In many ways Terry Jo might as well have been an alien from another planet, or a changeling who looked like Terry Jo but was really someone else who had taken her place, someone very different from the Terry Jo who left on that dream vacation worlds before. No one knew how to deal with her, except in the “let’s-all-act-as-if-nothing-happened” mode. Terry Jo simply followed the lead of others and revealed little to nothing. Plus there was the squirm factor – the discomfort many people feel around those who have gone through horror, or are dying from some horrible incurable disease. The most understandable parallel might be how uncomfortable people can feel around a young woman who has been raped, even though it is clear she is thoroughly innocent. What do you say? In fact, Terry Jo’s circumstance was, in many ways, similar to having been raped. She had her innocence wrenched from her in the most cruel and brutal of ways.
All of this meant that Terry Jo’s healing would be mostly up to her, despite that fact that even the most mature and healthy adult would find it too much to do alone. Her journey toward healing would be long, lonely, and fraught with peril. There would be missteps. Though no longer on that flimsy raft, she was still alone and, in a way, adrift. She had no idea how long it would be before she might be rescued, or possibly land on solid ground on which to build a life.
Terry Jo did continue with some of her friendships even if there was never talk of her ordeal. Her best friend was a girl named Pam, and next door to Pam lived a boy named Gregor. Pam’s family became a second home for Terry Jo. They included Terry Jo in many of their activities and made it clear that she was welcome there any time. And in good, solid, mid-American fashion, they meant it. Terry Jo and Pam did typical, healthy early-adolescent things like talk about boys, hang out with friends, go to parties, and engage in mild hijinks like rolling some sleeping bags onto the back of their bicycles, peddling over to a gas station, and talking loudly about their long bike trip from Wyoming. Terry Jo loved Pam for helping her laugh. Pam worried that pretty Terry Jo would steal boys away from her.
Terry Jo’s life was not completely lacking in friendships, or indeed love. The hearts of thousands went out to her; they just didn’t know how to touch her.
One of the first things Terry Jo did might be seen as partly an act of escape, but it was also an act of seeking something new and positive. At the age of twelve, she decided on her own to change her name from “Terry Jo” to “Tere,” though pronounced the same way. One day she simply informed her aunt, uncle, and everybody else that, from then on, she was to be known as Tere. To this day this is a legacy of the strength of Terry Jo’s will. Terry Jo was gone forever, part of that other world that was also gone.
She made this change for several reasons. One is that the name “Terry Jo” was so linked to such horror that she wanted to get away from it. The name was also linked to her as a victim, and she wanted to get beyond that, too. The third reason was that she had gotten tired of repeatedly hearing about “brave little Terry Jo,” as if people endlessly saying that would gradually push all of her demons away. It is ironic that she heard this so often while, at the same time, no one ever talked directly about the tragedy that required her to be so brave. She didn’t need to hear that anymore; she knew she was brave. The fourth reason, as Tere will tell you, was that changing her name was something she could control. This proved to be the first big step in taking charge of who she was, rather than allowing the Bluebelle incident to forever define her.
After changing her name, Tere did not know how she would do it, but she set out alone to find better ground. She had no map, and no guide. She had learned that the adults around had no more of an idea than she did. Much of what she would do over the following years would involve both running away from her troubles while running toward something better at the same time. She embarked on a years-long experiment to try to discover who Tere would be.
By age sixteen, Tere had carried her elephant too long and was tired. She was also bristling under the restrictive protectiveness of her good-hearted aunt. Even though her grandmother remained her emotional ally, and her rock, there was some tension with her three male cousins because she got so much of their parents’ attention. She also received material things because of an insurance settlement from boat owner Harold Pegg. He had been sued because it was determined that he had hired Harvey as a master when he did not have a master’s license. The settlement was large enough to create a trust fund for Tere.
With her grandmother’s blessing and strong support, and somewhat less enthusiastic support from “Mo” and “Unk,” Tere decided she wanted to go to a private school to try to start over again, a place where she wouldn’t have to carry the stigma of being the girl from the Bluebelle who went through stuff too terrible to talk about, a place where she didn’t need to be a guarded person among guarded people. The trust fund, an increasing source of security, would pay for her schooling. She chose Ferry Hall, a private girls’ school in Lake Forest, Illinois.
As it happened, she didn’t have as much anonymity at Ferry Hall as she had hoped. Her senior Big Sister there turned out to be a student from Green Bay who knew about the famous Terry Jo Duperrault of the Bluebelle. Soon the rest of the school did, too. So she shared her dorm room with a roommate – and her elephant.
She became a close friend with her roommate, Janis, who invited her to visit her home in Indianapolis over the first winter holiday break. She met a boy there and proceeded to fall head over heels for him. When she was rebuffed – the rebuff including being told that she wasn’t grown up enough yet – she was crushed. There was some teenage angst and dramatic heartache in this, of course – it was Tere’s first hard-hitting, love-at-first-sight romance after all. Her heartbreaker told Tere that the 1967 Bobby Vee song, Come Back When You Grow Up, captured it all. But there was so much more than angst and teenage breakup for Tere: she felt kicked in the stomach, not just by a breakup but by a reminder of how alone she was. She was surprised by how hard she took it. For the first time in years – perhaps for the very first time ever – she felt truly overwhelmed by all she had lost. It all hit her at once. It was too much to bear, and she finally broke down. She wept more than she ever had, and was too broken up to function.
