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    Bernice and John: Finally Meeting Your Parents Who Died a Long Time Ago
    Bernice and John: Finally Meeting Your Parents Who Died a Long Time Ago
    Bernice and John: Finally Meeting Your Parents Who Died a Long Time Ago
    Ebook274 pages4 hours

    Bernice and John: Finally Meeting Your Parents Who Died a Long Time Ago

    By John Janovy, Jr

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    “Bernice and John” is part memoir and part post-WWII Oklahoma history, and in a sense national history, through the eyes of two people who lived and worked in Oklahoma City. My father was a petroleum geologist; he illustrates the life of a young man who comes to maturity in the Great Depression and chooses to become a professional oil man, a choice heavily influenced by the Oklahoma oil boom, and who is just starting his career as WWII begins. My mother was an extremely intelligent person from a family with a religious fundamentalist father, yet she became, through her own efforts, a very well-educated, dignified, and liberal individual. Her final act, as she neared the end of a 14-year battle with cancer, was to go to college, a life-long dream. I believe that regardless of the memoir tone, this project is a valid contribution to regional history and sociology.

    “Bernice and John” is a memoir, yes, but it’s not so much about the author as about the people, organisms, circumstances and machines encountered in the last seven decades, and how these factors serve to shape personal history in an ever-changing world. The book has one overriding theme, namely, the intimate but mostly invisible connections between individual lives and the major historical movements that bracket and enclose those lives. These connections are intimate because they run deeply through our daily conversations, our daily behaviors and choices, and the cultural milieu in which our children mature. “Bernice and John” asserts that these connections are strong and functional beyond the obvious cases such as combat veterans, Holocaust survivors, Presidents, and CEOs of multinational giants. Even the proverbial person on the street today lives with the results of a United Nations vote taken on November 29, 1947, a single bomb dropped August 6, 1945, and construction of Mark I by Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper in 1944, in other words, with the creation of Israel by division of Palestine, the age of mass destruction as ushered in by Hiroshima, and invention of the digital computer.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Janovy, Jr
    Release dateMar 28, 2014
    ISBN9781310355035
    Bernice and John: Finally Meeting Your Parents Who Died a Long Time Ago
    Author

    John Janovy, Jr

    About the author:John Janovy, Jr. (PhD, University of Oklahoma, 1965) is the author of seventeen books and over ninety scientific papers and book chapters. These books range from textbooks to science fiction to essays on athletics. He is now retired, but when an active faculty member held the Paula and D. B. Varner Distinguished Professorship in Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interest is parasitology. He has been Director of UNL’s Cedar Point Biological Station, Interim Director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, Assistant Dean of Arts and Sciences, and secretary-treasurer of the American Society of Parasitologists.His teaching experiences include large-enrollment freshman biology courses, Field Parasitology at the Cedar Point Biological Station, Invertebrate Zoology, Parasitology, Organismic Biology, and numerous honors seminars. He has supervised thirty-two graduate students, and approximately 50 undergraduate researchers, including ten Howard Hughes scholars.His honors include the University of Nebraska Distinguished Teaching Award, University Honors Program Master Lecturer, American Health Magazine book award (for Fields of Friendly Strife), State of Nebraska Pioneer Award, University of Nebraska Outstanding Research and Creativity Award, The Nature Conservancy Hero recognition, Nebraska Library Association Mari Sandoz Award, UNL Library Friend’s Hartley Burr Alexander Award, and the American Society of Parasitologists Clark P. Read Mentorship Award.

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      Book preview

      Bernice and John - John Janovy, Jr

      BERNICE AND JOHN

      Finally meeting your parents who died a long time ago

      Copyright © 2014 by John Janovy, Jr.

      Smashwords Edition

      **********

      This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should delete it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s copyrighted work.

      Bernice and John: Finally Meeting Your Parents Who Died a Long Time Ago, First Edition. Copyright © 2014 by John Janovy, Jr. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations (600 words or fewer) in scholarly publications, articles, or reviews. For information contact the author at jjparasite@hotmail.com.

