by Laura Joplin
On April 28, 1958, the United States conducted atomic tests on the Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. A sense of potential annihilation hung in the air, a terrifying reality for those who were willing to look. It figured in all decisions in hidden, subtle, subconscious ways.
In her sophomore year, Janis worked on the yearbook staff, along with several of the guys from the Little Theater group. They were slowly emerging as the most important group she had met. They introduced her to a new horizon, one that had grabbed their minds and lives. In 1957, Jack Kerouac published On the Road, the first mind-blowing saga of another way of life. It chronicled the “Beat” generation, precursors of the beatniks. Janis’s gang saw Kerouac’s character Dean Moriarty as a fanciful, modern-day outlaw. Kerouac used the term “white nigger.”
The Beats reduced life to its essentials in order to feel alive again. They romanticized poverty and those living in that divine state of grace, most notably the black male jazz musician. They looked for leadership in his balance between humility and freedom. The Beats dressed to show their contempt for society and its values. They smoked grass, drank excessively, and talked in rambling stream-of-consciousness lingo that only the converted could understand. Their works challenged the naïve readers in Texas with the implied question, “Are you hip?”
Some say the term beat referred to a deadbeat, or being beat up. Kerouac thought it was from the word beatific, to walk to the beat of an inner, soul-guided music. The gang in Texas was desperately trying to break out of the mindless routine they felt society trying to force upon them. They yearned to be part of the real world, and they knew that wherever it was, it wasn’t in Port Arthur. The Beats offered awareness about the whole world, not just the parts that proper society wanted to tell kids about. To Janis, they seemed to promise answers to the questions of existence that so dominated her life.
Many Beat affectations showed up in teen movies, led by Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean in 1955. The film displayed a hero who was forced to rebel against the constraints of society, guided by a higher moral imperative. On the big screen he complained, “My parents don’t understand me.” He mocked the square world with an insolent attitude and a new uniform: blue jeans. The Hollywood image machines had discovered the huge adolescent audience. For the first time they geared programs especially for teens, a group that had been used to listening to the same things that their parents did.
The Beats became the guideposts for the intellectual gang that formed out of the Little Theater summer workshops. Janis wrote a note in Karleen’s yearbook:
To a good ole egg. I’ve tried in vain to analyze you but I can’t so I figured—what the hell (heck), stay confused. I wish I could figure you out. Who do you like now—Mickey, Dennis, Jim or David? I hope I will get to know and understand you better next year. Remember me always, SEZ Janis.
P.S. Remember—I AM A VIRGIN!
During the summer between Janis’s tenth and eleventh grades, she again participated in the Little Theater workshops. It was the same group of people, only she was older and more capable of handling herself. The Little Theater group was the one place where she felt comfortable and fully accepted. The social leaders of the workshop remained the boys—Dave, Jim, Adrian, Randy, and Grant.
This group of five guys didn’t admit women into its inner circle, but kept them on the periphery, as girlfriends or dates. In Janis’s sophomore year, she had occasionally dated guys in the group. She went to a DeMolay fraternal society installation dance with Roger Iverson, an occasional group member. She’d had a date with Dave Moriaty to go sailing. But she wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend.
When Janis wanted something she went for it full force. If she wasn’t invited initially to go to some event the guys were attending, Janis wheedled herself an invitation. She took it upon herself to call one of them and ask, “What’s going on? I’m ready to do something.” Slowly she became a steady member in her own right. She was a girl, she wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend, and she was a member of the gang. “Janis was self-assured and assertive enough to make friends with five guys who were handfuls themselves,” said Adrian.
Her hormones had finally kicked in to give her the physical maturity she so craved. She expected Lana Turner hourglass curves. Instead, her body defied her desire to retain her eighteen-inch waist. Her torso thickened and her hips headed toward the staunchness of a yeoman farmer’s wife, but her bosom developed only a gentle curve. She was never heavy in high school, but she lost the lithe grace of a young fawn and held a soft roll of baby fat just below her belly button that thwarted her desire to have a flat stomach.
Adopting the Beat attitude in her life, Janis caustically derided those who identified themselves by their superficial physical beauty. Someone who was pretty or popular had to prove she also had intellect before Janis would stoop to socialize with her. Several girls passed the test, though, and Janis was quite friendly with some of the most popular girls in school.
To some of her classmates, she appeared sullen and belligerent. Mother kept trying to help her fit in by making or buying her nice clothes, most of which Janis refused to wear. Some of the loudest arguments during Janis’s high school days were over clothes. She screamed indignantly when our maid washed the Keds that she had labored to get to just the right degree of dirty!
Since the schoolboard wouldn’t accept girls in pants, Janis wore black or purple leotards while her classmates were still marching in step with bobby sox and loafers. She wore her skirts right above the knee when most of the others placed their hems right below it. When the Barbie fashion dolls were introduced in 1959, Janis had a wardrobe no Barbie would be caught wearing. Janis was becoming a beatnik.
Janis and her friends took what little they knew of Kerouac’s characters’ life-style of snubbing society and blended it with a righteous attitude regarding their own flagrant behavior. They weren’t outcasts; they were rebels!