Tere returned to the comparative security and comfort of her aunt and uncle’s home in De Pere, reconnected with some friends (including her best friend, Pam, and the neighbor boy, Gregor), and took some time off. Her aunt and uncle finally arranged for her to see a psychotherapist for help. Tere went to see him several times. She recalls that they talked about her emotional problems, adjusting to school, and problems with relationships, but (incredibly) they never talked about what happened on the Bluebelle. So a psychotherapist, no less, sidestepped the challenge of, and the need for, trying to get to the root of her problems.
This episode foreshadowed what would become a pattern in Tere’s life: seeking, finding, and then losing a relationship. Broken hearts are, of course, part of the emotional obstacle course of a normal adolescence. As a normal, healthy teenager, she had yearnings. In Tere’s case, however, the yearnings were deeper because, as psychologists might point out, she had lost so much, and she was still looking for her lost father, subconsciously if not consciously. As her emotional breakdown shows, her vulnerabilities were great. Needing somebody so much, she was vulnerable to being deeply hurt by their loss.
After returning to the Green Bay area and to her aunt and uncle, Tere returned to high school in East De Pere. She also reconnected with Gregor and they officially became girlfriend and boyfriend. Tere felt a special bond with Gregor because, a couple of years earlier, he had lost his father.
When Tere graduated from East De Pere High School, she remembered her father’s challenge to his children that “travel is the best education.” She decided to go to college to study Spanish. She chose the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point partly because she knew they had a travel-abroad program.
The summer after freshman year, the adventurous nineteen-year-old
Tere was in Spain. While there she traveled a lot, but especially fell in love with the Spanish islands of Majorca and Minorca. She took the ferry to them many times. She loved the beaches and the clear, emerald-colored water.
Not finding what she was looking for in studying Spanish language and culture, Tere dropped out of college after the fall semester of her sophomore year. She realized there was something else she was searching for, but she wasn’t sure what it was. She would have to keep experimenting.
Because she knew she wanted to help people heal, but she could not deal with blood, she decided she would try studying to be an X-ray technician. She got an apartment the next fall in Milwaukee and began a joint program between St. Michael’s Hospital in Milwaukee and the University of Minnesota. After the fall semester she moved to Minneapolis to continue the program at the university. She soon realized this wasn’t what she was looking for either, and besides she missed Gregor a great deal. So she packed up and abruptly left Minneapolis. She knew that Gregor had left Green Bay to go skiing in Colorado, but she didn’t know where. She missed him so desperately that she drove there in her Volkswagen Beetle and cruised through ski resort parking lots for days on end looking for his car. After a week or so, she gave up and came home to Aunt Dot and Gammie. It is tempting to point out that the quest to find her missing boyfriend is a metaphor for the continuing need to find her lost father. But she also needed to find something as yet unknown to replace what she had lost.
No sooner had she reconnected with Gregor back in Green Bay than he got his draft notice. It was 1971. Vietnam. Once he got the notice, the two of them rushed off on a political-romantic-escapist-adventurous dash to Canada so he could avoid the draft. Canadian authorities at the border, however, wouldn’t let them in. So they returned and Gregor dutifully reported to the draft board, ending up in the Army. This turned out to be a respite for Tere for, big-hearted as she was, she realized that she had been becoming more and more obligated to Gregor because he had lost his father, not because their relationship had other potential.
Later in the summer of 1971 Tere was at a 4th of July party with some friends. There she met a kind, attractive, and charismatic young man named John Satrazemis. Again, in that same pattern, she fell fast and hard for him; so hard and so fast that she married him three weeks later. Tere also liked John’s four brothers very much, and they her, and almost instantly felt like she had a new family. Tere and John lived both in Florida, where John’s brothers shared a house, and in Wisconsin. Their daughter, Brooke, was born in June 1974, but they divorced only a few months later. John, a good man in many ways, had proven not to be mature enough for the long-term responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood. And he had admitted that he was a less than faithful husband.
Even though her marriage had failed, Tere felt thoroughly embraced and welcomed by John’s family. So she packed up her things, loaded baby Brooke into the car, and headed off alone to Florida to stay with John’s four brothers. She was beginning to feel that she had to be a responsible adult now and she could not simply go back home this time to her Aunt Dot and Gammie. She also was exhibiting something else that was becoming another pattern in her life: heading to the sea in times of trouble.
It didn’t take very long before the other pattern returned. A handsome young man named Spencer Hill was living with John’s brothers in Florida. Spencer was nothing if not quick to (as Tere put it) “put the move on” her, and Tere was nothing if not quick to fall yet again. Soon she and Spencer had hooked up, baby and all. They and baby Brooke lived in a room in the brothers’ house for a while, then, in another romantic-adventurous move that only young lovers can sustain, in 1975 the three of them moved into a tent in Naples, Florida, living in romantic poverty right next to the rich and famous.