      Excerpts from this book have been published in Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, Issue 6.2:8-13; Pieces of the Plains (J&L Lee Company, 2009); and Rougarou, an online literary journal, October, 2011 (english.louisiana.edu/rougaroul)

      Some photographs are from Janovy family archives, others were taken, and drawings done, by John Janovy, Jr.

      Designed by John Janovy, Jr.

      ISBN: 9781310355035

      **********

      Books by John Janovy, Jr.

      Keith County Journal

      Yellowlegs

      Back in Keith County

      Fields of Friendly Strife

      On Becoming a Biologist

      Vermilion Sea

      Dunwoody Pond

      Comes the Millennium (as Jack Blake)

      Ten Minute Ecologist*

      Teaching in Eden

      Foundations of Parasitology (with L. S. Roberts)

      Outwitting College Professors, 4th Ed*

      The Ginkgo: An Intellectual and Visionary Coming-of-Age*

      Dinkle’s Life: A Spiritual Biography*

      Conversations between God and Satan*

      Tuskers*

      Intelligent Designer: Evolution for Politicians*

      Be Careful, Dr. Renner*

      Pieces of the Plains: Memories and Predictions from the Heart of America*

      Christian Zombie: A Tale of Sin and Redemption*

      Bernice and John: Finally Meeting Your Parents who Died a Long Time Ago*

      * = available as e-books on Smashwords

      **********

      Table of Contents:

      Foreword

      1. Houma

      2. Tulsa

      3. Oklahoma City

      4. West Nichols Hills

      5. Norman

      6. Red Dirt

      7. To Drill a Well

      8. Burning Oil

      9. Maple Street

      10. Landscape

      11. The Spoon Collection

      12. Portrait of an Evolving Nation

      Acknowledgements and Sources

      **********

      Return to Table of Contents

      Foreword

      Shortly after noon on October 26, 1962, Lillian Bernice Locke Janovy, age 46, sitting up in bed, was handed her first grandchild, Cynthia Anne, age six days, wrapped in a light blanket. Bernice’s husband John took a photograph of the two, one of hundreds that he had taken, and would take, of the children and grandchildren in his family, but one of the very few of his wife, at least in the preceding twenty years, fourteen of which had been consumed with Bernice’s surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. When the photograph was processed, it became obvious that the camera’s flash attachment had not been synchronized for that particular setting because Bernice was in a shadow and baby Cindy was in the light. The picture could easily have been a sad but in a sense welcome omen, given what Bernice had endured. Within a month, she would slip into her final coma, take a long last breath, and die, leaving hardly a trace of her time on Earth beyond a pair of grown, highly educated, almost belligerently secular humanist, children and the memory of a mother those children scarcely knew.

      Some time in the late morning of November 23, 1973, John Janovy, petroleum geologist, age 59, received the last of his morphine injections, administered by his son, who gently slipped the needle into his father’s inner thigh, about the only place on his body where there was enough flesh to receive it, and slowly pressed the syringe until it was empty. Later that afternoon the men from the funeral home would arrive, place John’s body in a zippered vinyl bag, and leave. It’s best when they die at home, in their own beds, the doctor had said; they’re more comfortable, more at ease, than in the hospital. The son would then pour himself a large glass of Jack Daniels and begin wondering what to do next beyond filling out an obituary form for the Daily Oklahoman. Thirty years later I, that son, would open a box containing my father’s papers, start slowly reading them, and thus discover a man I’d known no better than the woman who was my mother.

      In those intervening thirty years, my own family, and my sister’s, would grow up, finish college and find gainful employment, all the time interacting with Rachel Lorraine Cheek Janovy, the step-mother my father married a year after Bernice’s death, as a loved and respected grandmother. For half of those thirty years, we also interacted with Sam Bristow, one of my father’s former business associates, a widower who Rachel married, thus becoming a loved and deeply respected step-grandfather. All of this interaction took place largely in the home in Oklahoma City where Rachel and my father moved in 1972 and where he decided to spend his last few months on Earth building a greenhouse. In that house on Colony Lane, beside the Oklahoma City Country Club golf course, I gave my father his injections of pain-killer when he became too feeble to do it himself. In that house I walked into his and Rachel’s bedroom when it was time for his next shot, sat beside him on the bed, syringe in hand, and decided he was no longer breathing. And it was in that house that I watched my grandfather, Frank Janovy, contemplate in silence the death of his own, and only, son.

