustee of the REAL PROPERTY INVENTORY OF METROPOLITAN CLEVELAND and the CLEVELAND COUNCIL ON WORLD AFFAIRS. A former college fencer, Thompson returned to the sport when his son made the American Olympic fencing team in 1948. The elder Thompson became part of a northern Ohio epee team that won the national dueling sword championship in 1952, marking the first time in 47 years that the trophy had left New York or Boston. He was elected president of the Amateur Fencers' League of America in 1957 and inducted into the Cleveland Sports Hall of Fame. Thompson retired from the Federal Reserve in the 1960s and moved from his home in SHAKER HTS. to Illinois in 1987. He died in Glenview, Ill., survived by his son Donald and a daughter, Abigail Sbarge.
Article Categories