by Laura Joplin
Art was becoming a way Janis interacted with the world. It provided entrées and a sense of identity and specialness. In 1957 she approached the librarian during one of the frequent family library visits. “Do you need any volunteers around here?” “Absolutely” was the reply. That summer, Janis worked doing posters for the library bulletin boards. The Port Arthur News took a photo of her in front of her illustration of the Scarecrow of Oz. The headline read, LIBRARY JOB BRINGS OUT TEENAGER’S VERSATILITY. They quoted her: “It gives me a chance to practice art and at the same time to do something worthwhile for the community.”
Port Arthur could be a very proper place, offering a clear idea of what young ladies should be like. Janis was well on her way down the accepted path for young ingenues, but with increasing age came increasing awareness. The pristine image of the town contrasted with Port Arthur as a port city, with wide-open prostitution and gambling blatantly advertised on the sides of buildings. None of it, of course, was discussed in polite society. Headlines calling the town SIN CITY spiced newspapers around the country as a new district attorney vowed to clean it up.
In Janis’s seventh-grade year, 1954, the Supreme Court had banned school segregation. We all held our breath in the highly segregated South to see what would come of this grand chess game in the North. We lived a racially isolated childhood. The blacks in town, at least 40 percent of the population, lived “on the other side of the tracks.” They kept in their place and we in ours. The few times our family ever went to the ocean to enjoy the beach, about twice a summer, we had to drive through the black part of town. It didn’t take a genius to see the smaller, tattered homes, raggedly clothed children, and general state of inequality.
Our parents were frank about it. “Society’s treatment of the Negro is wrong, but you can’t do anything about it. You’ll only get hurt if you try.” There wasn’t much opportunity to do anything anyway, beyond trying to smile and be kind to a black person on the street, if they would look at you. Still, discussions were in all the newspapers and magazines. Our parents subscribed to Time, and we were all expected to read it cover to cover. Like the rest of the country, Janis was influenced by the rumbling racial challenges.
Added to that was Janis’s ill-fated job as salesclerk in a toy store. She was elated when she came running to us, gushing that she had the job. A Christmas salesgirl! She took it seriously, and asked Mom for tips about helping customers choose the right toy in the right price range. Then her boss told her to mark up one group of toys. That was no problem, until the next day. She came home with an aching sense of dishonesty. “They had me mark the same toys back down, and put a sale sign up! It’s dishonest,” she said. It seemed as though everywhere she looked, she saw social hypocrisy. People she used to respect were no longer admirable. The emperor had no clothes.
Janis did the only thing a bright, determined, idealistic girl could do. She went searching. She simply turned her head away from the prescribed path to face the layers of life that society had told her were not the proper ones for a young lady. She didn’t make a clean break just yet. She was merely curious. With simplistic reasoning, she decided that if the good people weren’t all good, then perhaps the supposedly bad people weren’t all bad. She was off to see for herself.
FOUR
ADOLESCENCE
Well I know that you got things to do and places to be
And I guess I’ll have to find the thing and place for me
I may wind up in the street a-sleeping ’neath a tree
Still I guess you know I’ve gotta go
—POWELL ST. JOHN, “Bye Bye Baby”
SEEKING NEW HORIZONS, Janis joined the summer program of the Port Arthur Little Theater just after the ninth grade. She spent most of her efforts painting scenery for the productions, and also ushered on the evenings of the performances. Sunday Costs Five Pesos was the only stage play in which Janis had a role. She played an ingenue, appropriate casting for that time in her life.
The Little Theater program was run by the mother of Grant Lyons, a student one year ahead of Janis. The Lyonses were Eastern folk who had come to Port Arthur for work in the refineries. They aspired to a broader cultural experience than was readily available in provincial Port Arthur.
