Love, Janis Read online

  In Nebraska, my mother’s parents, Cecil East and Laura Hanson, met and married in the farming community of Clay Center. They were still caught in the fever of land ownership and moved along with the East clan to western Oklahoma. They traded Nebraska farms for Oklahoma ranches. Cecil’s temperament suited the independence and roughness of a rancher’s life. His little herd thrived and he was committed to developing the local community. His wife, however, pined for her family in Clay Center and broached the subject so often that her husband finally relented. With two toddling children they returned to the Hanson family routine of Sunday dinners and singing around the piano.

  Cecil was an ambitious man. He roamed the countryside looking for livestock to buy and trade to supplement his basic farming income. Laura tended an acre-sized kitchen garden, canning and storing in the root cellar enough food for the family to eat throughout the year. They both worked long and hard, but Cecil put all his money into high-profit hogs who contracted a disease and had to be put to death. They were devastated because losing the hogs cost them the farm. Laura took the children to live with her parents. Cecil moved to Amarillo to find work and a way to support his family. He soon succeeded, selling what a farmer knew best: real estate.

  The East family moved to Amarillo during my mother’s senior year in high school. Mom saw her mother lose her integral place in the family economy when her father began earning wages instead of sharing the farm work with his wife. The new roles forced upon Cecil and Laura were not kindly accepted by either. They, in turn, blamed each other for the unwanted patterns of their new lives. They shouted at each other, tormenting their four children with their arguing. Cecil began to have affairs, hunting for the solace his wife could not give him. He also began to drink occasionally, a clear affront to Laura’s increasingly strict religious views.

  All of my grandparents began life on a rural frontier, but their children became city dwellers. The structures that had defined life since the founding of the country—the Bible, the family, and personal reputation—were beginning to lose their pivotal power. From one generation to the next, seemingly outdated ideas, guideposts, attitudes, and ambitions were cast aside with the changing look each new group of adolescents saw in their future.

  Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book Generations, describe the process as a predictable cyclical set of stages. In twenty-year increments, our society focuses and refocuses its energy. The culture moves through a concentration on spiritual experiences and personal growth into a period of recommitment to civic groups that work diligently solving cultural crises. Strauss and Howe describe American culture as oscillating between two pivotal poles: “SECULAR CRISES, when society focuses on reordering the outer world of institutions and public behavior; and SPIRITUAL AWAKENINGS, when society focuses on changing the inner world of values and private behavior.”

  The ambitions and expectations of any one person are thus defined by the times in which they were born and raised. Their cohorts, born during the same twenty-year time period, share a unique set of historical experiences as well as “society-wide attitudes toward families, schooling, sex roles, religion, crime, careers, and personal risk,” explain Strauss and Howe. “At various moments in history, Americans have chosen to be more protective of children, or more generous to old people, or more tolerant of unconventional young adults. Then, after a while, the mood has swung the other way. Each time this happened, the social environment changed differently from each cohort-group. . . . Trees planted in the same year contain rings that indicate when they all met with a cold winter, wet spring, or dry summer. Cohort-groups are like trees in this respect. They carry within them a unique signature of history’s bygone moments.”

  My ancestors were born, lived, and died as part of generational groups that were formed and limited by the historical events and attitudes of their day. They in turn exhibited like characteristics, causing and reacting to other historical events that formed the life experiences of a generational group that followed them. The story of my ancestors’ lives is the saga of American pioneers, exploring and sometimes conquering what was seen as the frontier of their day. Whether it was spiritual growth, homesteading land, or founding institutions that promised answers to then urgent questions, my family members committed their lives to the task. They bequeathed their faith in a better future along with the energy and talents needed to move the society one more step along the evolutionary path.

  THREE

  JANIS’S CHILDHOOD

  I ain’t quite ready for walking

  I ain’t quite ready for walking

  And what will you do with your life

  Life just a-dangling?

  —JANIS JOPLIN, “Move Over”

  FOLKS CALLED MY MOTHER the “Lily Pons of Texas,” a compliment for her ability to sing like the great operatic soprano. Dorothy East’s voice was pure, clear, and powerful, bringing the Broadway show tunes she favored to vivid life on the Texas plains. She also kicked up her heels with the jazzy songs of Cole Porter. She sang at any opportunity, which in Amarillo meant church, weddings, and the Kiwanis Club. Whenever she sang, her father’s face beamed, his eyes watering. Her mother retained her dour personality, seldom even cracking a smile.

  The high point of Mom’s high school career was singing lead in a citywide stage production. Because it was an important charity event, the organizers hired a Broadway director to give the show extra polish. Everyone talked about good things happening for this talented young woman. The director of the show pulled Mother aside, saying, “If you want a job in New York I can get you one, but I don’t recommend it. I’ve gotten to know you during this show and those people just aren’t your kind of folks.” She took his advice and did not go to New York. Instead she won a college scholarship in a singing contest. She followed the urging of her church pastor and applied to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.

  In 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, my mother packed the only two dresses she owned and proceeded to college, ready to seize her future. Instead of inevitable triumph, she hit against the limitations of a single voice teacher who taught only opera. Broke and disenchanted after one year of school, Mom returned to Amarillo to work.