      Year after year, as the house evolved into Rachel’s, then Rachel and Sam’s, I knew it contained the evidence of a past, a time when two young people—Bernice and John—faced in their own personal ways the global upheavals that began with Pearl Harbor and ended with Hiroshima, and a past when two young people had babies—me and my sister—then, like all young people of all time, wondered what to do with them. My parents answered their own question, at least for me, with two words: books and nature. I became lost in this answer, never really knowing these parents until opening those boxes stored in the garage for three decades. From the musty-smelling pages of my father’s correspondence, and from the faded black and white photographs, there emerged two of the most unusual people I have ever met. Born to not quite itinerant, but close, working-class parents, reared as neighbors in near poverty, and married during The Great Depression, they became models for the production of extraordinarily well educated and cosmopolitan human beings through only their own efforts, insights, and decisions. If there is one question I could ask them today, it would be: how did you do it? How did you become these remarkable people while the world around you was crashing into violence and chaos? Their partial but revealing answer is found in those boxes—the words they wrote, the photographs they took, the things they kept, the decisions they made.

      That answer is the subject of this book about a mother who kept her childhood hidden and who always seemed to be studying me from afar, and a father who was patient beyond description and who seemed to always watch me with amusement and curiosity. Bernice and John is not a book about parents who survived The Great Depression. Instead, it’s a book about the process of discovery. In this case the discovery is that of two parents who turn out to be far more sophisticated, far more perceptive, and far more determined that their children would grow up with an understanding of science, literature, and the arts, than I ever imagined. In fact, that determination was their defining characteristic. This book is the story of how that characteristic was manifested, how it was developed and fostered, and how it directed my parents’ decisions. Their lives were not kept from their children on purpose; I, at least, simply never understood what was happening to me, what my mother’s tears really meant, or what my father’s patience and enormous curiosity allowed him to do with and for his children. Bernice and John is thus a book about the intellectual relationships within a family, about the development of ideas and ideals, and about dignity in the face of ugliness, including the ugliness of lingering death at a young age.

      If there is a larger message to be found in its pages, Bernice and John provides it by answering a vital question that we so often fail to ask: how do we retain our humanity in the face of global events that seem destined to destroy it? In a more current sense, however, that answer also applies to life in a cultural environment characterized by strident, often outright lying, political rhetoric aimed directly at uncovering our deepest fears, then developing those fears into actions. Were they still alive and alert, whatever Bernice and John would have said in the privacy of their own living room about folks like Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh is exactly what needs to be said in every living room in a free democracy sustained by well-educated humans. So this book is about common sense, rationality, the lessons of literature, and development of an appreciation for the natural world.

      Many of the scenes and events in Bernice and John come from Oklahoma, my childhood home and a region—both cultural and political—where my family assembled during the first half of the 20th Century. Thus much of this book is indirectly about Oklahoma, but not necessarily exclusively so. The State of Oklahoma provides a rich source of excellent material for a writer and strange as it seems I feel quite fortunate to have grown up there. As claimed by the historian Angie Debo in 1949, . . . all the experiences that went into the making of the nation have been speeded up. Here all the American traits have been intensified. This is the Oklahoma that my parents lived with, the territory that my father explored daily looking for oil. And this is the richly diverse and challenging place that I encountered as a budding young scientist so unknowingly well equipped as a result of Bernice and John’s handling of me as a child. Debo also claims that the one who can interpret Oklahoma can grasp the meaning of America in the modern world. That’s quite an assertion, but one that also is a challenge, especially for a writer with deep Oklahoma roots. This book thus is, finally, my attempt to interpret Oklahoma indirectly through the eyes of Bernice Locke and John Janovy, and so be default is an attempt to understand both the evolution and the meaning of my nation through much of the 20th Century.

      John Janovy, Jr.