Grant ran with a group of intellectuals who were united by their disdain for the level of mental sophistication of their classmates and the town in general. The Little Theater enabled them to identify with the greater artistic world. The workshops were also a great place to meet girls. The daily activities in the program brought together a large group of adolescents who began to hold parties and hang out together. The core group was Grant’s nucleus of friends—Dave Moriaty, Adrian Haston, Jim Langdon, and Randy Tennant. There was no leader; they were all equally powerful in their own right.
Dave was a slender fellow with thick, wavy hair and large, piercing eyes. He saved money from mowing lawns and raising bees to buy a seventeen-foot sloop, which gave him instant social status, something he made much use of in his headlong pursuit of girls. He was intent on becoming a scientist, building rockets with Randy Tennant in his spare time. Randy Tennant was a twinkle-eyed, slender-built fellow, a scientist with an artistic bent. Grant was the athlete, later becoming an all-district linebacker and an all-state baseball player. He was a hunk with sandy hair who had a passion for folk music. Dave, Grant, and Randy were members of the Latin club and the theatrical club, and served in various functions on the school newspaper. Jim Langdon was a shorter, stockier guy with large blue eyes that sat on his face in such a way as to give him a lovable Basset hound look that the girls craved. He was an incredible flirt, and girls fretted continuously over becoming his steady. His passions included playing trombone in the school band as well as local dance bands. Adrian Haston was a tall, slender, dark-haired fellow who had droopy eyelids that matched his slow-talking voice and gentle demeanor. He was exceedingly kind and intelligent. He played in the band and loved music. The year before Janis met them, several of the guys had been active in student government and received meritorious citations. Whatever they did, they did together.
They steered the socializing in the Little Theater group to their own ends, taking great delight in mocking anyone brazen enough to admit they believed in anything good. Adolescent cynicism was their modus operandi.
The Little Theater group did what most adolescents did in Port Arthur and other small towns: They piled in a car, drove to an out-of-the-way spot, sat, and talked. They liked Sarah Jane Road, a dead-end track on the back of the Atlantic-Richfield refinery that was lined with tall sweet gum trees from which hung aimless masses of gray Spanish moss. That road stimulated talk of death because it was rumored that a woman named Sarah Jane had hanged herself from one of the trees. “I wonder if Sarah’s in heaven looking at us right now?” Janis would say. “Heaven? What makes you think there is even a God, girl? Religion is just sugar coating for pea-brained idiots incapable of coming to terms with their own mortality.” Jim Langdon could always command the discussions with his deep, booming voice and an ability to speak with authority, no matter what the topic. Janis argued with him, “How can you not believe in God? You must!” They all laughed and mocked her naïveté.
That was it! People questioned God. Her ninth-grade experiences let her see that society wasn’t living by the morals it tried to foist on its youth. In the summer Janis realized that the groovy people didn’t even believe in God, the Ten Commandments, and hell. Discovering the hypocrisy of society and the possibility that God wasn’t guiding things after all freed her from adopting the status quo. If the supposedly “good” people weren’t really good, and if God wasn’t there to follow, then she could make decisions about her behavior on her own terms. She was free to look around the world with her newly awakened vision, taking in all walks of life. Perhaps the supposedly “bad” wasn’t so at all, especially if the protectors of local social codes were breaking them whenever they could get away with it.
As the summer ended
and Janis got ready to launch her high school career, Mother rose to the occasion. She wanted to provide a nice home for Janis so that she would feel proud to bring her friends over. To Mom that meant buying new furniture. We’d had the same old maple-framed furniture from Sears that the folks had purchased when they moved into the house. Mother became intent on modemizing.
The forefront of the architecture and art of the time was the modern movement, which threw away with brazen abandon the gargoyles of ancient history and exposed the beauty of the simplicity of structure underneath. Mother loved it. She fancied herself on the forefront of design. We drove to Fingers furniture store in Houston and picked up new living-room and dining-room sets. Mom chose a heavy-duty brown nubby-tweed stuffed couch. It was flanked by two end tables made of blond ash that had slender, triangular-shaped legs and a glass-covered storage area. On them sat a matched pair of brown aluminum conical lamps trimmed with a swirl of bright brass and topped by a narrow strip of a lamp shade. The dining-room set matched the end tables, blond wood with brown-tweed seat covers. On the windows she hung long-wearing fiberglass curtains.
