Joanne Blokker oral history interview.

              J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Transcript: Joanne Blokker oral history interview December 4 and 5, 2014
Steven Novak: This is Steven Novak, and I’m with my colleague, Susan Kitchens. We’re at the Langham Hotel, looking out over the beautiful view. We’re with Joanne Blokker as part of the Whittier family oral history project, and the date is December 4th, 2014. And we’re so happy to meet you –
Joanne Blokker: Thank you! It’s my pleasure.
Steven Novak: — and appreciate your giving us your time. Why don’t you just start off by talking a little bit about when you were born, where you were born, what your parents were like.
Joanne Blokker: I was born Joanne Whittier in Los Angeles, at the Good Samaritan Hospital, at least I’m told I was born there.
Steven Novak: [laughs]
Joanne Blokker: I guess I was there. And I believe that we moved directly to the Whittier mansion on Sunset Boulevard for I’m told it was six months. I, of course, don’t remember, because I was a baby. Then we moved into our home at 704 North Hillcrest Drive in Beverly Hills, which I believe my father said cost $25,000 to build. It was a quite nice English Tudor house. It had a double lot, and we used the second lot as a garden. I remember, my first memories would be of a nurse, probably. My sister, Mary Ellen Whittier, was born about eighteen months after I was, and so I remember always having someone else in the room with me, or near me. We had a nurse for at least the first six years of my life, actually, who took care of us. And we also had a cook.
My mother was fairly social; she was the president of the Junior League of Los Angeles. My father worked from – Well, he actually, I guess, worked in his shop, that’s what he liked to do most. Sometimes, he would go to the J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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family office, which was the M. H. Whittier Company in Los Angeles, down on, I think, at that time, was it in the old PG&E Building? I don’t know. Later, it was on Bixel. His father had been in the oil business, and had actually been one of the original developers of Beverly Hills, which I really wasn’t aware of until I was much older. We weren’t told about that, particularly, at the time.
At that time, there were quite a few vacant lots in Beverly Hills. We had a lot next to us, and then another family called the Oswalds, and next to them lived Groucho Marx and his first family, his daughter, Miriam, and son, Arthur. And then there was another house, I think, and after that, it was just vacant lots all the way up to Sunset. We would go up to the top of the street and coast down on scooters and other roller things. As a child, we played with the Oswald girls, Janet and Ruth, and Miriam Marx.
And my family— I never was aware of particular racial discrimination, but there was some, because I know they didn’t want me to spend a lot of time at the Marx home. They liked to have Miriam come to us; they didn’t want me over there very much. I went to school at Hawthorne –
Steven Novak: Well, let me slow you down, okay, because all this is so interesting! Your mother was Violet Andrews?
Joanne Blokker: She was Violet Andrews. Her father was Louis Andrews, who actually – which I didn’t realize – helped start the Union Oil Company in Los Angeles. He was an attorney. Also, he was the first secretary of Caltech. He apparently had done work over there. I didn’t realize that. He apparently has a portrait over there, because someone else told me about it. I was looking for it today, we were just over there for lunch, and I didn’t find it. But he, I learned later, he was the first secretary of Caltech. He had come out to the West Coast. I guess everybody went to Santa Paula when they came from the East; they came from Ohio, I think. He didn’t study the law, he read the law under Judge Toland of Santa Barbara. So he became a lawyer. My other grandfather was Max Whittier, who would come out from Maine, let’s see, I’m not sure what the year was, but he worked in the oil fields. He had, I guess, made quite a bit of money, and he and his partners bought the Rancho – whatever the Rancho J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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is, west of Los Angeles, looking for oil, but there wasn’t any. Well, there is some, we know that now. But they didn’t find it then, so they turned it into the suburb of Beverly Hills.
I’m always amazed at how beautifully it’s designed, because it has Santa Monica Boulevard, and all the residential areas north of Santa Monica. And then, they had the Redcar tracks that ran east and west, and then south of that was a commercial district. I would say that medium lots, like the half-acre lots, were between Santa Monica and Sunset. And then the fancier homes – the larger mansions – were north of Sunset on the hills, and were individually built. Apparently, at first, it wasn’t too successful, so they hired a lady who was a well-known hotel runner to come out and build the Beverly Hills Hotel, and bring her friends, because they thought once the people would see how gorgeous it is here in the wintertime, that Easterners would want to build homes out here. At that time, there was no smog. Smog came later!
Steven Novak: Let me go back to the Andrews grandparents, because your Whittier grandparents were deceased when you were born?
Joanne Blokker: They were deceased, yes. As I was growing up, I knew the Andrews grandparents.
Steven Novak: Tell us more about your Grandfather Andrews. I know you mentioned a couple of things.
Joanne Blokker: Well, when I was growing up, we went to their home once a month for Sunday dinner. Oh, there’s something in there [the list of oral history topics] about religion, and what schools we went, religious education. Apparently, my grandmother Whittier was a Christian Scientist, and I think – Well, they were sort of Christian Scientists. I went to Christian Science Sunday school for about four or five years, and I had a lot of bible studies, and then it sort of stopped. So then, really, I had no formal religious education to speak of. My maternal grandfather, the Andrews family, I believe they were Universalists, J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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or Unitarians, one of those churches. It’s a Protestant sect , one of the Protestant offshoots. A lot of them were very popular at the time.
We’d go there for lunch, and we always had a very sit-down dinner with service, even though we were young children. There was always nuts on the table, which were supposed to be for dessert, but we always ate them and got reprimanded. [laughter] There was no liquor ever served in their home at that time. My grandmother was very nervous if we would try to play cards on Sunday. She was from that, whatever religion that is, it would make her nervous. She didn’t quite tell us not to, but she really didn’t like it. We would be all dressed up, and we would mostly spend the afternoon – I say “we.” I’m talking now about three sisters: myself, my sister Mary Ellen, and our younger sister, Patricia. This was before my brother, Donald, was born. So, this would be in the early thirties, because he was born in ’36. Yes, because I’m nine years older than he is. We’d be all dressed up, and we would be sitting there playing, sometimes playing Chinese Checkers. My grandfather liked to play games of intelligence. He never held back with any kind of information or idea that our brains weren’t sufficient. There was never a feeling that we were inferior to men. In fact, most of us thought we were superior at the time, I think. In fact, I didn’t learn any of – That’s all later notions that were put into my head that there was even a question about that! [laughter]
So, at the time, there wasn’t any of that. In fact, later, I learned he was considered quite advanced for his age for that era, because he insisted that his daughters have a college education. My Aunt Ellen Wright, my oldest aunt, graduated from Stanford in 1916. At that time, there weren’t many women at Stanford. Apparently, he had had two cousins who had been widowed and had no means of support, so he felt that women should be able to support themselves, if they had to. Not that they should work, but that they should have a means of a support. And my mother went to Stanford, and graduated. My father had flunked out of Stanford, and he didn’t graduate from any school. I was the first Whittier that graduated from any school, or from college, I should say, not from any school. [laughs] J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Steven Novak: And so, then, your grandmother, did she ever work? Or did she just marry and become a housewife, which is fine.
Joanne Blokker: Oh, well, women in those days didn’t work if they didn’t have to. She became a housewife. In those days, that was pretty much a 24/7 job, even though she had help. She had four children: there was my Aunt Ellen, there was Uncle Horace, my mother, and then there was an Uncle Louis, four surviving children. She had had two other pregnancies, but I think those children were all born at home. In those days, that’s how it was done. She was not in terribly good health, either, as I remember her. Oh, what would we say today? Well, she just kept repeating herself, her memory wasn’t that great.
She was very sweet. But I wouldn’t say it was Alzheimer’s or dementia, I couldn’t put a name, I didn’t know.
Steven Novak: What neighborhood did they live in?
Joanne Blokker: When I knew them, they lived on Lafayette Park Place, which had been called, after my grandfather, Andrews Boulevard, because he developed that area, and it was filled land. It’s not Hancock Park; it’s now become kind of run down. After the First World War, the name was changed to Lafayette Park Place. I’m trying to think, what’s the school – There was a girl’s school that’s now in Holmby Hills?
Steven Novak: Westlake School.
Joanne Blokker: Westlake School, for girls at that time. Has that gone coed or not?
Steven Novak: Yes.
Joanne Blokker: Okay. My mother graduated from that. And not my aunt. I wonder where she went to high school? Maybe it wasn’t there then. Good question. But yes, my mother graduated from Westlake. But the school was down in that Westlake Park at that time, which was near there. It was later called MacArthur Park in the Second World War. I don’t know what it’s called today; it may have a new name. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Steven Novak: It’s still called MacArthur.
Susan Kitchens: MacArthur.
Joanne Blokker: That’s what I remember, basically, of my grandfather and grandmother. Later, I knew my grandfather after I’d graduated from college. I spent quite a bit of time. I would go and have lunch with him every week, after I was living at home for about a year, or a year and a half. I would spend time with him, and we had lunch, and we had a chance to talk. He would have taught me golf and paid for everything, if I had wanted to. Oh, that was another thing. He helped found the LA Country Club. He was a member. That was another place we occasionally went for dinner, or lunch. I always just remember being told to stay off the golf course because it was dangerous. [laughs] We thought of flying missiles...