  This was the 1930s. The flapper was hip and Dorothy was a liberated woman. Along with her peers she scandalized her parents by cutting off her long hair in a “bob” style. She chose figure-skimming dresses, heels, and jaunty hats—in styles that her future father-in-law, Seeb Joplin, would call “go-to-hell” hats. She smoked cigarettes, for the shock value. Smoking was quite a parental affront in those days. Cigarettes were illegal in fourteen states and legislation was pending in twenty-eight other states. Young women—such as Edna St. Vincent Millay—were expelled from college for smoking.

  Mom began helping out at an Amarillo radio station, KGNC. Her local reputation as a free spirit was made when, frantically trying to figure out why the music wasn’t being broadcast, she screamed, “I can’t figure the damn thing out!” only to discover that her expletive had traveled to every house and farm within a hundred miles.

  A blind date at Christmas brought my parents together. Pop was on break from engineering studies and ready for a good time. Dorothy loved to dance, so she brought him to her favorite spot until she realized he felt uncomfortable in that loud and boisterous scene. Away from the noise, their talk soon turned to areas they both favored: literature and the world of ideas.

  Dorothy had often escaped the hostility in her house by spending hours reading Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy in the local library. Seth was interested in American literature. The first money my father earned as a boy went to buy The Complete Works of Mark Twain and The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. As their relationship grew through letters, Pop wrote, “Don’t tell me what you are doing. Tell me what you are thinking.”

  Seth was a strikingly handsome guy with a square jaw and a wry grin. He was said to have the bluest eyes in high school. He was a flirt who regularly won the
“slow races”—a challenge to creep around the school in your car on tires stuffed with rags while talking to the girls. (They used rags in their tires because rubber for new tires had been scarce since World War I.) Seth liked to wear suits with a fedora, which he kept carefully cocked on the side of his head.

  He was painfully shy at times, and used to spending a lot of time alone. His parents’ home had housed the boarders Seeb hired for running the stockyards. Florence didn’t like the influence of the rough men on her kids, so she boarded her daughter in town to go to school. My father was given his own one-room cabin out back.

  Lack of money forced Seth to quit college one semester shy of a degree. Though he was intellectually curious and an avid reader, school bored him. He was more a playboy, known to make bathtub gin during the last days of Prohibition in order to enliven college parties. He lived a risqué life, smoking marijuana, which was legal but not widely available. Back in Amarillo in an era of 25 percent unemployment, he spent time with his girl and worked at the only job he could find, as a gas-station attendant.

  Dorothy got a temporary job filling in for a vacationing credit clerk at the local Wards store. She spent the two weeks showing her boss that he should want her to keep the job rather than take the vacationing girl back. She achieved her goal and was eventually made head of the department.

  Dorothy and Seth spent hours together, often visiting at the Joplins’ house. They enjoyed the gentleness and lively conversation of his parents. Dorothy felt accepted and enjoyed escaping the ongoing arguments that hung in the air at the East home. In a moment of candor, Dorothy’s father, Cecil, confided in Seth, “My wife and I used to talk and share things, but now it’s so hard for her to hear, it seems we never talk about anything.” Laura had worn a hearing aid since childhood. At this time in her life, she often preferred to turn it off rather than listen to what people told her. Her primary commitment was the church.

  Cecil was a religious man as well, but his views of life had changed with age. He was known to have a drink of alcohol, an act his wife felt was the devil’s work. Cecil even drank with Seth, once getting him drunk and then laughing when the young man threw up on the porch outside.

  When the tension at the East home erupted, Laura would scribble a note and place it on the bureau. Then she would take her bags and try to hitchhike back to Nebraska, but Cecil always found her and brought her home.

  The poor relationship of the Easts made Mother take a silent vow: “I will never argue with my husband. I will always make things work.” She chose in Seth a man who was gentle, kind, and sensitive. Seth selected Dorothy because she was strong like his mother but more exciting and challenging in a way that fit the craziness of the times.

  Around 1935, Seth’s best friend in college recommended him for a job at the Texas Company, later Texaco, in Port Arthur, Texas. It was more than six hundred miles away, but it was a real job and a chance to start a new life. Seth jumped at it, and Dorothy quit her job to follow. Her boss at Wards called to see if doubling her salary would keep her in Amarillo, but it just made her angry. “If I’m worth twice the salary now, then you’ve been cheating me” was her retort. She quickly found work in the credit department at Sears.

  Four years after Seth and Dorothy met, they finally could afford to marry. On October 20, 1936, Dorothy East and Seth Joplin were wed. There was no gathering of family and hours of celebration. It was a simple ceremony with two friends, due to their distance from family and the strain of the times.

  Port Arthur was the refinery capital of the world. It was only twenty miles away from the largest oil strike to date, at Spindletop in Beaumont. Petroleum was king of the times, the source of many new fortunes and a restructuring of the economic landscape. Seth and Dorothy could see their lives in a future of spewing oil that meant a steady income. Texas led all other states in oil production, and Port Arthur was in the center of the excitement.