The summer of 1957 and on into her first year in high school, Janis wore lots of makeup, straight skirts and white shirts, bobby sox and loafers, and had softly curled hair. Her sophomore year was marked by her embarrassment with her undeveloped body. She was still up to a year and a half younger than many of the girls in her class, and her relative physical immaturity became increasingly important to her. Her body was slow to change. She remarked later about why she was unhappy in school: “’Cause I didn’t have tits at age fourteen.” She spoke in a derisively humorous tone, but there was truth in there too. When she entered the tenth grade, she was still very slender and had just begun to develop hips and soft breasts.
Regrettably, Janis’s face blossomed in a never-ending series of painful bright red pimples, the worst brand a girl could have. Such magazines as Seventeen explained that pimples were caused by drinking Cokes, eating French fries and chocolate, and poor face-washing practices. She denied herself all such pleasures and scrubbed endlessly, but still the glaring dots appeared. Mother took her to a dermatologist, who continued the charges. “Pimples are your fault!” he seemed to say. “Keep your hands off your face.” Then he pricked her face and squeezed the skin in an attempt to clear them up. He tried to burn the big ones with selective applications of dry ice, but nothing seemed to work. No one realized then that pimples are caused by bacteria and hormones and could be treated with antibiotics. When nothing worked, Janis got furious at the doctor and angry at her predicament.
Adolescence is a time of searching and trying on roles. Until age fourteen or so, childhood develops in predictable patterns. When puberty kicks in, all bets are off. For most girls, puberty is a high-pressure experience characterized by mood swings and irrational emotional outbursts. For some girls, the intensity of the changes is even greater. For Janis it was wrenching.
The question each young person asks is, “Who am I?” It is generally paired with, “Who do I want to be?” Janis had already been well schooled in the importance of these essential questions of life by our parents. In her sophomore year she was consumed by the overwhelming need to answer them. She was intelligent and inquisitive. She didn’t just look at the options set before her by society; she surveyed the world.
Janis was surprised and then overwhelmed by a perceived inability to attain the social ideal. She had always had a strong ego and a proud sense of herself, but in high school she began questioning. She thought she had “pig” eyes, incapable of ever being one of the long-lashed lovelies so brilliantly photographed in glamour magazines. She hated her name and her initials. Unlike her classmate Arlene Elster, whose initials were ACE, Janis said, “JLJ, it spells nothing!” She bit her nails, which further embarrassed her. She tried putting a red rinse on her hair, thinking it would change her look, but all she saw in the mirror was Janis with reddish hair. She went to the toniest salon in town and had Mr. Allen give her a new do, but it didn’t change her social standing.
Janis looked around school and saw the hierarchy of social groups. At the top were those in class government; next came the athletes, the cheerleaders, the kids with great personalities whom everyone liked, and finally a giant mess of others of indistinguishable quality. She clearly felt among the last group, while her ego felt she deserved to be in the top tier.
“The main goal of high school was to not be different,” said Kristen Bowen, classmate and family friend. “Clubs were the thing.” In January 1958, Janis joined the Future Teachers of America. She pasted her candle and card, with red, white, and blue ribbons on it, in her scrapbook. She was active in Tri Hi Y, making centerpieces for dinners and decorating for dances. She made posters for candidates in school elections, hosted poster parties, and was known to place a fifty-cent bet on the outcome of an election.