Steven Novak: That’s right. So, let’s go back, then, to your mother, Violet. You said she went to Westlake?
Joanne Blokker: Westlake School for girls.
Steven Novak: And then after that, that she –
Joanne Blokker: She went to Stanford. She graduated from Stanford. She was a president, I think, for three years, of a sorority, which was Kappa Kappa Gamma.
Steven Novak: So she was an intelligent woman.
Joanne Blokker: She was quite intelligent, yes. I remember at one point, during the era of the flappers, the story is that she cut her hair, which was a scandal. And the family had been planning a trip to go back to Cleveland, Ohio, where my grandfather’s older brother lived. He was a prominent attorney there. And they didn’t go, because they didn’t want the people to know that Violet had cut her hair! It was a scandal, I guess! Yes, she was intelligent.
Steven Novak: And you said she was the president of the Junior League, I think?
Joanne Blokker: Later? Yes, she was. She was very busy and socially active. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Steven Novak: Philanthropic.
Joanne Blokker: That’s right, yes. She became ill after the birth of my brother. She had a hysterectomy at a time when they didn’t know much about hormone therapy afterward, and so she became mentally unbalanced after that. She spent the rest of her life in Las Encinas, out here. But she was very intelligent, and I remember her as a very lovely person. On the cook’s night out, which was Thursday, she would cook, but all she knew how to cook was lamb chops. People didn’t know – I remember reading – this is a digression – Julia Child’s last book. She describes her life in Pasadena, which was exactly like mine! They had dinner on Sunday with overcooked lamb, and mint jelly, and her mother never went in the kitchen, except maybe on Thursday with the cook’s night out. Or they went out for dinner that night to a club, which was the only night that clubs would allow men, women’s clubs did that. And that was exactly the way I remember things, until we moved away from Beverly Hills, in 1938, I guess.
I was in sixth grade, so I must have been ten. I was eleven. That would have been ’38, yes. I was born in 1927, on the day that Lindbergh landed in Paris. My mother said she was upset because people were excited about this, not about me.
I would say that I was very loved. I was a child that was welcomed and loved. I really was. I’ve been very lucky all my life.
Steven Novak: And you were the first grandchild of the Whittier family side, right?
Joanne Blokker: No, Laura-Lee.
Steven Novak: Oh, that’s right.
Joanne Blokker: Laura-Lee was six months my senior.
Steven Novak: Were you the first grandchild on the Andrews side?
Joanne Blokker: Yes. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Steven Novak: Oh, that’s nice!
Joanne Blokker: Yes. I was also a pet over there.
Steven Novak: You were special.
Joanne Blokker: Oh, yes. And what are some other early memories? Well, I always say there are pictures, probably child abuse today, we were dressed up in gorgeous little frilly dresses on the Fourth of July with a punk in one hand and a firecracker in the other, and lighting these things! [laughter] About four years old, five years old. And this is not unusual. We have pictures of all of this! This doesn’t happen today.
Steven Novak: And you survived! [laughs]
Joanne Blokker: Yes, we survived just fine! [laughs] What else happened? Well, I guess we moved away, then, from Beverly Hills, about 1938. My parents found a property in La Crescenta, about ten acres. At that time, that was pretty much out in the country. I think it was 5125 Briggs Avenue. I don’t know why I remember these numbers, but I do. It may be etched in your memory. I certainly wasn’t driving, yet.
Steven Novak: I think it’s because parents want their children to know in case they get lost, to tell the police.
Joanne Blokker: Yes, they maybe etch it into your mind.
Steven Novak: I can remember my old addresses, too.
Joanne Blokker: Oh, I do remember walking back, once, this was in Beverly Hills, this time, Elevado Avenue, right below the school. I think we heard that Jean Harlow had died. That was quite a scandal. I just remember hearing that; I didn’t remember much else about it. Apparently, there was some issue whether she was actually poisoned, or what the story was. People were sort of a little bit scandalous about it. But anything was scandalous then, I mean, anything was slightly off-color. We were also in the era of Hollywood. A lot of refugees were just beginning to come in from Europe. My parents actually moved out J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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of Beverly Hills to get away from that, what they felt was an artificial atmosphere. That was one of the reasons that they decided they wanted to move over toward Pasadena, because we moved to a beautiful, actually a nice home, a bigger home, in La Crescenta. I went to Polytechnic School, which is still here, and I probably got a very sound education. I still have friends from that era, that are still alive, a few of them. We were driven every day, because it was about a ten-mile, well, more than that, twenty miles. So, we had to be driven into school every day. I think I went by myself first. My two younger sisters couldn’t get in right away. They went to Flintridge. And then I think they all ended up eventually going to Poly.
At this – Oh, my brother was born, my brother, Donald was, at this time, a baby, and my mother was really beginning to show signs of mental instability. So one day, I came home and she had moved to Las Encinas. She had a cousin, Grace Andrews, Grace Marshall Andrews, who came and lived with us for a long time, while she was there. Mother actually spent the rest of her life there. She was never able to really function outside of that again. Although, later, I think there were a lot more drugs that helped her in her later years. But they didn’t know anything about that in those days; they didn’t even know you were supposed to have a hormone replacement. She had a complete hysterectomy, and probably with ovaries removed, too, which today, we know that’s not what you do.
But in any event, we were raised, from that point on, by a housekeeper. My father was kind of a – Well, he was a bachelor, essentially, and a very desirable one. My parents were divorced; my mother agreed to it. And he traveled around the world in 1939, came back on the last voyage of the – I want to say – it was a German ship out of Hamburg, and it was the last voyage before the war started, the Second World War. And then, we, at that point, we were renting a house for the summer in Balboa, on Bay Island. It was the old Tustin House. It was one of the – Well, in those days, it was still the Depression era, so it was $30 a month in the summertime, and $90 for the whole year. So that’s what he rented it for! We had it for quite a few years. We spent a lot of time down there. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Eventually, we had a lady, a Mrs. Fisher, who was our housekeeper. She really raised us in those days. And then we had a cook, Nora, that basically – Oh, and we also had not a groundskeeper, we had a couple that lived in a house on our property in La Crescenta who managed it. He really did all the gardening, and he did a lot of work around the property. My father loved it. He really was in his element out there, because he liked to create things and build things.
By this time, the war was coming. It started, I guess, in ’39. We didn’t have the draft, I think, until 1940, maybe. I think they had started, then, with the draft. But he was almost too old. In nineteen forty, he would have been thirty-nine, because he was born in ’01. So he ended up working in the defense factory during the war, in Pasadena. That was later, after he remarried – and I’ll go into that in a minute – he remarried, and we moved to South Pasadena, to 2001 Monterey Road, which has another interesting history – I’m sort of jumping here – of, well, we lived in La Crescenta, that was the eighth, ninth, tenth – well, no, probably sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth grades, for about four years. And there were about thirty people in the class at Poly. And I went to dancing schools here, and I had friends that lived right up the street on Oak Knoll, and that house is still there. Things don’t change! [laughs] What else?
Susan Kitchens: You had mentioned Mrs. Fisher, the housekeeper, that she raised you?
Joanne Blokker: Yes.
Susan Kitchens: Could you describe her?
Joanne Blokker: Well, she was definitely a Christian Scientist. She managed the house. She sort of managed the servers, and she took care to see that we were raised like young ladies should be. She was very good at that; she was like a governess, or more of a manager. And she had worked with the Bekins family, I think, before that, one time. She knew the Bekins family. You know, she would drive us if we needed to go somewhere. Or we had another man, who lived in Montrose, who actually drove us to school back and forth every J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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day. And then we had, of course, had bought uniforms here on Lake Street. They’re all dresses that we owned. They weren’t bad uniforms, but it’s just everybody was dressed the same, which was good, actually. What else happened?
Well, then I graduated from Poly in 1941. My father was always looking for a ranch to buy. He liked to travel around the country, so I went with him. We went looking at boarding schools. I was reading books about boarding schools, so I thought it would be fun to go to one. And there were about four that we wanted to look at. There’s one in Albuquerque called Sandia, and another one in Santa Fe, New Mexico, called Brownmoor, which is still there. Well, I don’t think the school is there, but the buildings are there. It’s in the old Bishop’s Lodge, which is a summer resort, mainly, and it was then, too. People went there for their health, because of the altitude. And I did enroll, and I spent one year at Brownmoor. I started in the fall of ’41, and then, of course, Pearl Harbor started, and my father didn’t want me away from here, because he felt transportation would be hard. So I went to two public high schools after that.
