Several years ago my mother wrote a paper about my dad, Paul [break] which was very nice because none of us knew anything about [break] … and I told my Dad I would write something about my mother. Cause nobody else knows her but me now.
So I’m not sure why I’m doing it, I think it’s for myself, and maybe for you too. And it may not be completely accurate, because there are big blanks in my memory too.
So I’m going to start out by saying …
My mom was born Vera Lenore Loveland, December 23, 1911, in Harleton [?], Montana.
She was the fourth child of Mina Alice and Robert A. Loveland. Her other siblings were Russ, Wayne, Mary and her youngest brother Bill. I don’t know anything about Harleton, but I know that they moved to Lewistown when my mother was quite young. And they built their house, which is at 1010 W. Main. And it was a very large house. As far as I know all of the children went to Lincoln Elementary School as I did later in life, and Lewistown Junior High.
My mom as far as I know was pretty athletic, she liked to play basketball, and she was a lifeguard at the swimming pool.
At age 13 my mother was fully, physically developed. And in those days, sex was not spoken of -- only in negative terms. She had no idea of what anything was about.
At age 16, her and my aunt Mary double dated with two boys named Donald and Bud. Donald was ten years my mother’s senior, and somehow both my mother and her sister got pregnant. Life changed for her radically then. My grandfather told her she had to leave. So my aunt and my mother went to Detroit and both had their babies in Detroit.
I don’t know who they knew or how they got there, but this is what happened.
[break] … model, and then when she had my sister, she went back to Lewistown and left her with my grandmother, and then she, my mother, went back to Detroit, and in Detroit continued modeling and then married my father, Joseph Smith, previously Russkowski, who worked for the post office. Now my father I don’t remember hardly at all, except that my mother tells me he was very alcoholic. And he was a singer, and when he wasn’t drinking he was singing on the radio, plus his job at the post office.
I don’t know what all happened, my mother was modeling. Then I guess when I was born, again I went back to Montana. Meanwhile my mother was still in Detroit and doing modeling. She modeled for a church, for a Mary [Madonna sculpture] to be at a church, and she modeled clothes and modeled … she stood for students that were learning art.
And during that time I guess she became pregnant again, but because of my father’s alcohol, he kicked her down a flight of stairs and she lost the baby, and she became quite obsessed with that. Many of the poems that she has in her poetry book relate to babies that died.
So it wasn’t very easy for her. This was all during Depression times. And eventually she came back to Montana, and worked for the chamber of commerce for awhile. And eventually she got a job with the NYA, which was the National Youth Administration, during Roosevelt’s time. And she had to work a hundred miles from Lewistown because that’s how far apart the towns are. So she either worked in Billings, which was a hundred miles one way, or Great Falls, which was a hundred miles the other way. So on weekends she would come home.
During that time in my life when I was with my grandmother, it was not an easy time, because, for one thing I always felt left out of what was going on. My sister still – had had a different father – and she was considered more important because of the prominence of that family, even though she was illegitimate.
My grandmother was very close to her because she had had … she was the first baby to come. And she -- my grandmother -- became very, very close to her. Nancy even used to sleep with her as time went on and read with her. And somehow or another I was kinda like somehow outside of the circle. I guess I didn’t know it then, but I was very, very shy -- very, very passive and I did not take criticism well.
So, let me see … this is hard. That’s all I want to say right now.
I used to wait for every weekend when my mother would come home from her job. She would stay during the week and then come home on the weekends. I remember I always had so much to tell her, because I didn’t think my grandmother treated me right. And I would build it all up and wait and wait for her to come home. And then actually when she got home, I kinda forgot to even say anything. I think that’s because I wasn’t sure she would believe it anyhow.
During my mother’s time when she working and driving long distances, she picked up a hitchhiker, an elderly man, who was to affect her life for many, many years. He somehow thought that she was like his dead wife, that had died.
And after she had picked him up and dropped him off, he would try to come see her every day in Lewistown. Eventually my mother moved back to Detroit, we were still with my grandmother in Lewistown.
And she got married to my stepfather who was Paul Averit. When they came back … Well, first I guess she wrote my grandmother a letter, and my grandmother told my sister that my mother had remarried. I didn’t know anything about it until the day she walked up to my school with her new husband, and I had the biggest fit anybody could have. I had always said to my mother that I’d take care of her, and I would take her on a long cruise when I grew up.
So without any knowledge of this man in our lives, I just freaked out. And I cried and I screamed and I did everything because she had brought this man home. And that lasted for quite a while.
Anyway he was in the Marines, and eventually was transferred to California. But my sister and I still stayed in Montana. But my mother was in San Diego with him. And then suddenly decided to bring me and Nancy where she was.
