by Ann Wilson
Grandpa Dustin sang in the church choir, but he also loved ribald vaudeville songs. He’d play Spike Jones records for us. He saw Spike Jones perform, which our grandma never forgave him for because she felt it was too randy. We loved those Spike Jones records with their shooting guns, slide whistles, and banjos.
At the family hootenannies many of the songs our various aunts and uncles sang were bawdy drinking songs. One was “The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham,” which probably shouldn’t have been sung around a five-year-old. Since I was four years younger than Ann and eight years younger than Lynn, my age seemed to be forgotten by everyone around me for most of my childhood. “Lydia Pinkham” was based on a real-life character who marketed a highly alcoholic “woman’s tonic” to cure menstrual pains. Sample lyric: “Mrs. O’Malley had a problem, she could not have a baby, dear, but after drinking a bottle of compound, she had a baby twice a year!” I loved it.
They also sang disaster songs like “The Great Titanic.” That one had a light-hearted sound, but the lyrics, obviously, couldn’t be more tragic. But I drank them in. I loved being around all of that singing.
Within our house, our dad always played the radio and had a very high-end stereo. He also owned a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and often you’d see him transferring his records to tape, hoping to get a perfect copy before his kids scratched them. I remember we had many classical recordings, the Hawaiian wedding song album, the soundtrack to South Pacific, and records by Ethel Merman. Even at a very young age, Ann could do a spot-on Ethel Merman.
Anytime there was a car ride, we sang. The radio was usually on, and our mother and dad sang along, as did us girls. It was never about being a great musician, or singing perfectly. We grew up in an environment where music was part of the family every day. It was an atmosphere where music was always fun, and fun always included music.
ANN WILSON
When Nancy was only a few years old, Dotes was transferred to Taiwan. It was 1956, and there was still a real fear that China would invade Taiwan. Our dad was a major by then, big brass. The promotion did not make his life easier, though. He had more responsibility, though many of his fellow Marines would say he “was born with a silver spoon in his mouth” because his father had been a general. His promotion had nothing to do with his dad’s rank, but Dotes lived with that attitude during his entire service career. He hated Corps politics, but it was his life.
We gave him a tearful good-bye, and then spent a few months in Oregon City with the Dustins. But my mom decided this time she wasn’t going to wait for a telegram to announce Dotes was dead. Instead, she decided we were going to follow him. We left San Francisco on the USS General W.A. Mann, which was a troop transport that carried five thousand men, and had seen service in World War II and Korea. There were giant guns, and it was no place for a mom in high heels and three little girls. As we left under the Golden Gate Bridge, our mother had us stand on the deck and wave good-bye to the States. Nancy was wearing a tether harness tied to a railing on the ship to keep her from falling into the sea. She pretended she was a wild horse.
We were in Taiwan for three years, from when I was six until I was almost nine. It was an innocent time, but also one of tension. A week after we arrived, a typhoon hit, and we were trapped in our quarters for many hours until our dad came to rescue us. Eventually, we were moved to a former three-story department store that had been converted into housing.
Our mom was expert at making the abnormal seem normal. Wherever we lived, she draped cloth on the windows to make them appear elegant, and she used our trunks as coffee tables. She even made our department store home look habitable.
In Taiwan, she organized the Girl Scouts. Nancy was a Brownie, while Lynn and I were regular scouts. We earned our merit badges, and Mom sewed our patches and sashes. We would go on Girl Scout jamborees, though occasional artillery shelling from mainland China scuttled a few adventures. Another typhoon once cancelled a campout. The only phones we had were field radios, so as Girl Scouts we had to learn Marine terminology like “over” anytime we wanted to call a fellow scout. “Nine” would never again be just “nine” in our family, it was now “niner.” Dotes’s odd nicknames suddenly made more sense to us all.
We regularly had to go to air raid shelters. We lived with a suitcase packed at all times in case an invasion happened. Naval aviators practiced bombing runs near us where they would drop sacks of flour on marked targets. One even hit our housing area.