But we went on these trips in the Southwest, looking for ranches and staying in motels all over. It was kind of fun. And we also went to visit the schools in Monterey, one which is still there, Robert Louis Stevenson School. I think it had another name. My sister attended that school, at one point. He finally – Well, he never did find a ranch, but he kept looking. So I went all over Nevada, and so forth. I ended up in Brownmoor for one year, where I learned to ski, actually, very well. There was just a rope tow, it wasn’t very fancy in those days. And of course, the skis I was wearing are in museums now, with leather bindings. Cable bindings were brand new then, they’re all passé, and so forth. The other advantage there was everybody had their own horse, and we had to learn how to saddle and maintain the horse. We rode every day. And we wore shorts to school, even though it snowed in the wintertime. It’s very dry.
Steven Novak: It sounds like you were your father’s compatriot. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Joanne Blokker: I sort of was, for that time. I was, yes. And then, finally he found a lady, Helen Erkenbrecher, who was divorced. She had three children, he had four. I guess Mrs. Fisher was really taking care of my younger brother, who was much younger and needed more. He was barely in school. And so, they merged, literally merged. We became a family of seven kids and two adults, nine people at the dinner table every night. Of course, she realized that three of us were going to be out of the house within two years; four of us, actually, because we were all in high school. And her oldest daughter was one of my classmates at Poly. She had been going to South Pasadena San Marino High School, which there was only one then, it was over – Well, it’s still there, on Fremont, I think it is. But now there are two, two different, they’re split up. We moved there in the summer of 1943, right after we were at Balboa. And that was the last year we were at Balboa. By this time, we couldn’t go out at night, everything was blacked up. Everything was blackout at the coast. Well, you guys wouldn’t even remember what that was like!
Steven Novak: I know! We missed all the excitement! [laughter] Well, let me go back, though. This is kind of a psychological question.
Joanne Blokker: Yes, go ahead.
Steven Novak: Do you think your mother’s illness and the divorce had some effect on you?
Joanne Blokker: Probably. Yes, it did, because I was afraid of her. It probably made me afraid to trust, emotionally, to trust people, I think. I think that’s true. I remember at one point, I told her – Well, she would have periods of anger for no reason, and blame us for things. We couldn’t understand why she was angry. She had always been so loving before. So, at one point, I said, “I’m afraid of you,” and it terrified her. I think that’s what made her realize she needed help, really needed to do something. Because she kept referring to that later, that that really made her – She didn’t even realize it. And I was thinking of ways I could go somewhere else, so, I was thinking – Yes, it did.
Steven Novak: What was your personality like when you were young, and a teenager? J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Joanne Blokker: I was withdrawn. I was kind of a reader. Yes, I was withdrawn, I think, as I look back on it. I was very much into myself. I liked to read, I was good at sports, quite good at languages. I didn’t realize it until later, but yes, I got a really good basic education at Poly. I didn’t sort of really come out of myself until I went to Stanford, which was later.
Steven Novak: You mentioned going to public high schools, but I don’t think you mentioned the names.
Joanne Blokker: We first went, at La Crescenta, after I came back, after the war had started, to Glendale High. I took a bus, I went down -- It was our local high school. My father was always big on the local high schools, public high schools. So I went there. I don’t think I got much of an education there, I know I didn’t. But then, when we moved, we bought the house on Monterey Road, and then I went to South Pasadena High and graduated from there. And the house on Monterey Road had been owned by Philadelphia O’Melveny of -- Her husband had died, that was O’Melveny & Myers, and so forth. She moved to The Huntington Hotel with her chauffeur and maid, and one other, the cook, I guess, in one of those cottages. But the interesting thing is, later she became Julia Child’s stepmother, which I think is hysterical! [laughter] It’s all connected!
Steven Novak: When you say The Huntington, you mean right here?
Joanne Blokker: The Huntington Hotel, right here, yes. They have the cottages, or did, all around here. I don’t know what they are now, but yes, they did. People had moved in, especially widowed old ladies, and there were a few divorcees, but not too many. So anyway, we had this four-acre property, which, in the back actually had a carriage house, because it was built in the era where they had horses and carriages.
And it had an upstairs apartment where we had our groundskeeper move with us in from La Crescenta, with his wife, and they occupied that apartment. By this time, they had two children who were going to school. And we had a bunch – the cars were in the back. My father had a shop back J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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there. And this was a huge, it was like a typical Georgian – I wouldn’t call it a mansion, but it was a big house. My stepmother said she never liked it, because she never knew what was in every drawer in the house, there were so many of them.
We sort of filled it up, for sure. I had, by this time, my brother and my stepbrother: they had rooms on the third floor and shared a bathroom. Then I shared a bathroom with my sister, Patricia, and my sister, Mary Ellen, and the youngest Erkenbrecher girl, Mary, shared a room. And the four of us – No, wait a minute. Ann and – How did that work? Maybe it was Ann and Mary, or Ann had her own room, and then there was a guest room, which didn’t have a bathroom. I don’t know how they worked that one. And then, of course, my parents’ room. And then some servants’ rooms were in the back, but some friends of my stepmother stayed there during the war where there were two small bedrooms with a bath. And of course, the back stairs.
Down in the basement was a – We all did the washing ourselves by this time, because the servants were gone. That was good, because we learned how to manage the kitchen. And we were just terrified of cooking! We had a washing machine with a wringer, which you probably don’t even remember.
Steven Novak: Yes, I have seen them.
Joanne Blokker: A hand wringer.
Susan Kitchens: Is that with rollers?
Joanne Blokker: Yes. You roll laundry through it, after you rinse it. And then we took it up in a basket to hang. Of course, it was all sun dried, which meant it was really sweet smelling. We did this about once a week. My stepmother did have help, that came in four days a week, that helped with a lot of the cleaning of the house and with the cooking, but as kids, there were four of us, and we had teams that would set the table, because we sat down for dinner every night. Two people would set the table and serve all the dishes, two others would clear and clean. This went on all the time I was in high school. And the J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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only fight I ever remembered between all of us was a fight when my stepmother had a guest, was about who – Because we kept switching about who was going to take whose place, about who was going to do one of these chores. It was odd, and very embarrassing, if you look back on it. But it was the only, actually, argument I can remember, living there. So that was nice.
Steven Novak: Well, it’s sad that your siblings are all deceased now. Susan and I were thinking we’d love to have you talk about them in some detail. We could that later, or we could do that right now. What do you think?
Joanne Blokker: You can talk – or, you want my view, plus their daughters. My sister, Mary Ellen, my next sister – I could go right now, I guess.
Steven Novak: Sure.
Joanne Blokker: I mean, we’re here. Or I can do it tomorrow morning, if it makes more sense. Is that your phone? Well, phooey, if it’s my phone, they can wait. My sister, Mary Ellen, married. She went to Berkeley. We were fairly close, I guess, growing up, because we were close in age. I remember she was a very sweet person. Actually, I sort of grew away from her as I got older, and so the memory fades a lot. But she was sweet. She first went to Colorado and met up with somebody we thought was unsuitable. I guess my stepmother didn’t like him. Do you want my relationships with her, or what she actually did?
Steven Novak: Well, both.
Joanne Blokker: Because we were here that one year, together. Well, actually, we were here in Pasadena, and I went off to Stanford – I actually went in the summer of 1944 because I didn’t know what else to do, and the war was still on. So I started my freshman year in the summertime, and I finished, then, in the fall, or February, probably in winter term. But I had done three quarters, so it was good. I enjoyed Stanford very much. My sister, I think she had one year more at high school, and then she graduated.
And my step brother was away – He was at Midland School. He was in boarding school. And my sister, let’s see, this was sort of hearsay, because I J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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was doing something else. But she went to Colorado A&M, for one year, and finally transferred to Berkeley and became a Theta, because my later years at Stanford, we would go back and forth and see each other.
Is that enough for that for her? I’m doing it in time slots, rather than her whole life.
Steven Novak: That’s fine.
Joanne Blokker: I could go her whole life right now, if you want. It gets more important later on because she was with me when I met my husband.
Steven Novak: Let’s just not forget, right.
Joanne Blokker: And then my sister, Patricia, was sort of dropped. She’s the one that got lost in this equation. She never had the right emotional support; there was nobody there for her, really. She needed a lot more than she ever got. She went to school, and eventually had a rather sad life, I think. She went to USC, and she sort of stayed away from the family and lived out in Venice. Finally, she became an alcoholic and then diabetic, and finally died in the seventies.
And then my brother, Donald, was just a little boy, then, of course. Now, where did he go to college? Oh, he went to Midland, too. Yes, he loved Midland. That worked very well for him. And then he went to Cornell. I remember him saying that he and a friend, they were freshmen, and I guess there was one of those Atlantic hurricanes that came up, that would have been when, the fiftiess, maybe? Yes. I guess so. Let’s see, ’35, ’45, yes, about in the mid-fifties, he would have been at Cornell. He and a friend said they said they saw a tree go this way, horizontally. They thought they’d better go inside. They knew it was windy, they’d go inside! Yes, maybe! And then he eventually got in the Air Force, and the Air Force put him through school, and he became – He was interested in the weather, eventually. And finally, he married a lady called Mary – I’ll say Collins. It wasn’t – Mary Avery, Collins? Her mother married somebody called Collins. Mary Avery. They had J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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three children, and then he was working the oil fields in Texas, and then he developed leukemia. He died when he was thirty.