In July 1958, Time magazine wrote an article about Jerry Lee Lewis and his child bride. The following issue contained several letters to the editor deriding Lewis’s supposedly lax morals and poor character as representative of the “youth of today.” “This letter writer is crazy!” Janis stomped around the house, fuming at the unjust charges against her generation. “Then write your own letter to the editor and tell them your views,” was Mother’s reply. Janis did write a supportive letter and received a reply, thanking her for writing and saying that many others like her had written upholding the quality of the youth of today. She was proud of the letter and kept it in her scrapbook.
Time, our family staple weekly reading, wrote about the Beats in 1957. We also watched Steve Allen’s television talk show, and on one program Steve televised the hip new art form of free-form jazz, with Allen playing piano behind Jack Kerouac reading his writing.
Janis set herself apart at a time when people didn’t want to be different. Her classmates were just discovering mass movements. Their generation gelled around the new sound of rock and roll, led by Bill Haley and the Comets, who jumped onto the scene in 1954 with “Rock Around the Clock,” which was used in the movie Blackboard Jungle. A host of others soon followed—Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and more. The radio was the vehicle of liberation for teenagers, allowing them to talk directly to each other. Rock music was especially suited to the radio because it didn’t need a big band or a large ballroom.
Rock in those days was never listening music but always dancing music. It required audience participation. Elvis swung his hips and made the jitterbug erotic, and it was called bop. The Twist and other popular dances drew more people to the new sound.
Rock and roll owed its roots to folk music, black rhythm and blues, and country and western. Many blacks felt that they were being ripped off as the white kids took their songs and made large fortunes recording them. But the white kids were also finding a way to address and include blacks and the black experience in their segregated lives. Janis and her friends were more interested in the
root music of rock than in the Elvis style of rock and roll.
The large black minority in Port Arthur was blocked into a community in the oldest part of town, a downtown area bordered by Houston Avenue. The only blacks we saw regularly were domestics. In spite of that, we were well aware of the nightlife that was the mainstay of Houston Avenue, a sign of other qualities of life. The fact that it was forbidden made it even more intriguing. The blacks were only one of many defined cultural groups in our town. The area was a “melting pot of workers, Catholic Southern Louisiana Cajuns, Protestant East Texas rednecks, and a few East Coast managers,” explained Jim Langdon. The international port, with its oceangoing vessels, attracted many nationalities—Dutch, Irish, Italian, Mexican, German, Syrian, French, and more. The abundant heritages made it that much more difficult for us to see African-Americans as anything other than just another group, with its own stories and traditions.
Racial integration was beginning to get national attention. On September 4, 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used the state militia to block black students who were trying to attend Central High School. The upshot was that President Eisenhower ordered U.S. Army troops to escort nine black students to class. In September 1958, Governor Faubus closed four schools in defiance of the Supreme Court. It wasn’t until June 1959 that the federal court said that the Arkansas law allowing the school closures was unconstitutional and that blacks were allowed to enroll. In August 1959, 250 demonstrators assembled near Central High School in Arkansas to protest integration.
Port Arthur was solidly segregated, but the times sparked some tentative cross-race interaction. There was a black-versus-white tackle football game every Sunday afternoon in a field close to the borderline of the communities. “It was never angry or racist, it was just football, black against white,” explained Jack Smith.
Despite such intermingling, there were segregated waiting rooms for professional offices that served both races. The hospital had a separate black wing. Signs saying WHITES ONLY graced the water fountains.
Our parents were quiet rebels who recognized the authority of the larger society. The best they did was to pay a fair wage to the cleaning women who worked for us and give them our cast-off furniture when we bought new.
Race relations figured prominently in the Beat literature that Janis read with her gang. They adopted Kerouac’s ideals of the poor black man’s higher morality. Janis’s social studies class was taught by Miss Vickers, a stout dowager true to the schoolmarm cliché, including all traits that an excellent teacher should have. Miss Vickers liked to bring current events to class and one day raised the issue of race and the court decisions. One by one the students emphasized the value of segregation and their denial of any validity to the black claims. Janis and Karleen exchanged looks and Janis stood up. “Society’s treatment of the black person is wrong! They are people like you and me.” She expressed her heartfelt belief in equality and was greeted by derisive yelling in class. Karleen slumped in her seat, too intimidated to rise to her best friend’s defense. After class and down the hall they heckled her, “Nigger lover! Nigger lover!” Janis cringed in righteous indignation.
She went through much the same process when she dared question the value of unions. Our father was in management and she often heard tales of the arguments in the plants. The choice between union and management allegiance often drew the line in friendships. The local unions were big, powerful, and inclined to violent strikes. To Janis, it was a matter of what was right. How could you discover what was right until you could talk about everything, including whether the union viewpoint was fair and accurate. To many people, union support meant blanket support—right or wrong. Janis was in the minority side in our blue-collar town.
