Growing up it was always Ellen and Joan, the names, the story seemed almost inseparable.
Joan and Ellen were a partnership forged permanently when they lived with my grandmother in St. Louis shortly after Joan was born during World War II. Ellen was 18 months old when Joan was born in March 1942. It’s a tribute to Ellen’s generous nature that they weren’t competitive. Ellen was the senior partner but by the time I came along 4 years later Joan and Ellen were a given. They might have had their disagreements but it stayed between them. Ellen more than anyone else appreciated Joan.
Ellen was the star of the show, the strong character, the tom boy who could hold her own with the boys and shoot marbles better than any of us. At eight or nine years old Ellen wanted the full Hopalong Cassidy outfit and when she got it, wore it with pride. Joan was the background. I don’t remember much about her at all and in those days I think that was as much Joan as it was Ellen, Joan was in the shadow. Joan was a person of strong character and intensity, but she kept it to herself.
After the Barracks, the second bedroom was always theirs. At our new home on Magnolia Boulevard Ellen and Joan’s room was this pristine sacred space, with twin beds, bedspreads, curtains, a book case and a desk. The most precious object in the room was a turquoise Motorola Clock Radio which Ellen kept tuned to KFAC, the classical music station in LA. Today when I hear Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1 I’m transported back to the sound coming from Joan and Ellen’s bedroom, The Gas Hour theme.
In school Ellen was everyone’s favorite. In the 8th grade Ellen was the captain of the Bellarmine Jefferson Guards, Monsignor Keating’s doctrinaire and whimsical fusion of devotion and patriotism into a kind of World War I home guard. She and the boy captain led Flag Salute our morning formation, where at attention we recited prayers composed for the occasion and sang the national anthem while raising the flag. We sang Hail Columbia. Monsignor didn’t like that new fangled Star Spangled Banner.
I think by the time Joan started high school she had had enough of always being Ellen’s sister at school. She began to shine as her own star. We Duggans were a bright bunch but Joan was undoubtedly the smartest of us all. She played the clarinet in band, she roller skated at Harry’s Roller Rink, and she became the science teacher, Sister Mary Paul Anthony (Catherine O’Dwyer) pet. The rest of the world was terrified of Paul Anthony but Joan flourished under her guidance.
In 1959 Ellen left for the nunnery. Joan got her own room and was on her own at Bellarmine Jefferson, winning awards and honors and a full scholarship to Clarke College in Dubuque Iowa. Dubuque was the mother house of the nuns at St. Roberts and Clarke is their college. In those days I filled in as Joan’s ally. Her little brother to Harry’s Roller Rink. She was very pretty. Ellen never had much interest in boys, but the boys noticed Joan and she liked the attention.
Before she started the college sent Joan a reading list of books they thought she should be reading. She shared it with me. I devoured it and let Joan know the ones I thought she should read. Joan was excited about chemistry and I wondered what it was all about so I read a chapter of one of her books. The chapter was Boyle’s law and when I took the entrance exam for high school, the science section was a paragraph on Boyle’s Law and questions on the reading. I was by that coincidence one of the smartest students to enter St. Francis High School that year Later I was a big disappointment to the science teacher.
Joan came home for the summers. She was a young woman, smoking, drinking beer and quite sophisticated. She got a summer job as an information operator at The Telephone Company. I was always struck by the fact that she was a Chemistry major with a Latin minor. Joan had learned to drive on an automatic transmission. The summer I was chafing to get my driver’s license having learned to drive in a few lessons earlier in the year. Joan was looking for a car and realized it would be good to know how to drive a stick shift. I had mastered the basics of driving on our 1948 Studebaker, our second car, our mother’s junker.
She asked me to teach her. Our exchange was after our lesson I could drive the car with her as my over 18 licensed driver. That exchange was a strong element of our growing bond. We had fun together. One time I was walking her through the sequence of making a left turn: slowing, clutching, downshifting. Just then I looked and we were heading directly for the house on the corner, “And steer! And Steer!” I shouted. We both had a good laugh and I had a story to tell.