So I remember we took a train called the El Capitan, We were like the only two people on a whole train full of Seabees, going oversees. To this day I have a book called Bulldog Drummond with everybody’s autograph on it. No, we had a great time.
When we got ... I think the train stopped in San Franciso and we went to a hotel with my mother, where she picked us up. And everything is kind of hazy there except we ended up in San Diego, and my stepfather was sent overseas to the Marshall Islands.
While we were in San Diego I went to school for about 3 months, and then we moved back to Detroit.
My mother had a friend who helped us buy a house. And that was in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. Well, meanwhile before we got the house, we lived in a couple of apartments, so I went to like four schools … no, wait a minute, now I’m mixed up.
Before we went to Michigan, we lived in Mohave, California. So I went to junior high for a few months in Montana, a few months in San Diego, and a few months in Mohave, and a few more months in Michigan. So I went to four [junior] high schools.
I didn’t get to know anybody very well, but in Michigan, in St. Claire Shores, I finally went to school up until my junior year.
Meanwhile my sister got married.
And incidentally, during this time, that man, whose name happened to be Sullivan, that my mother picked up on the road, had followed us to San Diego. He left notes, cut up our clothes. Then when we were in Michigan, somehow or other he got to Michigan, and there he did the same thing. And he put my mother’s name down in bathrooms in Detroit, people were calling, and it was really, really awful.
Meanwhile my stepfather was overseas and my mother was working, like most people did, in a factory for guns and planes or whatever.
And Nancy and I got a little wild. One time we stole the car; my sister had it hotwired and, guess what, she ran into a police car. So those were the days. However, when my dad came out of the service, came back to Detroit, and he suddenly tried to be The Boss. Well it was a little late. Nancy was … we were both in high school. He was trying to be the boss and we didn’t … we used to call him “little Hitler” all the time. Because what we thought was ok, he thought was really outrageous.
Anyhow my dad was not feeling very good, he was coughing a lot, and the weather was very, very cold in Michigan. So the doctor recommended that we move to … someplace like AZ. Meanwhile my sister was married so she was out of the house.
Incidentally from her days in Montana when she had done a little stealing, she had ended up getting caught stealing in Michigan from a very prominent department store. And it really … it really showed me that when you get away with something, it’s easier to do it over.
Anyway, we did then .. my dad did decide to go to Arizona. We went to a town called Prescott, Arizona, because it was supposed to be very warm, but the first year we were there it snowed! And he did … ok.
And that was … I had gone three years to high school in Michigan, now I was at my last year of high school in Prescott. It was a real, real hard decision to decide what to do. I was able either go back and go on a trip with my class in Michigan, or stay in Prescott and go through the graduation ceremonies.
I finally decided to stay in Prescott, even though I did go back and visit my sister later.
Meanwhile that little man, that Sullivan man, was following us again. He came again, we never knew where he was, we called the police and everything, but we never could find him. And he continued to wreck some kind of havoc … my mother was constantly worried about where and when he was going to show up again.
So from Prescott, my dad got a job at what they call Davis Dam. They were building a dam which was down from Boulder Dam and he went to work there.
My mother became a librarian. This is a very small town, which is now known as .. well part of Laughlan. There were about two stores, and the river, and the government project.
My mother meanwhile got a job as a librarian, which she really, really loved. But for some reason my dad was not happy there and wanted to leave.
But meanwhile I went to college at Arizona State in Tempe and started as a music major. And it was a completely different thing in my life, because I had never been alone, never had any responsibility … for myself or anybody else. So I ended up eventually messin’ that up.
But I did meet my first husband in college. Went out with him two times and became pregnant.
I went to the doctor, and the first time I went they said that I wasn’t pregnant, that maybe it could be a tumor. So I told my mother about this, and I was more relieved to say it was a tumor than a baby at that time. And of course she got very concerned.
And then the next time I came back, it wasn’t a tumor, it was a baby. And then my mother was really upset, cause she claimed I was lying to her, that I had been lying about it all along, you know. So that didn’t turn out to be a very good situation.
I wrote to my … In between school, when I was not on campus I was living with my mom and dad in Davis Dam, and I wrote him a letter and I told my … the father of the child that I was pregnant … And he at that time was in the Air Force, he was about a year or two after me and had been drafted to go into the service. So he was in Puerto Rico at the time and I wrote to him. And I guess that he decided he was going to marry me. So he came back, he was a good guy, he was a nice guy, but it wasn’t a good situation, because neither one of us were very smart. He was an only child, and his mother doted on him, and everything was … he was ok, but I wasn’t ok.