NANCY
One of our dad’s jobs on base was that he led the Marine Corps band during parades. He marched in front with a baton, like our own “Music Man.” A lot of the Corps’ pomp and circumstance was just a breath away from show business, to be honest.
Our mom was a bit of an amateur filmmaker, and she used her Super-8 camera to shoot Dotes marching in countless parades. She also filmed our birthday parties and scout picnics. She taught us to operate the camera, and at a very young age we were all amateur filmmakers. We made short five-minute reels that were inspired by the Keystone Kops and Charlie Chaplin, whom our mother adored. Sometimes we used subtitles because the Super-8 didn’t record sound. Those films were our first taste of performing. That camera was part of the fertilizer that fed the seed of life on the stage for us. We all became total hams, but no one more than Ann. I was shy in the early home movies, but Ann was shoving people out of the way.
When friends or family would come over, we’d pull out the projector and force them to watch our home movies. We’d invite someone over for dinner and as soon as the plates were cleared, we’d pull out the films. Our guests might say, “I’ve got to get up early,” but we held them hostage.
We’d watch the same clips again and again, and everyone in “The Big Five” found amusement in their repeated viewing, even if the neighbors didn’t.
After three years in Taiwan, our dad was transferred back to Camp Pendleton. Whenever transfer orders came, a squad of enlisted men would show up at our house, and everything we owned would be loaded into cardboard barrels and put on a troop transport. We never owned a single houseplant because we never knew when we would have to move.
Wherever we’d move, we’d make friends with the neighbor children, but we always lived with the knowledge that, with only a day’s notice, we might leave for a different post, a different base, or a different continent. Usually we went to school on base, and our classmates were just as apt to move around as we were. It was hard to make real, lasting friendships. We learned at a very young age not to make deep roots.
As a result, the relationships inside our family took on more significance, and we were much closer than siblings generally are. Many times the only entertainment we had was inside “The Big Five,” so we became a self-contained vaudeville show, with our sing-a-longs, and Super-8 films.
Once we arrived to a new post, our dad was off being a major, so the task of unpacking and arranging furniture fell to our mother. It was not the life Mama had imagined when she was studying home economics in college, but she made the best of it. We had very little, because pay for a major was not much, but she did what she could to make every house a home.
She tried hard to make our humble life appear elegant. We sat at the dinner table together each night, and we ate by candlelight. We had inherited one set of china and a set of silver, and we used those with linen napkins for every single meal. Mama never served food from a carton. It was always put into another bowl, which meant more dishes, but “The Big Five” pulled together to wash them.
One time Ann and I ate dinner at a friend’s house, and it was served on Corelware with steel utensils. When we returned home, Ann asked mom why we used the silver all the time. “There is no one more important than my family,” Mama said. “There is no guest more deserving than you.”
We were expected always to have proper manners and to be ladylike at the table. “I want you to grow up so that if you are invited to dinner with the president, you’ll know how to behave yourself,” she said. She told us
this so many times, we grew up thinking our White House dinner was already scheduled for the future.
Still, when orders came to move yet again, our mom was always a little downhearted, if only briefly. I knew it was exhausting, but I never heard her publicly complain.
Instead, she came up with elaborate rituals to help us deal with all the transitions. One was that on the day we left a house for good, she would have us stand outside the threshold and tap our feet together to “dust off your shoes” because that would give us good luck on our next journey.
When we left Taiwan, we knocked our shoes together and climbed back on a troop transport for the long journey across the Pacific Ocean. We briefly moved back to Camp Pendleton and started all over again. Almost as soon as we’d unpacked the cardboard barrels, our dad was transferred again, back to the South Pacific to Okinawa.
It was an eighteen-month posting and my mom had just taken her three Girl Scouts on a nearly month-long crossing of the Pacific Ocean on a rusty World War II troop transport. She decided we would stay on in Camp Pendleton without him, and await his return.