That year Spencer joined the Army. In early 1976 Tere got pregnant. But Spencer, the romantic charmer, was not built from the kind of responsible stuff that makes for a solid marriage and a great parent. Even though Tere saw this pretty clearly, she felt trapped by her pregnancy, and she didn’t want to have another child with no father. She knew too well how hard that could be. So she married Spencer in 1976 and had daughter Blaire that year. She vowed that she would work hard at being a good wife and mother. And besides, once again she was near the sea because they were stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Now an Army wife married to a man planning an Army career, Tere had son Brian in 1978. That same year her beloved Gammie died, another devastating loss that Tere had to deal with and which once again forced her to face being so alone.
In 1979 Tere and her husband, three young kids in tow, were transferred to Germany, the front lines of the Cold War. Even though Tere remained unhappy in her marriage, and her husband was be coming colder and more distant (and he would later to be found to have a drug problem), she stayed out of obligation to her kids and to the idea of family. She tried harder to be a good wife and mother.
As part of setting up arrangements for medical care for Army families after arriving in Germany, a remarkable thing happened. It began ordinarily enough. While arranging to set up pediatric care for her children, Tere had filled out a routine questionnaire full of questions about family background, medical history, her children’s vaccinations, the usual questions. To the question, “Are your parents living?” Tere, as she had done on other questionnaires over the years, simply checked “No.” When the pediatrician, who would become her children’s doctor, looked over the questionnaire in the routine parent-intake interview, he saw that question and the subsequent answer, then looked up and asked a simple, routine, obvious question:
“How did they die?”
A simple question that was simply profound. Tere had never been asked. So she answered.
Tere briefly said they had been killed, together, along with her brother and sister – all four of them, her world – on a sailboat a long time ago when she was young. The doctor’s jaw dropped. She didn’t go into much detail because the pediatrician interrupted and told her he wanted her to talk to his psychiatrist colleague. So, after nineteen long years of keeping so much of herself out of sight, Tere sat down and began to tell her story for the very first time. Slowly, very slowly, this began to change things. She had never before shared all of who she was. It was a new and unfamiliar experience. But the more she talked, the lighter that elephant began to feel, despite having to deal with a lot of pain as old issues kept so long in the dark began to come into the light. Ironically, it was around the same time that she was tracked down by a reporter from the Green Bay Press-Gazette, and an interview with her appeared in the paper. It was a big, front-page story. Everybody remembered Terry Jo and the Bluebelle.
Her journey and struggles were far from over. It would take years. But she finally had changed course and taken another step in the healing process. She would face more peril. She left Germany with her three small children and headed back to the United States. But she didn’t go to Green Bay this time. She went to another place where she knew she would be welcome. She flew to Kansas where her old, good friend Pam now lived with her husband and baby. She was one of a number of people who loved Tere very deeply, and absolutely never failed to be there for her.
After catching her breath and taking stock, she filed for divorce from her husband who had failed to contact her – because he was hospitalized for a drug addiction.
She once again packed up her children and was on the move again, on her own again. She headed back for the familiar warmth and security of her Aunt Dot. Aunt Dot had not seen the children for some time, and this was the real beginning of their close relationship with their “Grandma,” and one that would give them added security in the coming years. And Tere wanted that for her kids.
In the next few years Tere would go back to school, this time at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
After a few years, another man would come into her life – a charming man, in fact. He seemed kind and interested in her children and she married him, but
eventually he took advantage of her trusting nature and her need to be with someone. Tere prefers not to mention the name of this man, whose presence in her life she considers better forgotten. She discovered a well-concealed dark side that threatened her kids. She ran with her children one last time. But regardless of what else would happen, she knew she would get through it.
She had made some bad decisions, and some necessary ones. Yet she had given life. She had a family of three children who would prove to be remarkable people in their own right. She was strong for them. She loved and was loved by many. She had safe places: her aunt’s home, her friend Pam’s home, her first husband’s family. She had touched many people, and not all because of the Bluebelle. Even though she had experienced failed relationships, she never had a failed friendship.
Despite having had to do so much on her own after the Bluebelle and having had her idyllic childhood wrenched away, she hadn’t forgotten the lessons she learned from that world. She remembered what her parents, her grandmother, her aunt, and her uncle had taught her about love and family and the adventure called life; she remembered her multi-talented mother and her love of beauty; her dedicated father and his love of adventure (and, yes, she had traveled!); her brother and sister with all of the potential they represented; she remembered what neighbors had taught her about looking out for each other, about a work ethic from the rugged people of Green Bay.
She had moved many times on her own, taking first herself, then one, two, and three children with her. Once she had children, she always put them first. “My mom taught my brother and sister and me to survive in every way,” said Tere’s eldest daughter, Brooke Satrazemis. “Thanks to her teaching and her love – and her amazing example – we all feel we can survive anything.”
Whatever happened from here on out, she had a family; she had people to love, and to love her back. She had struggled mightily for years. But she was back home. And life had taught her much, not the least about what she was made of. She would get a good job and be greatly respected by her colleagues for her ethical approach to work, her kindness and support toward her colleagues, her dedication to the mission of caring for the natural world, and her good old-fashioned Green Bay work ethic.
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