Steven Novak: Oh, that’s too bad.
Joanne Blokker: But I suspect, I still suspect, they were spraying those farmer’s fields next to him with these pesticides that we know now are dangerous. So he died, and that was in 1965. And his three children, I think his widow lived in California for a while, then she moved back to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, so they actually grew up there. But they’re all members of the family; they come to all the meetings, so it’s good to see them.
Steven Novak: Good!
Joanne Blokker: So, we go back to where we were. Where we were?
Steven Novak: You were going to go to Stanford.
Joanne Blokker: Yes, okay. [laughs] So I’m at Stanford, I’m having a great time, even though all the men were gone, but they still had the V12 – They had an army there. They had people there, but just not a lot of guys like they had had, that girls were expecting. But I had met some wonderful friends. I was there for the three quarters. I came home and decided I’d been to school long enough, I needed a break. My father said, “You’re not going to sit home and do nothing, and be a social butterfly.” So I got a job in a defense factory at 60 cents an hour. I walked just down the street. Well, that’s what they were paying then. I could walk from 2001 Monterey Road. I was sort of near the high school. It was Jimmy, what was his father’s name? Phillips. They had this kind of little factory that made fuel gauges for the P-51. We didn’t make them, we tested them. That’s all we did. We dumped them in water to see if they bubbled. I told a guy later that I met who had flown them, I said, “I hope you didn’t trust those things.” He said, “No, we always knew how much gas we had.” But I did that until I got sick, I got the measles, which I hadn’t had before, in the summer of – let’s see, it was 1945 by now. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Of course, the war in Europe ended in 1945. Roosevelt died. My father was delighted. I remember coming out and telling him. He was working in the shop, for some reason. I guess he had stopped working in the factory. I don’t remember why he was home. I said, “I just heard that President Roosevelt has died.” He said, “Oh, really?” He was very, kind of, pleased. And then, I got sick. And then, I invited a friend, and we went up to – By this time, Helen Erkenbrecher had finally persuaded him to buy a ranch in Tehachapi, because she knew he wanted this and he wasn’t going to be happy until he had something. This one, he could drive back and forth to in a day. So we went up there. We were there on VJ Day, which was probably a very safe place for us to be.
And, of course, on VJ Day, my problems were completely solved, because the gas rationing went off. As a teenager, of course, we shared a car. Oh, I didn’t say this. We shared a Model A, a stick shift Model A. We drove it, occasionally, even up to Mount Waterman to ski, which was kind of, when you think about it, this little rattle trap. With those cars, you could manage, you could push them, you could start them on compression, which I don’t think you can do today. I don’t know. But I certainly can’t change a tire anymore, because they’re put on with electric – The lug nuts are too hard to take off. Not that I ever could, but just the idea of being able to. But anyway, we had this Model A, and then right when the war ended, they found this convertible Chevrolet, which we thought was very jazzy. But we had to be very careful of gas, because it was always rationed. But when the war ended, of course, that stopped. Well, that was fun. The Pasadena freeway had just opened. That was the first freeway in Los Angeles. So it was really easy to go down to LA and back. It was wonderful.
I should talk about the Christmases when I was in college, as well. On Christmas, we had so many families to visit, because the Andrews family always had a Christmas. And then the Whittier family always had a Christmas. And we had our own Christmas at our house, on Monterey Road. We’d have a party usually Christmas Eve. And then the Erkenbrechers had their Christmas with their dad. It got very complicated. We’d go pick up my J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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mother in Las Encinas. She always had a lot of presents for us, she loved to shop. Then we would take her down to the Andrews’ family home on Lafayette Park Place, where we would be there for maybe an hour, or two. Then we would have fun, because we would leave and go over to the Whittiers’, where there was quite a bit of drinking and, well, it was fun! All the cousins were there, and then more presents. This was the entire – That’s where we usually had dinner. Finally had a Christmas dinner over there. It never seemed like an ordeal, it seemed like something we’d always looked forward to. That went on for years, until people started getting married and moving on to their own families. But all the way through college, as I remember. I don’t know if Laura-Lee will tell you the same thing, or did, she may not remember.
And on other occasions, I have had uncles – Uncle Paul decided that we all needed sex education. We probably were younger then. We were still in Beverly Hills, so we had to be about eight, seven, eight, nine. On Easter Sunday, when everybody was dressed up, he brought rabbits and turned them loose in his brother’s yard, and we each had to collect a rabbit and take it home. Well, of course, eventually, we had a lot of rabbits! Quite a lot of rabbits! And nobody was terribly pleased with this idea, but finally, I guess we built hutches for them, and we learned how to take care of them. But this is one of those things I remember from that era.
Now, we’re back in Stanford. What did we do? Well, I went back, then, in the fall after the war was over in ’45. I lived in Roble Hall for two years, for all the fall semester, and part of winter – In winter, I got a bed over in the Cubberly House, which was the old Theta House. At that time, the first year I got there, there were no sororities because they had been outlawed. The reason they were outlawed was, they could only take a brief number of people, and before the war, I guess, in 1944, ’43?, somebody had committed suicide because they didn’t get invited to a certain sorority.
My Aunt Ellen was pressuring me to look at the Kappa Kappa Gamma because she was saying that was her sorority, that was my mother’s sorority, J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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that it was great. I was, of course, resolved not to look at it. It turned out they didn’t have them, and that made all the women furious! So what they had was sort of a lottery system, where people could draw and elect to live in those houses. By the time I got there, there were juniors and seniors who had been real Thetas. They had been part of the sorority. But the sophomores – There were no freshmen in my class. We were just regular students, but we had to obey their rules, which meant if your grade sunk below a B, you couldn’t go out at night. You had to stay in the study hall. They kept to that, which I thought was good. In those days, they had a cook, a big cook, a big black lady. For breakfast, you’d go downstairs in your bathrobe, and she’d cook whatever you wanted, like eggs and stuff. And we’d come home and sit at the table for lunch, and we had hashers. Those hashers were usually fraternity boys. One of my friends now had been a big man on campus and head of the football team. He would have been a hasher also, where I was. And then it was the same thing for dinner. We had lockouts. You were not allowed to be out after 10:30, except on the weekends. And if you were going away overnight, you had to sign out. Those were the rules.
My senior year, we had a new dean of women – she had been in the Navy– and she made the rules a lot lighter. She thought they were being too strict, we were getting too coddled, but everybody was happy about that. And of course, in the spring of, let’s see, by this time it was ’46, all the men who had been gone, who had survived, came back from the war, only they were much older and wiser, and real men, they were not schoolboys anymore. This was great, because we were all there, so we all had a wonderful time. I still have a lot of friends from that era, and they all remember it as a magic time. I do too. Everybody was full of optimism and there was a lot to be learned. I changed my major, because I wanted to be in Poly Sci, but these guys came back and they actually had been to the places I was reading about. They knew what they were, and I had to guess – I mean, I could read about them, but I couldn’t, you know, I couldn’t imagine – like, they lived through a lot of this. So I changed mine to French, because I knew I could get out with French, I was good at it. And French wasn’t too difficult. I mean, you didn’t have to write an exam in French. You answered the questions in English. But J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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you read French, and you answered questions. You probably had to write a little bit, but it wasn’t really what I would call an “intense” exam, like it would be today. But I got a Bachelor of Arts degree in French, and graduated in ’48.
Steven Novak: Did you have any career aspirations?
Joanne Blokker: I looked at being a lawyer. My grandfather would have definitely – He said I had the brain for it. I didn’t like to read the cases, but they were just beginning, developing those personality tests, and I sort of was one of the guinea pigs. I came out “lawyer.” But I really was too lazy to do the work, I really was! I mean, I look back and – I liked dissecting things, but I don’t like reading all those cases. And you have to, because you have to know what they are, they famous ones, anyway. So, no, not really. Well, it wasn’t really – It was considered – We were there to get married. Well, we assumed we would get married. And we were there to get an education. But it was definitely – My friends were all getting married when I was in – I was going – I was in weddings all the time in my senior year. Today, that’s considered kind of outré.
But yes, they were getting married. That was the culture of the time, prevailing culture. We all wore skirts and bobby socks. We were allowed to wear – We used to have to wear stockings to class, but because of the war, you couldn’t get nylons. So by the time I got there, you could wear bobby socks. But you only put on jeans or long pants if you were going on a picnic, or something of that kind, or to a beer bust. You wouldn’t ever wear them on campus to class, or to any event. Not even to a football game.