“Janis and I adopted a tough attitude to the world to survive,” Jim Langdon explained. “Port Arthur was hostile. It was outrageous that people so much stupider than me were going to push me around. I wouldn’t stand for being victimized by the Neanderthals of the world. Being tough worked. I got through.” Janis assumed a way of walking, a certain body posture, and a style of cussing designed to get people to leave her alone. A few classmates took to following her around school, begging her to say a cussword. They went off laughing when their taunts finally succeeded in her striking out with a verbal retort.
She began to develop a deliberate image to use in confrontations at school. She went to Karleen’s house and sat in the middle of the bed, practicing a special laugh. She cackled and listened to the effect. “Was it loud enough, Karleen? Was it irritating enough?”
By daring to rebel against the social code of conformity, Janis and her friends made themselves easy targets for the normal adolescent barbs. The guys got as much flak as Janis did, but the barbs stung her more deeply than they did her friends. They embedded themselves in a way that made them hard for her to release, then or years later.
Society’s resistance to what was obviously the right thing to do—racially integrate—further heightened Janis and her intellectual pals’ views of the backward nature of their hometown. They began to see themselves as victims of an ignorant world. The national racial conflict with its local echoes spurred them to pursue the other side of life. It was almost as if some people in society were ready, waiting for someone to shove the racial issue to the forefront. Janis’s gang responded to the call.
The routine at home—Pop working and Mother caring for the kids—changed radically in Janis’s junior year. Grandmother Laura East needed nursing care and our mother had to find some extra money to help pay for it. Mom enrolled in a typing course at the local business college to hone her skills before she started to apply for jobs. She was so obviously competent that before the semester ended, the school hired her to teach the course! She took on the job of training young ladies to be secretaries, guiding them from adolescence to their first paying jobs. At the same time, Janis was systematically breaking the local social codes, almost as though ticking them off a list. The contrast made Janis’s defiance even more uncomfortable at home.
Our parents liked her interest in pursuing a subject whether it was a school assignment or not. Once she got the idea of making beer in the bathtub. “You’re not old enough to drink, dear,” they said to her enthusiastic plans. “I know. I don’t care. I just want to make it,” she replied. She amassed the materials and worked on fermenting the mash, but something went wrong and the goo soured horribly. She carted the failed brew out to the backyard and buried it. Although our father often mentioned his fond memories of making bathtub gin, no one seemed to make the connection with Janis’s beer efforts. Perhaps in her own fumbling fashion she had been trying to succeed in his eyes.
Janis’s junior and senior years were marked by periods of peace broken by instances of outrageous behavior that led to confusion, panic, and yelling at home. “She just changed totally, overnight,” Mom said with a sigh. “A complete turnabout from her former self, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t understand it.” Perhaps Janis was one of the minority of girls who have a severe problem with the hormonal imbalances and physical changes of puberty. Perhaps she was just too intelligent and had too strong a sense of righteousness to accept the myriad compromises that life asks of us. She was incapable of drifting through life. Once she began challenging cultural values and standing for truth, she crossed an invisible line that could never be retraced. Rebellion took on a value and meaning of its own. Each challenge or request that she stop a behavior resulted in a firm attachment to the activity. Resistance brought equal resistance and a heightened escalation of the problem.
Janis’s searching left an ocean-sized wake of chaos in the house. I was emotionally terrorized by the flying discord, and did the only thing an eleven-year-old could do—I hunted for a higher authority. I started going to church and prayed for everyone.
In retrospect, Janis’s behavior was not so terribly shocking. Most of the time she just hung out with her pals and talked. They congregated at Jim Langdon’s house because h
is father worked nights and his mother was willing to make herself scarce. “We just had fun, good clean fun,” Adrian Haston said. The group gathered in the evenings or on the weekends and searched for something interesting to do. Sometimes they went to the beach, like everyone else, to build campfires and have picnics. Occasionally they stopped at the abandoned lighthouse and snooped around and talked. In flat, marshy Port Arthur, there were few high spots to catch the eye, but two available ones were the water towers and the Rainbow Bridge. The gang climbed them both, often, to sit and look at the world below. They held a goal of climbing every water tower in the area at least once.
The group had its own version of the drag. While other kids cruised a four-to-five block strip of town, gawking at each other, this gang took to the highway. They carved a groove in the triangle from Port Arthur to Beaumont to Orange and back. They spent half their lives in cars. They would stop at a diner along the way for some java, soak up the working-class ambiance, and continue their intense discussions. They talked about movies like Picnic, in which the female hero leaves everything for a man who loves her for qualities other than her beauty. They were typically paranoid about being spotted by their parents in some unapproved activity. “Canoe racks” was a signal for Dave to duck down in the seat because a car with canoe racks, like the one his father had, was approaching. It was always good for a rise, whether or not the car-top carriers were visible. Most discussions concerned the evils in the world, the hypocritical social structure, the banality of the school, the boring town, and prudish sexual values.
Janis started reading Mad magazine with the guys. She laughed at Alfred E. Neuman, whose cartoon antics poked fun at the world of adults and presented a sense of a national underculture that held a satirical view of life. Mad cartoons mocked middle-class America, television, the suburbs, and anything else that smacked of accepted values. For a while Jack Smith and Tary Owens put out a high school humor magazine, giving the young commentators a place to voice their opinions.