ANN
The next year at Camp Pendleton was relatively uneventful, as we waited for word from our dad. The U.S. presence in Vietnam hadn’t started in earnest yet, so it wasn’t as tense as his previous tours, but we also knew he might be sent there. I started fourth grade at the elementary school on the base, and Nancy began kindergarten.
When our dad returned, we had just a few weeks of “The Big Five” living together on Camp Pendleton before he was transferred again, this time to the Northwest. This transfer was one we looked forward to, however, because it would take us back to an area we loved, and it was near our extended families. Our dad had received a position as a recruiter covering Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and though he would have to travel a lot, we didn’t have to live on base. We packed up the cardboard barrels, dusted off our shoes, and headed north.
Our parents decided we would settle in Bellevue, Washington, in a neighborhood called Lake Hills. They rented a blue two-story colonial. It had a front and back yard, and it was the first real home we had lived in for years. During most of my childhood my sisters and I shared a room, but in the new house Lynn got her own room and Nancy and I shared another. Lynn was fourteen and starting high school that fall. She was social and made friends easier than I did, and her life began to shift away slightly from our family cocoon. That subtle change ended up making Nancy and me closer, and we became inseparable. We’d listen to the radio in our room, waiting for the new rock ’n’ roll hits, as DJs Pat O’Day and Lan Roberts counted down the hits.
I began fifth grade that fall, and Nancy started first grade. For me this was the beginning of a difficult socialization. I was heavier than my classmates, and other girls started to notice and make comments. My mother bought my clothes from a line named “Chubette.” I was a shy and sensitive girl to start with, and I didn’t want anything about me to stand out, but it seemed as if I always did. No one ever came up to me in school to say, “I love your dress, it’s a ‘Chubette,’ isn’t it?” but I lived in fear that the label would show.
I couldn’t wait for school to be over each day, and when it was, Nancy and I roamed the neighborhood on our bikes. Though we were girls, at that age we did mostly “boy” things. We lived in a new subdivision, at the edge of the trees, and there were many wooded lots nearby that we explored. The annual hydroplane races in Seattle were always fun to watch, and we made our own model hydros and dragged them behind our bikes. This was an era when children ran free without any parental supervision. We came home only when our mom yelled that supper was ready.
Our mother continued to be the on-deck parent. Dotes’s new job required that he be on the road a lot, and when he was home he would retire to his study and have a few beers. I know he drank to deal with his memories of war, and as time went on he drank more.
When he was on the road, our mother’s moods would often become explosive because the pressure of running the family would become too much for her. She and the teenaged Lynn would often get into arguments, yelling at each other and throwing things. Lynn took it on the face a few times, as did I, and it was really terrifying.
I was not a “Type A” personality. I was a kid who would go hide under the table like a rabbit if she got scared. But Lynn would fight back and say, “Fuck you.” Because Nancy was four years younger, she never really got into it with our parents. She learned, from watching Lynn and me, how to escape our mom’s wrath. But Lynn just crashed into it headfirst.
I’m not sure I truly understood it at the time, but all the traveling and the constant transfers had exhausted our mom. She loved our dad, but she was done with being a Marine wife. She was married to the Marine Corps as much as she was married to Dotes, and all those marching orders had worn her out.
Mom was a very competent homemaker who could clean, cook, and sew with the best of them. For decades she had made lemonade out of lemons. But there was so much pressure on military wives to hold everything together, it caused an incredible turmoil inside her. Sometimes the stress would have to come out, and she’d just blow. She’d yell, get in the car, which she called “Blue Bird,” and careen away. She’d come back a few hours later, calm, once again in control. She never had more than a drink or two, so she wasn’t in a bar, but I never knew where she went.
Our mom couldn’t do anything about the invisibility of being a Marine wife. The Marine Corps was just too big, and too powerful. She had no choice in how her life went. She had to take their orders, just as if she had enlisted herself. But she hated it.