      April, 2014

      **********

      Return to Table of Contents

      1. Houma

      I do not know how the Tuang baby began life, but to me it still remains the primordial infant from which the whole adventure of man began.

      —Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

      At the age of about two and a half, I had a question for my mother, a question that went un-answered except in a way that I now recognize as typical behavior of Lillian Bernice Locke Janovy, a woman who could easily see right through anyone and who seemed to carry a deep and cosmopolitan understanding of the world far beyond our immediate surroundings, no matter where those surroundings were located. The question itself was obviously one picked up from a stranger, although at that age, and in that particular neighborhood, I doubt if I would have been allowed to stray very far from home, and especially not so far as to encounter strangers driving by asking for directions.

      My mother could have answered this question easily and gone on about whatever young housewife duties she was performing at the time, but she didn’t. Instead, she set into motion a chain of events that would shape the lives of her husband, her son, and her as yet unborn, perhaps even unplanned, daughter. My question was a simple one:

      Dis whar Nat Terrio lib?

      She must have looked at me with her special combination of curiosity and judgment that I saw daily, once I grew old enough to recognize it for what it was, and thought "no, Johnny, this is not where Nat Terrio lives; this is where we live. I don’t know what she actually said to me at the time, but shortly afterwards she told my father let’s get the hell out of here." I was not to grow up in Louisiana speaking Cajun.

      Here at the time was Houma; according to family legend, our small, white stucco, house had been built by a single black man. I had been born in this house, at home, my father used to say, because it was safer than being born in the local hospital. I never questioned what he meant by safer, always assuming it had something to do with sanitation. But because of the dis and the whar I was to be whisked out of that cultural environment; to Bernice Locke Janovy, these words were lethal linguistic germs to be reckoned with, preferably by escape. But when it came time to run, we made it only as far as New Orleans.

      Today, because of the truly massive global flow of information, an uncontrollable deluge of such magnitude that it virtually defies description, often we can discover where people get their worldviews, those internal visions of their surrounding environment that in turn dictate actions. We know the social conditions that produce suicide bombers and Biblical literalists, homophobes, right-to-lifers, and children who don’t believe in the Cambrian explosion. But nobody seems to be concerned enough about our supply of truly classy, cosmopolitan, secular, idealistic, beautifully self-educated women to ask what makes one appear almost as if by spontaneous generation out of the impoverished, borderline itinerant, community of immigrants that settled into Oklahoma City’s underbelly in the early 1900s.

      I would search in vain for a teacher who would show me how to make this miracle happen. My maternal grandmother might have fulfilled this role but she failed. She made wonderful biscuits but said little about her life as a young homemaker, as she identified herself on my mother’s birth certificate. My maternal grandfather died before I ever met him and there was never any remorse, never any wishing that Edgar Locke were still alive, only a slight hush that fell over the two of them upon the rare mention of his name. Periodically I’d hear the word Pentecostal. Toss the genetic dice; get a very unusual child; then put her in such an environment. Maybe that’s the answer to our question of how such women are produced.

      Bernice Locke died before her children could ask her much of anything about her origins. We were too young. I was only 24 and my sister 22 when it happened. Had she lived another 30 years, we might have finally matured enough to understand why we needed to find out where our mother came from, both literally and metaphorically. She might not have told us, instead just smiling and deflecting the conversation away to some book of poetry, but at least we’d have tried.

      I might have asked why it was so necessary that my sister and I play the piano, and why did it have to be a Kurtzmann baby grand dominating our living room instead of a run-of-the-mill spinet like those tucked away in the corners of my friends’ houses? Why did we own that album of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances, a dozen 78 rpms in a rather elegant book with pockets for leaves? Why did our dining room furniture have to be hand made by a single person, like the house in which I was born? Where did she pick up the talent for judging my father’s business associates so quickly and why was she right on target 100% of the time. How did she and my father acquire these upper class trappings on a decidedly lower class salary? And why did she keep a loaded shotgun beside her bed when he was away? There is only one of these kinds of questions that I can even begin to answer with certainty from having been acquainted with this woman for only 24 years: why, as a terminal cancer patient, did she decide to go to college?