And that was true going to the city. You wore gloves, of course. Sometimes a hat, not always. Being from down here, I didn’t really wear a hat much. But my mother wore hats, she was very good at it, actually. After I graduated, we, my stepmother, ordered a first new car after the war, and it was a Cadillac. She took me, as sort of a graduation present, and her two younger children, Byron and my younger sister, step sister, Mary, Mary Erkenbrecher, then, later – now, Mary Stradinger – we went on the train to Chicago and we were J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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supposed to connect to Detroit, but the train was late. So my stepmother took us on the airplane, and my dad would not have liked it. He didn’t believe – They were just developing air travel, and he really didn’t like it. He’d built his own plane one time, and I guess he had had an accident, or something, so he really wasn’t comfortable with our flying. But in order to get to Detroit in time, we had to do it. So we did.
We went to all the stuff you do there, the River Rouge Plant, we went to the Ford Plant, and then we went to the Cadillac factory, and when I saw them all coming off the line. I lost my reverence for any kind of Cadillacs at the time. But we got in this car, and then we drove it east. And we went to New York City; it was the first time I had ever been in New York City. It was kind of interesting. We were either going up or down, doing something, basement or something, in a high rise, someplace. I had a friend there from college, and he was very good to us, he took us around.
And then we went to Washington, D.C., to visit a friend of my stepmother’s, and they didn’t have air conditioning in those days. We were in her house, and actually, I don’t know, we had a couple of rooms, down in the play room in the basement, which was cool, which was nice. We’d go to the movies to get cool. It was really hot and sticky. I’d never experienced that hot and sticky before. And then we drove all the way back across the country, ending in Berkeley, and we stayed at the Berkeley at the Claremont Hotel for a couple of nights, and had a gorgeous view across the bay from there.
I forgot about our trip to Hawaii. Right after the war, in ’47, I guess my father and stepmother decided we should all go to Hawaii, because we they hadn’t been for a long time. So the entire family – We had two Lanai suites. We piled onto the Matsonia, which had been reconditioned, out of Long Beach Harbor, and sailed five days. We had to buy long dresses because you dressed for dinner every night. My stepmother was very clever. She found this store in Pasadena that sold relatively inexpensive dresses, and she would put these Adrian shoulder pads in them, so they would look good. We each had to have two long dresses, so we could alternate back and forth. And J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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when I say “we,” that was how many girls, five girls, I think. Yes, three of us, and that they were two. Five girls, and the boys had to have suits on. Not the first night, but after that, every night for dinner. And not the last night, either. So, I guess four nights, five, four and a half. No, it was a six-day, well, the trip was five. Anyway, we were there six weeks, had a great time, learned to swim. We went to Pearl Harbor, did all this, went to the sugar cane factory. Some of the kids got sick because they ate the sugar off the conveyor belt. Then we all came back, and I had my senior year at Stanford.
So, have I done everything about the early days?
Steven Novak: Well, you’ve done a lot.
Joanne Blokker: I know! I’m trying to remember what I haven’t done.
Steven Novak: So all your friends were looking for husbands?
Joanne Blokker: Yes, and a lot of them found them. I met a lot of guys. Actually, I had people that I could have married, they were very eligible. And it was just something in me that said if I do, we’d be divorced in five years. Some kind of a little thing in me. So I didn’t. And I wasn’t really ready, either. But they were, because they had been in the war, and they were ready to settle down. In fact, one – both couples, one couple became a very good friend of mine, very good friends of ours, later.
So, let’s see, what did we do? Friends were all getting married. Oh, by this time I came back from college, I stayed at home, got a job at Barker Brothers. And this was the election of 1948. Yes, that’s right. Okay. I also bought a new car for $1,300, a new Ford. Where did I get $1,300? I guess I must have had some money. Gasoline was 13 cents a gallon. And this was a stick shift. I drove to work. Do you know what Barker Brothers was? It was a furniture store in downtown Los Angeles. I got a job in the personnel department. And we were all smoking, then. You always smoked at a party. In fact, my stepmother became famous because if there were a lot of cigarettes left over, she put them in a jar and brought them out for the next party, and everybody J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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was giving her a hard time about that! We were not allowed to smoke, of course, in the department. If you wanted to smoke, you had to either go in the ladies’ room, or out on the balcony, which was not convenient, so I just sort of gave it up. It was just too much trouble. I never really smoked a lot after that, except at parties. It was just a lot of trouble. I was at Barker Brothers for about, well, all winter. And then in the election of ’48, I was twenty-one. My grandfather called me. This was when Truman was supposed to get beaten by Dewey. My Grandfather Andrews called me at 6:30 in the morning. He had already voted, he wanted to be sure I was going to vote. And I did. I went to work and came back. And my parents had a celebration party for Dewey; he was going to win, right? Well, it turned out that about 10 percent of the people had actually gone to the polls! And this was all our friends. I mean, they all thought he’ll win, why should I bother? So I just went upstairs and went to bed, and that was it, actually. So that was history. Definitely history.
And we had our Christmas, and then the following year, I guess my stepmother, they realized I was spinning my wheels, here. So they got me up, arranged for me, or at least I got the information about a bicycle trip in Europe. A friend of my stepsister’s had gone on it, had a wonderful time. I talked to her, and so forth. So I signed up. I was in a wedding in Washington, went and saw an old boyfriend in Chicago, and then I ended up in New York, and got on this ex – what do they call those? Liberty ships, but they’d be converted student ships. I think the whole trip was, like, $1,200 bucks for three months. The ship was, I can’t remember, wasn’t that much. We were six in a room in bunks, and bathrooms were down the hall. But these were students, we don’t care. And I was teaching the kids in our group French. It turned out that’s when I learned I could teach. I knew more than everybody else. I mean, that was like a one-eyed person leading the blind, I was just a little ahead of them. We had a wonderful time. I really opened up, then. We just would bicycle for, actually, the whole summer.
I came back and they offered me a job in New York, so I stayed there. I lived in a women’s boarding house, it was called Ferguson House. I guess a Mrs. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Ferguson had felt that young women who came to work in New York didn’t have a place to stay. There was that hotel, it was a little more expensive, called Barbalon. This place charged $35 a week for room and board. I shared a room, and four of us shared a bath. We had breakfast and dinner, and then I had to buy lunch. I got $50 a week where I was working. I pretty much walked down 5th Avenue, because I worked at the corner of 45th Street and 5th Avenue. I learned a lot about New York and about just getting around. I had a great time.
The next summer, I was an assistant leader on a bicycle tour across the United States, with a bunch of teenagers, across Canada and the United States. We started in Montreal, and we went on what we call a Colonist Car, which is one railroad car with a curtain in the middle, and it has women’s bunks on one side and men’s bunks on the other. [laughs] And the bathrooms, in this case, were on both ends. We went to Ontario, we didn’t go to Toronto, really. We went to Ottawa, because Ottawa was interesting.
But then we started across Canada, and it was nothing but wheat. We stopped for a day in Winnipeg, and still wheat, just flat as a board. And finally, we got to Calgary before the oil boom, and saw the stampede. And then we got our bikes, and then we started cycling through Banff, and Lake Louise, and we had to camp out. Fortunately, I had a tent mate who knew what she was doing. She could put the tent up. I certainly couldn’t. That’s when I learned I really didn’t like camping. [laughter] I thought this wasn’t much fun, really! It was nice being out in the wilderness, but it wasn’t much fun to have to sleep in a tent, even though somebody else did the cooking. We bought the food, but we had some people that knew what they doing, fortunately, that were cooking! [laughs]
And then, we went up to Jasper and then came down the inland passage, through Seattle, Vancouver-Seattle, and down in Victoria. Victoria? Well, maybe. And all the way back to Santa Barbara, where we cycled down from part of the – We didn’t cycle on the highway. Of course they didn’t have freeways yet. I can’t remember what we did. We spent the night in J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Carpinteria, I remember that. And then the group all went to Los Angeles, and then I got posted to another group that was going to Mexico. At that time, I hadn’t been in Mexico at all. I went with them as sort of assistant leader. Then I got back to New York, let’s see, that winter. It was the winter of ’50. Fifty, and then ‘51, I think.
The following spring, my sister, Mary Ellen, meanwhile, had completed her studies at Berkeley, and went to a school called Wright McMahon, which produced, at that time, high-end secretaries, like personal assistants. They were very well trained, were well dressed, and taught how to behave in the offices, so she could command a big salary. She got out of school, and I called her, and I said, “We have reservations in two weeks on the DeGrasse, and we’re going to Europe for a bicycle tour, and then you can go to work.” So she came, and we went. We did a lot of interesting things. The first trip was ninety bucks. It was a very, very smart trip. We did that for about six weeks. That was in northern France and England. And then we were on our own for a while, bicycling through Germany.
And finally, my aunt, Olive Whittier, and cousin Laddia, I don’t know if you’re going to be talking to Laddia?
Steven Novak: I think so.
Joanne Blokker: She wants to talk, I think. She sort of hasn’t been part of the family very much, but she was interested in this [oral history] project. Actually, I had lunch with her niece, today.