I think at the beginning of grad school Joan bought an American Rambler. It was not cool or stylish but it was a good little car and had a stick shift. It was practical like Joan. It suited her. I don’t remember all the cars Joan had but they included a big Ford Bronco or Explorer and a big Ford pickup truck, macho cars. It was fun to watch her grip the steering wheel and use the step to climb into them. Joan was short 5 feet or 5 foot 1 but she liked the cars and she played Country and Western music on the radio sometimes. It tickled her sense of irony. Joan wasn’t macho but she was tough.
I began drinking beer at home when I was 16 and stopped hiding that I smoked. So when Joan came home in the summer before she graduated we drank beer together. That was another one of our bonds. I contributed and she bought and we’d bring it home and share with Pop including whatever he had at home. The three of us would drink together, we drank whatever was there and finished it off. These were convivial days and very social. For me and probably Joan too they were the first time that our father relaxed and talked to us. He was coming out of his PTSD shell that had lasted for over 20 years. We reveled in his conviviality.
When I started college, Joan generously offered to share an apartment with me and we lived in a furnished one bedroom apartment on Sepulveda Boulevard near Venice Boulevard in National City. I slept on the living room couch. I didn’t see much of Joan. She worked day and night and had an active social life. I was busy going to college on my own. When our paths crossed we both enjoyed Swansons Frozen Pot Pies. We did quite well together. We were good roommates. I have always been grateful for Joan’s generosity.
The next year she got an apartment near Culver City and I went on campus to the dorms.
And then I met Cathy and joined the Air Force and Joan finished her Masters at UCLA and went on. I was in the Air Force, got married, and then went to England. Cathy and my first summer in Bedford Joan came to visit. I think it was her first time in Europe and before she came to Bedford she went to a language program in Spain. I remember we had another a coworker to dinner at our flat when Joan was there. I can’t remember his name, a little older than me. He commended Joan on being in college and that she should stay in school and work hard in chemistry. He deflated when she said she wasn’t a student in college, but a professor. Joan was very pretty but looked very young, not like most chemistry professors.
That summer Joan had met this guy in the Spain and apparently they were quite taken with each other. Somehow we got the word that this guy Michael was desperate to call her and she was desperate to get the call. Using the phone in England in those days meant going to the red Call Box a block and a half away. Joan and Michael seem to take it personally thinking we were obstructing them in not having a phone. They managed to reach each other.
When Cathy and I returned to California in 1971, Joan and Michael were trying to maintain a long distance relationship between Monterey Park and the Bronx. Joan converted to Judaism and had a ceremony welcoming her to the tribe at a synagogue in Glendale. My parents and Ellen were there. We were all happy that Joan was happy, happy to be Jewish, and she had found her true love. Someone asked me how was it my sister converted to Judaism. I told them when you grow up Irish Catholic, it’s easy to convert to something else; Joan found an intellectual and spiritual home in Judaism.
She took a sabbatical and went to live with Michael in New York. She went to Hunter College for a year. And Joan and Michael got married in Connecticut, and paid my way to the wedding, I was still an undergrad at UCLA. It was a wonderful wedding with hoopa and Michael breaking the glass. It was at a cousin’s of Michael in Connecticut. Michael was very proud of the food, Middle Eastern, Sephardic, humus, pita bread and Michael’s favorite, baba ganush. The caterer was Lebanese. Joan and Michael stayed in New York.
As agreed they came out to California the following year, just for Michael to try it. Michael didn’t seem very impressed by California and he didn’t think they would stay. I remember his conversion occurred with an Orange Tree he bought. When it first bloomed and had fruit during the winter. Michael became a Californian.