      The answer is so simple yet so complex. If given one last thing to do on Earth, and just enough remaining strength to do that one thing, what would it be? Lillian Bernice Locke Janovy would finally go to college and study literature, not on her own as she’d done for so many years, but with the empathy and encouragement of some like-minded soul, probably a seedy English professor. Thus I introduce you to my mother, a parent I truly did not ever know but would eventually try to reconstruct from bits of evidence: a letter here and there, old photographs, a bank deposit slip, pieces of fabric, and the memory fragments of those looking for clues—clues about origins, clues about her values—to which I was blind at the time they were being laid out for me to see.

      Her children grew up and left for college. The house was silent. There was no piano music, no Chopin’s Polonaise in A Major played over and over again with a canary singing along, no Wednesday night fights on the black and white television, no newspapers scattered on the floor. So she got in her car and drove like the wind to . . . to college . . . to study history and fiction and poetry. Back home, her supply of drugs grew almost as fast as her tumors, but on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she aimed her headlights north, toward the town of Edmond and a place called Central State College, put her foot to the floor-board, and went to school.

      Upon being given a similar prognosis—You have only six months to live—and asked the same question—If you had just enough strength to do one remaining thing, what would it be?—Bernice’s husband John, by now a widower married to another elegant lady who’d also pulled herself up from modest working class beginnings, would answer: build a greenhouse. I had never thought of my father as a particular heroic type until he was given those final six months and embarked on this amazing, courageous, venture, either a gamble that he would actually have the strength to finish it, or an obsession so strong it would keep him alive long enough to finish it.

      In the end, it is impossible to distinguish between these two alternatives. I push him in his wheel chair out through the garage to the greenhouse—his greenhouse—open the door, push him in, and let him just look at his work. I take the cigarette from his fingers; he is too weak to hold it as it burns close to his fingers. There, surrounded by his plants, he lives an hour in the company of the latest and most consuming of his several concurrently indulged passions—alcohol, tobacco, music, stamps, coins, photography, cactus, his family, his grandchildren, and the oil business. Then, at the ancient age of 59, he dies. Unlike my mother, he leaves a swath of a trail, but I would not find it for another thirty years. When I begin to explore this jungle, I find another stranger.

      How did he do all this stuff? I wonder one day, telling our oldest daughter, home for a visit, about her grandfather’s files, about the stamps carefully mounted on loose leaf pages upon which he’d drawn, with the exquisite skill of a superb draftsman, small India ink rectangles to frame them, then added labels—actually personal catalog numbers—lettered in his perfect steady hand.

      Obsessive compulsive, she replies, converting him into a case study.

      My father’s first job after graduating—in 1935—from the University of Oklahoma with a bachelor’s degree in geology, was out in Pampa, Texas, working for Skelly Oil Company. He never mentioned whether he or my mother ever ran into Woody Guthrie, or heard about him; the music in our house was classical—Jascha Heifetz and the like, not folk singer protest with flattop guitar. My father’s second job was with Louisiana Land and Exploration Company, and so he and my mother moved to Houma where I must have been conceived and certainly was delivered, although by whom, and with whose help, I do not know. A fire in the parish courthouse destroyed my original birth certificate, but the State of Louisiana issued a replacement with no questions asked. This replacement I use to obtain and renew passports, again, no questions asked. My last renewal was prior to September 11, 2001; we will see, over the next few years, whether a long-ago fire in Houma, and a not-so-long ago hurricane named Katrina, make any difference in the life of a post-Patriot Act American seeking proof of citizenship.

      Twenty-two years after my birth day, I return to Houma with my parents and sister. We drive by the stucco house. It is vacant and open, so we go in and I step into the tiny, plain, empty room where I first saw the light of day. By this time, the four-poster bed, in which my mother had lain two days after Christmas in 1937, delivering her first-born, all nine pounds of me, safe from the septic dangers of a local hospital, is in my sister’s room in our house in Oklahoma City, but eventually—as brothers typically do to sisters—I take it. The bed ended up in our first-born’s room; she was the only grandchild Bernice lived long enough

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