So we went to Spain, because the only way you could get to Spain was –Actually, we wanted to go with somebody older, because at that time, Franco was in power. Spain was very controlled. Women, especially, could not go into the church without being covered to the elbow and having something on their head, period. We wore skirts, we did not wear pants. We wore skirts. We didn’t wear shorts, either, which we did wear shorts, bicycling. We were in Spain, I guess, about two weeks, and I had a lovely trip with Aunt Olive and her mother, Mimi, who was another character. Aunt Olive had J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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been a stunt rider in the movies! That’s how Uncle Paul met her. This is something you’d better hear from Laddia. No?
Susan Kitchens: Your perspective is good, too.
Joanne Blokker: Because this is – Well, she was very beautiful, and her mother, Mimi Hasbrouck, was very beautiful. She was quite a force, I think, in Laddia’s life and Peter’s life, because apparently, according to Laddia, Peter and their mother and father were out on the town every night and the kids didn’t get much attention, except from the servants, maybe, but that was, you know. But Mimi was – At least, being with her in Spain on that trip was wonderful. Later, the four of us, Peter, Paul and Laddia and Mary Ellen, my sister, and me, all bicycled through Germany and came down to Lake Leman, one of those gorgeous – Anyway, we got separated. And I mean, a long story short, and we didn’t meet where we should have. No cellphones. [laughs]
Laddia and I finally went to Munich. And then she went back to Paris. It turned out that Mary Ellen and Peter had cycled back to Paris, where his mother was. They hid in the bathroom, and when Laddia came in, then they came out. Mary Ellen put her bicycle on a train and joined me in Germany, and then we cycled down there in Southern Germany for a while. By this time, it was getting to be late August, early September. We got back to Holland, and I think we wired for money, or something. Anyway, we got a wire from my father saying, “No more money!” So we looked into – A friend of mine had told me about Dutch passenger freighters. Their freighters would take about forty passengers. They went through the Panama Canal to Los Angeles, and then all up the coast. Somebody said they went to Stockton, so that’s what we did.
And we were on the Dalerdyk. We met quite a few interesting people. It was a long trip, a month. When we crossed the Tropic of Cancer, all of the crew put on shorts, the deck officer, and everybody else. That’s when I saw my husband for the first time. I’ve always been a sucker for a uniform, and I just noticed him, then. We didn’t speak until we got to the Panama Canal, where we had to wait. You have to wait your turn. So, then we got to know each J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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other, and it turned out that he had a brother who had been a deck officer on the Holland America line. Their ship was in San Francisco, when Pearl Harbor occurred, so he never went home. He was paid, I guess, by the allies. They went back and forth through the South Pacific, you know, under escort, is what they did the whole war. His family didn’t know if he was alive or dead; they hadn’t heard anything, of course, because the Germans were occupying Holland. So we met, and we sailed back up the coast. He came up to the house.
(By this time, my parents were getting ready to sell 2001 Monterey Road. They had built a new home on Holly Vista Drive in Pasadena. Roland Coates was a well-known architect in Southern California. This was one of his first departures from the Monterey Colonial style. It was actually a very efficient house. It had a lot going for it. It had a nice, it had, really, an upstairs, I guess you might call it a “splanch.” A “splanch” is a split-level ranch. They had a lot of those in New Jersey, where we lived later. Because it had a living room, dining room, kitchen area, then a den with – By this time, we were just getting TVs. And then the master bedroom, and then this sort of wing that went off, had two bedrooms up with a bath and two bedrooms down with a bath, so the kids could still live there. I stayed there for about a year, later.)
And then after, he came – Johan came with actually another officer, and Mary Ellen, we all went home and went back to the home on Monterey Road. Then he went back, and they went on the Red Line back to the ship, back to Long Beach, and then went up the coast, and then loaded and reloaded and whatever. I think they even went to Stockton. I didn’t even know a boat could go up the river, but they did.
And then they came down, and he came back and saw me. And then he left and went back home, and we corresponded. The next year, I got another – I’d worked for the same bicycle company. I was an assistant in Scandinavia. Then, at the end of that trip, I stayed for a month with his family, at Deventer. And then we sort of figured out that we were going to get married sometime. That was about ’52. And then I came back. That’s when I sort of J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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was living in the new house, because I remember, that’s when I first saw smog, too, in the room. I mean, in the living room. You would wake up in the morning, it was like a morning like this, and you could look due east and see San Jacinto, and the other one, San Gorgonio. The sun was rising almost between them, then. And it was gorgeous, just beautiful! And then, by 11:00, the smog was beginning to trickle through the inside of the living room, which was kind of horrible. I was there for that winter, in ’52. Mary Ellen, by this time, had met her husband, Bill Solaini, and was planning to get married. And Ann Erkenbrecher had been married the year before to Wilbur Wright. So people were being married off by this time.
I was in Mary Ellen’s wedding, and I was sort of helping her. But then, at this point, I decided Johan had gotten his – His brother lived in San Francisco, and he already applied for immigration. And so he had gotten his okay to come, and he was coming and I figured if I really wanted us to go anywhere, I had to be where he was. So I moved to San Francisco. I got a job. And eventually, we did marry the following fall. I was already about three months pregnant, which was the reason it went so fast, it went quickly. Everybody said it was one of the best things that happened, because it was Thanksgiving weekend. Actually, we called my parents about two weeks – just before Thanksgiving, maybe the early part of November, and we arranged to get married the Friday after Thanksgiving. And everybody said that was perfect, because they didn’t have anything to do. They needed plans.
Everybody, all of the Whittier family, and all the kids. Laura-Lee came out and was one of my – Well, I just stood up with my sister and Laura-Lee. It was actually at the home up on Holly Vista. And then we had a dinner after that, about thirty-five people. It was all the Whittiers, and they’re all there. There’s pictures of both sides of the family. And all of the Andrews family, my grandfather was there, my cousin, Grace, her husband had died by that time. My Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tom and Horace Andrews, and his wife, Holly. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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The only person who wasn’t there was Horace, Jr., and my mother was not there. And my sister Patricia was not there, either, nor my brother, Donald. I think Donald was with the Air Force and couldn’t be there. But we had a very nice wedding. I remember I had to leave because my grandfather wanted to go home. In those days, you didn’t leave the wedding before the bride.
So we did leave. We went up back to San Francisco, and then we moved to Berkeley. We had an apartment there at the end of Shattuck Avenue, where the streetcars used to come. The lower deck of the Bay Bridge had two streetcars going back and forth. There were no cars down there. The cars, there were two lanes on the top, each way. They went to the city and back, the Red Line. I don’t think they went to – Well, if someone went to Oakland, one of them ended up – We were on Shattuck Avenue. Johan went to school there for four years, engineering school. My Uncle Lee had told him that he should become an electric engineer, because Lee Whittier was in business more than my father. He sort of had his ear out, and he’d listen to people, “You should study electrical engineering.” So Johan did. He graduated in 1957, and he got a job with Hewlett Packard, which hadn’t gone public, then, and that’s where he was for twenty-seven years.
So we lived in Berkeley, we had two children there. And that was a nice four years, I guess. It was okay.
Steven Novak: So far, you told us that he looked good in a uniform.
Joanne Blokker: Oh, right, we didn’t get all the details about –
Steven Novak: What was the introduction like?
Joanne Blokker: Yes, he did. He was also pretty smart! That’s what my stepmother said, he was really smart. Yes, and looked very nice. Very good in a uniform. Even without a uniform.
Steven Novak: He had good taste in women. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Joanne Blokker: Ah, well, that’s another story! He was two years younger than I am. And his brother, he had – What do I want to say? You know, there’s sometimes, when you see something, at least I did, it just seemed like the right thing to do, was just right. Because we didn’t always get along. We had a lot of arguments, about a lot of stuff. But it was just right. I was just in the right place at the right time, and that was what I was supposed to do, and I just did it. I also had kind of clock, maybe, that says it’s time for me to settle down. I had been gallivanting for a while now, I should just settle down. So that’s what I did. I don’t think you hear that much today. You don’t hear that instinctive thing, people, when they have careers – and that’s great, I don’t know how they can manage a career and a family, I think it’s difficult. I found it –
Steven Novak: It’s difficult. But that kind of leads to a question.
Joanne Blokker: Yes?
Steven Novak: You had been a career woman, to some extent. You had been working for this company and having these tours.
Joanne Blokker: Well, yes, until I was married.
Steven Novak: And now you’re going to be staying at home with a child, which is pretty hard and isolating, in a way.
Joanne Blokker: I didn’t think of it that way. It’s just what I had to do. When you have a child, you do that. I was reading in The New Yorker an article about these moms who can’t connect with anybody, and they need to talk to people like themselves, with young children. And so, there was some kind of an app in Brooklyn, or someplace, that was getting them together. And I thought, all we did was go to the park. And everybody who had – It’s like walking your dog. You don’t know the people’s name, but you know the dog. I mean, a lot of people did it that way.
Steven Novak: There was a baby boom in those years. There were a lot of mothers and babies. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Joanne Blokker: Yes, we were a little bit later. My kids are not quite boomers, they’re about ten years behind, because baby boomers were born right after the war. My kids were about ten years later in ’54, ’56, and ’58, I think it is.