One time when Mama stormed off in a fit in Blue Bird, she nearly came to her end. She ran into a traffic jam in the middle of Bellevue. Perhaps she was so steamed she didn’t notice, or maybe it was just bad luck, but she ended up over railroad tracks just as a train was coming. The train hit the back of Blue Bird, mangling the car terribly. Our mom survived uninjured, and Blue Bird was eventually repaired at the body shop. But it gave us one more odd battle scar in our family: We could honestly say that Mama got hit by a train.
3
Dust Off Your Shoes
Ann discovers Marlon Brando’s eyes and searches for an
Officer and a Gentleman. A Cotillion experienced “Alone,”
and the isolation in the middle of a gymnasium. . . .
ANN WILSON
After spending much of my childhood in hot dry climates, I learned to love the Northwest more than any other place. I would wake up to the soft gray skies and ride my bike through the canopy of Douglas firs. I cherished the constant fresh drizzle, and the smell of wood smoke from our fireplace. My favorite seasons were fall with frosty Halloween nights and the mild summers when we’d have backyard barbeques.
By the time I started seventh grade in the fall of 1962, a loud musical dialogue had begun in my head. It was a many-layered sound collage of the voices I’d heard all my life: the sweet bluesy songs my mother had sung to me when I was a baby, crazy Spike Jones stuff, and the Hit Parade of the fifties my parents played at cocktail parties. I’d also begun to explore the artists of my own generation: the Shirelles, the Supremes, Little Richard, Brenda Lee, but I also liked the song “Purple People Eater.”
That year I started to play the flute and joined the school band. Bellevue schools were very supportive of the arts, and my band teacher was first rate. For each instrument there was a chair ranking, and to move up a notch you had to challenge the person ahead of you to a playoff. I started as seventh chair, but after two successful playoffs, I moved to fourth chair, where I held steady. Anything above third chair was nearly impossible to obtain, and would have been held by girls who got straight A’s, and were super committed, which I was not. Still, being good at the flute was one of the few areas in my life where I felt I was on solid ground.
In my social interactions outside class, I felt increasingly shunned because of the way I looked. I wasn’t the heaviest girl, but I felt that every pound I
gained was noticed, and noted.
If that wasn’t hard enough, I began to stutter. It didn’t always grab me, but if I was nervous or trying to talk to a popular kid, it seemed to clutch me. The teacher would call on me, and the moment I heard my name, something grabbed my vocal chords and shut them. In my head, I could hear myself talking clearly, but what came out were small, clipped syllables. Once I felt the fear, I was lost. I’d stuttered a small amount in elementary school, but it wasn’t until junior high that it defined me. I became “the girl with the stammer.”
I started speech classes. At a certain point each day, my teacher would announce, “Ann Wilson, time for speech class.” Everyone watched me head off. I was mortified. The speech class was a series of recitations, with the concept that if I practiced difficult phrases, the stutter would go away. The effect only lasted during speech class. The moment I was back in homeroom, and the teacher called on me, the vicious cycle started all over again.
In junior high, we were often asked to read aloud in class, and this was one of my biggest challenges. I had managed to make a few friends who helped me with a ploy to make my stutter less obvious. The teacher would have the class take turns reading and we’d cycle around the room. When it was my turn, the boy next to me would finish, and the girl who sat one over from me would immediately start reading, and many times the teacher failed to notice that I had been silent.
In November 1962, Mutiny on the Bounty came to the John Danz Theatre in our town, and it moved me like nothing had in my life. Every move, every plane of Marlon Brando’s face, the way he simmered with complexity, floored me. He was refined, combustible, and elemental. His interpretation of the foppish, highbred Fletcher Christian to me was the stuff of rock stars. I look back now at some of the English navy-inspired tunics I wore onstage in Heart’s eighties videos, and I see only Mutiny. It was for me what Gone with the Wind must have been for my mother: an escape to a romantic otherworld.