Turning to an alternative “in” group, Janis and Karleen began to hang out with the Vitalis-coiffed toughs who could be called the “Fonzies” of their day. They formed car clubs and wore black leather jackets with names embroidered on the back, such as “Nighthawks” or “Highway Prowlers.” For a while, Janis dyed her hair orange like the tough girls who hung in the car clubs. Janis loved one of the guys, Rooney Paul. He was not a joiner in school activities. He lived alone with his mother and had gone to work at an early age. When Janis met him, he worked at the drive-in. Rooney was a skinny six feet tall. He hung out at a run-down café across the street from the school called the Bucket, and nicknamed “the Bloody Bucket.” He was very good-looking in a sexy fashion. He had thick, long hair that swept back in a duck tail with just the right amount of loft in the front. His thick lips begged girls to kiss them. Janis and Rooney Paul dated for a while, but not long enough to be true steadies. Still, the relationship they formed continued throughout high school.
Karleen Bennett was still Janis’s best friend. Arlene Elster was also close to Karleen, so the three gathered at Karleen’s house frequently. Arlene lived only a few blocks from Karleen. They discovered that the keys to Karleen’s mother’s car fit Arlene’s mother’s car, so Karleen and Janis would walk the few blocks to Arlene’s, then they would drive the car to Karleen’s house just for the thrill of taking it. When Arlene was ready to go home, she would back the car home so that no mileage would register on the odometer. They spent a lot of time sitting by the swimming pool at the country club and flirting with the lifeguards.
Once they decided to roam the city as photographers. Camera in hand, they headed to the canal to walk across the drawbridge to Pleasure Pier. A statue of some notable town father caught their attention, and they posed and reposed each other clambering on it. This social affront insulted the sensitivities of a proper family out with their young children. Their scornful glances further heightened the thrill of the adventure.
Janis often asked Karleen how to do things, and she was easily led. Out in the car in winter at a drive-in restaurant, Karleen was smoking a cigarette. Janis saw the exhaled breath and said, “I can’t believe you can hold that much air.” Karleen smirked, not telling Janis that the breath she saw was merely frost in the frigid air.
Janis had an early curfew on school nights, whose violation would mean grounding. Once, realizing she would be late, she asked Karleen, “What’s the absolutely quickest way to get to my house from here?” Karleen suggested a route and Janis was off, driving Pop’s work car home. Later that night Janis returned to Karleen’s, mournfully relating a story of running a stop sign and broadsiding a car. “You didn’t tell me I had to stop at the stop signs!” she accused. Luckily no one was hurt, but it was a bad accident and grieved everyone involved.
Pop took special pride in his autos, not that we had any distinctive models to crow about. He kept them in good running condition, clean and waxed. He bought used cars, choosing models he read about and ones his engineer’s eye decided were in good shape. In addition to his affection for the cars themselves, he demanded a weight
y sense of responsibility from others. He was more than a little upset about Janis’s irresponsibility in running the stop sign. It was the biggest problem any of his kids had ever caused and he seethed in astonishment, yelling in a voice we seldom heard, “How could you be so dumb? Someone could have been hurt!” Janis was crushed, embarrassed, frustrated, and upset that she had failed so miserably. It was just another sign that she didn’t measure up to the standards of the world. She was grounded and spent the time moping around the house in an emotional climate that was hostile and resolute. Our parents realized that their strictness on time limits was part of the cause of the accident. They tried to ease up and put time in proper perspective to safety.
In tenth grade, Janis took social studies, English, plane geometry, biology, gym, and Latin. She received A’s and B’s and a few C’s for grades. “I have enjoyed having her in class” was the comment written by one of her teachers. “Janis is an excellent student and thinker.” However, she continued to receive poor marks for her behavior in class. “N’s [needs improvement] will become X’s [unsatisfactory] unless talking is stopped.” This trend continued throughout high school.
The Port Arthur schools were excellent. They paid higher salaries than those of most towns in Texas. Fifty-seven thousand people lived in the town, which was the center of the world’s largest oil-refining district. Many of the wealthiest oil companies had their newest and biggest refineries in the area. The companies invested in the school system as a way to train top-quality workers for the local plants.