Steven Novak: So you had three children, eventually, but two at Berkeley?
Joanne Blokker: Two in Berkeley, and then Dominique was born the first year we lived in Palo Alto. I was pregnant with her. When my husband finished his degree, I felt that if I didn’t get these kids to Holland, his family might never see them. At least, we didn’t know when we could go every again, because he’d be working.
So, what we did. My grandfather had died and left me $5,000, so we bought a house, we bought a new car, and we went to Europe. We didn’t get $5,000, we got $3,750, because the way he wrote his will – he was very old-fashioned – He wrote a holographic will, and he didn’t think of the tax consequence. So we had to pay some tax, because he wanted us each to have the $5,000 and the rest, the estate, would go out. When I say “us each,” it meant each grandchild. He had four or five grandchildren.
So we bought a house for $25,000 in Palo Alto. I don’t know what we put down on it. I can’t remember. I’d have to go back and look. I know we paid about $125 a month mortgage. But it was all proportional. So we did go to Europe. I got a girl that I knew, I met her, she was kind of a nanny. She sort of took care of the kids sometimes. She was from Switzerland, and she wanted to go home. I said I’d pay her air fare to New York if she’d look after the kids on the plane, because we had an all-night flight. That was crazy!
It was eleven hours. By this time, 1957, they had a Constellation that didn’t stop in Kansas City for fuel. When I first lived in New York, you couldn’t come back here without stopping for fuel. Of course, they didn’t have jets, yet. So this is a Lockheed Constellation, TWA, I think. So we flew overnight, and set out on the New Amsterdam, the ship, the next day, which was in Hoboken. They don’t dock in New York. I think they do now, but they didn’t then. We went to Rotterdam, and then we spent the summer in Holland. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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We had one month at a place on the ocean, called Egmond An Zee, which was on the coast. It was the month of July. We were lucky, because for three weeks, we had good weather, and then the last week, as they say, “the weather got sick.” We had thunderstorms all the time. So we had very good weather. By this time, I had two kids. Even Donja was three, she was still in diapers. In Holland, you scrape the diapers off and rinse them, sort of, and then boil them overnight. So that’s what we were doing. We sort of did laundry every night. My mother-in-law helped, but also my sister-in-law, my husband’s sister, who spoke English very well. She had two young kids, and they were in the house, too. So we were all boiling – I remember these diapers, boiling, we would go out on the roof and hang them up. Of course, they air-dried very quickly in the wind, and they were sterile enough, because they had been boiling all night! [laughter]
At this point, my Aunt Ellen, who was traveling in Europe, decided to come. She wanted to meet my husband’s family. She had all these guys that she thought I ought to marry, and none of them were – Some of them were gay, but I don’t think she understood that, quite. Anyway, she did come. They couldn’t speak, of course, because my father-in-law spoke some English – he could write it and read it – but he couldn’t really speak it too well. But they got along pretty well. She just came briefly for a little visit, and then she went on her trip, wherever she went. We took her back to the hotel, and at one point, on that trip, my in-laws took care of the kids while – No, wait a minute. On that trip, Dominique wasn’t there yet. I was pregnant with her. It was just the two of them. Anyway, Johan and I traveled. We went to Stuttgart to pick up a new Mercedes, and drove it a little bit in Italy, and then came back. So we had a car. Eventually, we put the car on a ship and came back, eventually, to California.
When we got back in the fall, he started with HP. They wanted him right away, they kind of just wanted him. There is sort of history about, as far as Silicon Valley. We never thought about being in any kind of revolution like that. Not really. Because what HP made in those days was instrumentation. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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They made instrumentation for industry; they didn’t make commercial products.
And then later, we got transferred to New Jersey, because HP bought a little plant in Berkeley Heights, which is not far from Bell Labs. I don’t know if you know any of that area. We lived in Summit, New Jersey, for eleven years, where my kids were actually educated, and very well. I never regretted it. I liked living near New York. It was fun. The weather was bad, and a lot of other stuff like that, but it was fun. It was good for them.
Let’s see, I can go on to Johan’s career. He got transferred back east, and he ran two plants there. When he first got transferred, he was just the R&D manager, and then he got moved to another plant in Rockaway, where he actually ran it. That time it was kind of interesting in some ways. He was always complaining about the government, because one agency demanded a list of all the people and their countries of origin, because they were looking for immigrants, I guess. But he wasn’t allowed to ask that question, so he was ignoring the whole thing, not doing either. But I thought that was kind of interesting, because it hasn’t changed much. And that was late sixties.
We moved back to – Now, my mother died, let’s see, in about 1970. You know, I don’t remember. I think it was ’74. No, it had to be before that. More like ’72. Yeah, I honestly don’t remember the year. I remember coming out here, of course. Yes, well, and my Aunt Ellen, she was quite emotional about things like family, and so forth. But she was also a traveler, and she was on the Gobi Desert in a yurt! And so, I was able to wire her and tell her not to come, race back, because it wasn’t going to do any good, anyway. I’d see her when she was ready to come back. Because my mother had been ill anyway, so it was not something that was unexpected.
What else do I remember? I’m running out of ideas about that time.
Susan Kitchens: I’ve got one. You had mentioned your dad having this conflict about airplanes. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Joanne Blokker: Yes.
Steven Novak: And then, his son joins the Air Force. Is there a dis—
Joanne Blokker: I did not feel – Well, my brother is the kind of person that would turn off the gas and coast all the way down from Truckee, just to save gas. He’d go in neutral, which is not safe. He was very, shall we say, parsimonious? They put him through school, and that’s one of the reasons he joined. I think he was happy in the Air Force. He wasn’t flying, particularly. I don’t think he ever flew. He was just the weatherman. Yes, that was what he did. So I never heard anything about it. If there was anything, I didn’t know. This conflict about flying, actually, was earlier, because later on, my father and stepmother and two friends went to Europe, and they had to fly to New York. They went on a boat, but they had to fly to New York to catch the boat. So I think he sort of got over that as he got older.
Steven Novak: How would you describe yourself and Johan as parents?
Joanne Blokker: Well, we were always there. I thought we were good parents at the time. I don’t think I was particularly loving, I’m not a terribly emotional touchy-feely person, but I was certainly there. We were the kind that wouldn’t buy candy. I mean, if they wanted sweets, they had to pay for it themselves, except on special occasions. I learned to cook from Julia Child on television. We haven’t even gone through the television era. [laughter] Yes, absolutely. I was getting really good at making stuff. Well, they brought the camera down onto the frying pan, I could see what was going wrong, and I wasn’t doing right. I could see what it should look like, and after about five tries, and the sixth time, it would work, usually. I got to be a pretty good cook, and the kids liked certain things that I made. But it was every night, I mean, you know, I had to get dinner on the table for five, four, five people every night, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, they had to be there. Then on Friday and Saturday and Sunday, well, I could cook for them, but they could go out, if they wanted to. And Sunday night, we always went out. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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If they were there, they went. Or if they had something else to do – Or we may have gone into New York, we may have had other stuff to do. But that was our general pattern. So I would say we were pretty good parents. I think our kids are pretty good kids. I don’t have any flakes. [knocks three times, i.e., “knock on wood”] I didn’t allow any flakes. I mean, they don’t buy fancy cars, they don’t have the money to do that. But they’re pretty careful, I’d say.
Steven Novak: Did they go to private schools or public schools?
Joanne Blokker: Both. Let’s see. The girls went to public schools in Summit. Jeff sort of had problems, so he visited a psychiatrist. I think he just needed somebody to talk to, a Dutch uncle or somebody, and we didn’t have anybody like that around. He ended up at Newark Academy, and he never got the grades he should have gotten, except once when he decided to show us he could do it, if he wanted to. So of course he didn’t get into any good colleges. And then by this time, he had found Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and learned to meditate. When he graduated from Newark Academy, he parked cars at a local restaurant for about a month, and then he earned money. This was the year of the hippies going all over the country. I put him on the parkway, and he’d start hitchhiking all over the country. But he had a goal, which, of course, he didn’t tell us. He came to Santa Barbara, because Maharishi had started a college for meditators in Santa Barbara. And he got here, and he found it had moved to Fairfield, Iowa. And he showed up, and Donja was, by this time, at Scripps, over here in Pomona. He showed up at her place, and naturally, she wasn’t too excited to see this kind of raunchy, hippie kid showing up. But anyway, he came back just about Labor Day and he told us about the college. So I called up, and of course, it was brand new. It had moved to Fairfield, Iowa. I called it on Monday and we were in the airplane on Friday. And so I delivered him to Fairfield. It’s kind of a – was then, I think it’s grown a lot since, because it’s become quite an establishment. This was 1974, yes, the fall of ’74. That was also the year that Nixon resigned, so there was a lot that happened that year. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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So I took him to Fairfield and left him at the college. And then, the next summer, or next June, my husband and I went back there for Parents’ Day. It’s not easy to go to Fairfield. We had to go to Chicago and get on kind of a puddle jumper that went to Ottumwa, among other places, Ottumwa, Iowa. They don’t have any service to Ottumwa anymore, but that’s thirty miles away from Fairfield. Or you could go to Cedar Rapids and drive for two hours, that’s another option. I think that’s what you have to do now. And he was this neat kid with his hair cut, neat, neat pants and a white shirt, and a tie. So we figured they straightened him out, and if they could straighten him out, then he probably wasn’t all bad. Apparently, what was really wrong was, he’s somewhat dyslexic. When he was in school here in Palo Alto, actually, they were experimenting with new ways of learning, you know, recognition, rather than sounding out the vowels. So he never really learned to read, basically, is what happened, until he got back there, where they spent one whole month on one subject. They concentrated, and then they moved to the next one for the month, and so forth. He stayed there for about three years. And oh, and in the meantime, we got – First of all, he came home that summer, and he got all of us – We all ended up meditating, we all got initiated. In fact, we were – who died? Somebody died. Oh, my brother-in-law’s wife died that summer, too, during this whole affair. So, we went up to California a little bit, in that.