  The town of Port Arthur was founded by a visionary developer, Arthur Stilwell. He chose its site with the help of voices in his dreams that he called fairies. He placed it on the edge of beautiful freshwater Lake Sabine, only twenty miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Stilwell designed the town with broad boulevards, grand avenues, and expensive homes along the lakeshore. He used Dutch development money and expertise to dredge a canal linking the town to the Gulf of Mexico. The city became the first inland oceangoing port for the refineries. Port Arthur was destined, they said, to be the shipping port for the entire Texas petroleum industry.

  Then Stilwell came under financial siege from John “Bet-a-Million” Gates, who wrested control of the city’s development. He made his fortune selling barbed wire throughout the Western states, forming a company that later became U.S. Steel. Gates sold the picturesque lakeshore to neighboring cities that wanted the right to continue the intracoastal canal to their communities. The town mansions no longer had vistas of white-capped waves and sailboats bobbing in the steady breeze. Instead, they overlooked oceangoing tankers creeping eerily and slowly through the canal.

  Dorothy and Seth began life under FDR’s New Deal, but war rumblings in Europe clouded their sense of the future. In 1936 Germany occupied the Rhineland and Japan invaded China.

  Seth worked at the only Texaco plant that made containers for petroleum, cans that traveled around the globe. As war came, Seth’s packaging plant grew ever more vital. He was called to join the army three times, but was always deferred because of the importance of his job to the war effort.

  With the inevitable collapse of the East marriage, Laura and her youngest daughter, Mimi, came to live with Seth and Dorothy. It became the opportunity for my parents to buy their first house, a two-bedroom brick bungalow on the edge of town. Money was tight, so that when Seth went to Sears to buy a push lawnmower, he used time payments to afford its eight-dollar price.

  Surrounded by uncertainty, fear, and never-ending work, Dorothy and Seth celebrated life. They were frequently found across the Sabine River in Vinton, Louisiana, a town that specialized in offering freely flowing liquor and good dance music to a Texas crowd. Clicking her heels and snapping her fingers, Dorothy sometimes danced on the tops of tables. Seth sometimes wondered if he would ever be able to contain her.

  One day, Seth came home from work and whispered to Dorothy, “Let’s do something for posterity!” West Texas morals held that it was okay to drink and carry on before a person settled down. With Dorothy’s pregnancy, the revelry abruptly ended.

  Janis Lyn Joplin was born at nine-thirty A.M. on January 19, 1943. That morning, when labor started, Dorothy told her husband to go to work. “Women have been having babies for centuries. I’ll be fine.” Afterward she confided softly, “The next time I have a baby, I want you with me.” Janis weighed only five and a half pounds at birth and was three weeks early. But by eight months of age she was a thriving twenty pounds. With World War II raging, it was an awfully optimistic bet on the future to bring life into the world.

  Seth sent his wife a touchingly humorous note marking Janis’s birth (the content can be understood only when one considers his work in a manufacturing plant):

  I wish to tender my congratulations on the anniversary of your successful completion of your production quota for the nine months ending January 19, 1943.

  I realize that you passed through a period of inflation such as you had never before known—yet, in spite of this, you met your goal by your supreme effort during the early hours of January 19, a good three weeks ahead of schedule.

  Janis was the first child in either of our parents’ families born in a city and not on a farm. She was the first to have much cultural exposure beyond the radio or church. She also changed the lives of her parents immediately. Living with her extended family afforded Janis extra love and attention. By her third birthday, the United States had dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima, the war was ending, and everyone’s life was changing. Dorothy’s mother and sister moved on to other homes, and the Joplin routine became more settled.
r />   Pop was the wage earner and had the final word on most big decisions. The other 90 percent of the choices were left to Mother. She was clearly in charge of the home and the children. Dorothy quit her job and devoted herself to mothering young Janis. She took her to the Bible-thumping First Christian Church for church school, which Mother eventually taught. Mother had spent hours as a child sewing elaborate clothes for her dolls, and now she did even more for her beautiful young daughter. Janis had pretty organdy dresses with ruffles, skirts and blouses trimmed in ribbon and lace, and cute sailor outfits for play clothes.

  Pop was used to formality in the relationships within his family. He wanted to be called by the respectful term “Father,” so he taught his daughter to say “Mother” instead of “Mom.” Mother was a more informal person, and so she didn’t push her daughter to say “Father.” Instead, Janis naturally took to calling him “Daddy.”

  Though the days were spent with mother and daughter together, the afternoons marked Seth’s return from work. Each evening Janis waited for her dad on the front porch. As soon as he arrived, they would hug, sit on the steps, and talk. One day Mother happened to overhear Seth telling Janis about his experience in college making bathtub gin. “Is that the proper topic for a conversation with a child?” she asked him later. Pop refused to argue the point; instead, he quit spending the evening time visiting with Janis on the front step. Janis was crushed and never knew why.

  Mother bought Janis an old upright piano and taught her daughter how to play. She and Janis sat on the piano bench together, with Janis singing the simple nursery songs Dorothy taught her. Janis often lay in bed at night singing those songs, over and over, to put herself to sleep.