Well we really didn’t live together, hardly at all. When he got transferred to another place in Florida, we did take a plane, my son and I, when he was about a year old and went to Florida to see him, for the first time. And it went ok, it was all right.
But in his area he knew a lot of people, that he’d even known from childhood. He’d originally been brought up in Huntington, West Virginia .. and the “only mother” [child?] routine … He had .. he was overly interested in people with education and wealth, the other people were not that interesting to him. And it was like, you know, a class thing. Well that bothered me.
And then he started going to a church, where -- what we would call today maybe born-again Christians -- where everybody had to be one of those, or they were in trouble. And I remember they were trying to get me to get up and take some kind of communion, like you would in the Catholic Church, and I refused to do it because I wasn’t .. didn’t believe that I should do that. I wasn’t that religion, and I didn’t want to do that. So that caused a little problem.
And so I went back to Davis Dam, he was still in the service, went back to Davis Dam with my son. And one day I got a “Dear Jeanne” letter -- not a “Dear John” letter -- from him. He had gone to Huntington, West Virginia, where he had been raised … and he had an old girlfriend, named Sweetsee, that he felt he was in love with, and he had all this background, his favorite teacher was a friend of hers, and he went on and on and on about how, you know, he loved her, and so he decided to get a divorce. We hardly ever had lived together.
The best thing I can remember was a kind of like a honeymoon we had. We went to Oak Creek Canyon. And it was like a beautiful cabin where they raised their own chickens and grew all their own food. And it was very quiet and very beautiful. That I remember … it’s the only really good thing I remember. Although he wasn’t mean, he wasn’t abusive, none of those things.
So I was back with my mom and dad. Things went bad there, and we moved to Texas where my uncle was, for some reason I’m not sure what, had to do with work. Then we went to Laredo, which was across the border.
And Stephen … right from the beginning I could see that my mother was kind of controlling … wanting to control my baby. And she got a Spanish lady to come in and take care of him, you know, when I should have been able to do it myself. And, and I guess I let her. So it’s my own fault in a way.
(Here we go again, moving around, did a lot of moving around.)
Oh, I don’t know, we had a falling out, my mother and I, and my dad lost his job and they decided they were going to Washington. Finally my mom and dad came back from Washington and went to Las Vegas, Nevada. And I’d had enough of San Antonio, trying to make it on my own and decided to go with them, went to Las Vegas, where we had a trailer, with an upper bunk for Stephen and a lower bunk for me. And we all got jobs in the casino … Well, my mom got a job at the Sahara as a head housekeeper, and I got a job at the Desert Inn as a billing clerk at the front desk. It was an interesting nine months.
All right, I got as far as Las Vegas. Now the rest of my life is an open book, and you probably know it. But the purpose of this was not to give you my life, and if you want to know about that you’ll have to ask me -- this was about my mother, and I really got off the beaten track.
What I guess I want you to remember is that the time she was brought up, the things that happened to her, was very, very difficult for her in that time frame. Women were not respected very much, especially if they weren’t at home. She went from a sixteen year old girl and working, which she’d never done, she finished high school in correspondence. And she went on and improved herself constantly.
I was going to say something about ….
Ok, so my mother was a strong woman who took care of her children to the end, as far as she could. I think it was harder then than it is now, but everything is relative. She worked for a senator, she worked for a lawyer, she was part of the NYA during the Roosevelt administration. She had a wealth of experiences and no formal education. Which I’m sure had she had one she would have graduated with honors because she was so curious and she wanted to know so many things. She was a good person. I know there’s a lot more I would like to say, but I think the most important part is that, she never gave up on her children, she took care of her mother, and she constantly tried to improve herself.
I know there’s probably more I would like to say, but I’ve been at this for months and months and months, and I haven’t gotten very far. So I’m going to leave it at this, and I want you to know that your grandmother had her faults, but in the end she really had tried hard to do what was right. Guess that’s it. Bye.
[Later…]
Oh, when I started to add to this tape
I had been thinking all the way up here,
I’m at Dr. Mulray’s, about
what I wanted to say, and since this is
such a political season, there is a great
deal of my mother in my thinking, and probably
your thinking from my thinking, because
she was always involved in politics in
some form or another, really believing
we could make a difference, which as you
know is the way I feel, although less and
less lately.
When ... the one thing I regret the most is that my mother died just before Clinton won the election and we got two women senators from California. She would have been in heaven. She died just before this all happened.
Anyway in this political season, I think, I’m trying really hard to believe, and I know that she would be trying hard to believe, that we still can change things. But all the way from the time I was a little girl, she always influenced me in my thinking, and I still think it was right. I needed to say that.