Cathy and I and Joan and Michael were friends, we prepared and ate dinners with wine together and cocktails or brandy afterwards. We were their guests for the Chanukah and Passover holidays. One day with satisfaction I realized my boys didn’t think of the holidays as exotic, just something we celebrated with Joan and Michael. They knew to set a place for Elijah, to ask the question and in December to look for Chanukah gelt.
In 1977 we went down to Brotman Hospital in Culver City to be part of their new baby’s birth. Being Joan and Michael I don’t think we saw the baby that day, she was born. Shortly thereafter we got to see Laurie Reyna Pessah. That was a big event. Laurie was Joan and Michael’s special child and very special she was. She was beautiful, talented, very smart and charming from the start and so she is today. She is Joan and Michael’s child and the best of both of them.
Cathy and I struggled in our marriage, there were good times and bad times and 1983 was a bad time. Cathy and I separated. I readily accepted the role of the bad guy and Cathy was the aggrieved party. She made sure all of my family knew my transgressions. It seemed Joan and Michael sided with Cathy and I was left out.
Eventually I was partially reinstated. At that same time I got sober and that became another barrier between Joan and me
Everyone in the family was pretty surprised. Cathy, now Kate, immediately joined Alanon and became a 12 Step Master though gratefully she didn’t have anything to do with me at the time. Her insights may not have been helpful to me at the time. Joan and Michael noticed it and were very interested. By this time, a lot of people knew Joan drank too much, including Joan. Not long after, I think it might have been the that summer when people began to realize not only had I stopped drinking but I was sober and getting more so every day.
One day Michael called and we had to meet downtown to “discuss” Joan’s drinking. Michael was very concerned that we should get Joan sober, she really needed to stop drinking. Around then I gave my copy of Alcohol Anonymous to Joan or for Joan. Of course, Joan and I never talked about alcoholism. It’s makes sense if you’re Irish. I was sober, she knew it and she knew she needed to stop drinking too. She had The Book and I think she had looked at it. Michael gave me updates on how Joan was doing. I learned Joan had tried AA but it wasn’t for her, too religious.
For Joan the Protestant sounding rhetoric of the Big Book was a deal breaker. She’d do it on her own. I was struck by the rhetoric, an artifact from the 1930s but it never bothered me. I was an atheist and just let it go. Particularly in California AA is strong on a Higher Power or “god as you understand him or her,” a big sidestep of the God thing for most of us. It is about surrender, admitting that we can’t do it on our own, that we have to give up trying to control it. Joan couldn’t do that. She tried. Alcoholism isn’t a lack of will power or character. Functional alcoholics are people of incredible character and strong will.
Trudging on, getting up, doing what has to be done instead of giving up, instead of letting go, takes courage and is an act of incredible will. Joan was a strong willed person. She did not give up. She tried and she tried. Joan fought her alcoholism up to the end I imagine.
She was uncomfortable with my sobriety. When I visited she wouldn’t have anything to drink and that was hard. I’d stay for an hour or two. She shared her garden and water course. She showed me her book binding projects.
We were cordial but we were never close again. As we aged Joan had some health problems. We didn’t talk about it but I was very proud of my sister for being a leader and guide for people learning to live with colostomy bags. And then she began to suffer from dementia, I didn’t see that. Michael had problems seeing and driving, so they were a driving team, Michael navigated and Joan drove.
And then Joan passed away. I would have liked to have been a lot closer and there for Joan but it didn’t happen. And she died September 2016. And I miss her.
My daughter Paloma was in the first grade when Joan died. And then Paloma was having problems in school. We looked into it and she was grieving for Joan. We hadn’t thought much about it. We didn’t think Joan’s passing had been important in Paloma’s six year old world. I didn’t realize that Paloma and Joan had bonded. It happened one afternoon when Joan took Paloma aside and showed her all of her bookbinding work, the tools and what she did with them. I felt very bad for Paloma but it also made me feel very grateful that Paloma had experienced my beloved sister Joan and that she loved her, just like I did.