Then the next year, Johan went on a program that HP had with Stanford, where they had people come in. Stanford had businessmen come in from all over the world, people who were already in business were already working, and they went on to learn further executive traits. Johan called it a “Mexican MBA,” but he didn’t want to live in the dorm.
We rented a house in Atherton, and they let us bring our dog and our cat, and Jeff came and went to school at Stanford for just the summer, and so did Dominique. They both went to summer school. He took art; he’s a good artist. The teacher said he could have gotten him in on an art scholarship, and Jeff didn’t tell me, because I would have made him do it. [laughter] J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Because he could have switched, then, to engineering. But anyway, which he did – Well, that’s another story.
That’s when he finally left MIU, because they didn’t have the science and engineering he wanted, and came back and got his credits at the local city college, which is not a city college, but a junior college. And then finally, he got accepted to UCSB, which is where he finally got the degree, a master’s. And more recently, he’s gotten another degree in mathematics, finally, at Stanford.
So, yeah, they’ve all shaped up one way or another.
Steven Novak: Well, since you’ve taken him this far, so did he have a career?
Joanne Blokker: Yes. Well, yes. He actually had his own business, which he developed, some kind of way ahead of the present – a way of delivering “real time” stock quotes to customers. And this was way back in the end of, say, the ’90s, the end of the ’90s, before people did that. A lot of his customers were in the World Trade Center. So, at that point, he sort of lost his business, his own business. And he always wanted to sail. I guess he had enough money to buy, because we didn’t finance this. They finally found a boat, and still have it, and sailed down the West Coast, Santa Barbara and Mexico, it got as far as San Salvador, yes, they were in San Salvador. When I say “they,” it was Jeff and Kim. They had three children, and their youngest son was being home-schooled, so he went with him. The other two were in college, they were out. Yes, they were in college by this time. They were on a trip, they went to Guatemala, and were in a bus accident. This was after – Johan had died about this time, so this had happened a lot later, in the early, like, ’02 or ’03, or something. Probably ’03. Yes, it was two years before, they were in a bus accident. They were in a hospital in Guatemala for a week, finally they left the boat down there, they were able to get it cared for. They had friends, or something.
They came back and stayed with me in Woodside until they recovered, and then they went back and sailed the boat back up the coast. And they spent, J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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let’s see, early part of the year -- They came and went to the Sea of Cortez. And then they came back up the coast and sailed in San Diego Harbor on the Fourth of July, and wondered why there were so many boats around! [laughs] But anyway, and they said it took forever, but then they sailed all the way up the coast, which is apparently not much fun, and entered into San Francisco Bay, and now the ship is there. The boat is about 54 feet long, parked at a marina in Redwood City. It’s been there for the last eight years. Jeff and Kim sort of use it as their weekend home. He’s always working on it and doing stuff, but he hasn’t really taken it out. He took it up once, they didn’t sail it, they just went by motor up to Napa, where he got it out of the water, worked on the hull. So that’s about it. That was his dream, to do that. And now he’s back working. Well, he did contract work for a while, but now he has a job at the company that does all of the tests for the CPAs throughout California. They’re trying to get their computers to talk to each other, and they have a horrible time doing this. He’s one of the people that they’ve hired to help, even though he’s now fifty-eight, I guess. He’s kind of old. It’s hard for old people, they don’t want to hire you when you’re that old.
Steven Novak: So, you called him Jeff, is that what you called him?
Joanne Blokker: Yes, his name is Johan.
Steven Novak: Right.
Joanne Blokker: Johan F., Jr., J-A-F. To distinguish him from his father, yes.
Steven Novak: And so your eldest was Donja?
Joanne Blokker: Yes. Donja. And she’s – Oh, what was her career? She graduated from high school in Summit, has lots of friends, still there. She went to Scripps, graduated from Scripps. And then in ’75 or ’74, when she graduated – the reason I’m looking at this, I think it’s ’75. Yes. She came up and got a teaching certificate at Stanford, her master’s in education. I guess it is, not a certificate. She felt that they were lousy teachers and lousy classes, but she still got the degree. And then, she sort of went on – What did she do? Well, J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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she went on a National Outdoor Leadership School trip for three months in Wyoming in the Wind River country, and she met her husband. Her and her husband, then. And so she’s sort of on-again, off-again, been doing trips. Then they got married in the early eighties.
Meanwhile, Jeff, well, I didn’t tell you how Jeff got married.
Steven Novak: Go ahead.
Joanne Blokker: He was at UCSB, and they were living in a compound that, what’s his name, Mike Love, one of the Beach Boys – He owned property up on the Mesa in Santa Barbara, and it’s kind of a compound where a lot of meditators lived. And so he rented them out. I guess he wanted the energy there. Jeff, I guess, had met Kim there. We didn’t know much about it, except we figured if he left his car with her – He used to go on these longer trips for meditators, I mean, there would be, like, three months here. There’s a Sidhi program that they did, and all that stuff. He left this car with this woman.
And then, in 1980, that was the beginning of another era, too, for another reason. In the fall, I guess, of 1980, we heard that he got married! They got married in a courthouse in Santa Barbara. The reason they got married was that Maharishi was offering a course in India that they wanted to go to. I think they had the money, because we didn’t pay for it. Anyway, but they couldn’t be together if they weren’t married. So they got married, and so they went to India. But when they got there, they got separated, anyway. [laughter] Kim got very sick, she got diarrhea, whatever. So they came back, and were in London for at least – They put them in quarantine for weeks. I had to send money, because he wasn’t expecting to be – He had to live in London while she was in quarantine in the hospital. But she said as soon as she got on the plane with air-conditioning, she felt a lot better. It was just that everything was so exciting, and she wasn’t paying attention to what she was eating, and all this stuff. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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So they came back. And they were still in school in Santa Barbara. And by this time, it was our first trip to Cabo for Christmas. And this has to do with Win Rhodes. You haven’t interviewed her, yet?
Susan Kitchens: No.
Joanne Blokker: Well, she wasn’t married yet to Al Bea, but they were an item. They spent Christmas together, and one Christmas, Win was living in Al’s house here in San Marino. Al Bea was a widower who had five boys. His brother was a judge, Carlos Bea, of San Francisco. His wife and their four children, and his wife’s mother, all came to the house for one Christmas. I guess Win was doing the cooking, or doing a lot of this. So, on the 3rd of January, she called Palmilla and made reservations for the following Christmas, so she wouldn’t be here. And nobody would be – We’d all be there. Or, she would be there, and she made extra reservations for some friends of hers who couldn’t go, so she asked me. This meant that we all went, or we were going. This was our first year in Palmilla. It was $125. Have you heard of the one and only Palmilla now? It’s all $700 a night, and all fancy? Well, then it was $125 a night, room and board, three meals. No television, no phones. I think they had sort of strictly showers, but you had a private bathroom. It was right on the beach, and it was really very pretty. And it was probably the most beautiful bar, or one of the most beautiful bars in the world. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but it’s very pretty.
Well, of course, we show up at the air – This was my first experience with meeting Kim. She and Jeff appeared. By this time, we were living in Woodside, we’d moved back. We were living in Woodside, appeared, and Dominique was with us. Donja went from here. She was already down here, for some reason. So, she went with Win, and they were all down there. We went to the airport. The first plane to LA was cancelled. That was a PSA at that time. It wasn’t bad weather, it was just cancelled. So we flew to Ontario, we got a later flight. We flew to Ontario and drove over to the airport and stayed in the International Hotel. We went to the airport the next day for the flight, and our baggage was checked in and everything. And then, they were J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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going to take us to Mexico City or some weird thing, so we decided we didn’t want to go. We had to get the baggage back, and I don’t know, Jeff jumped – Johan jumped over the counter, he was going to get all this stuff. Meanwhile, Kim, it’s the first time I’d met her. She had to put up with all this stuff. And she was really quite a trooper. And it was Dominique and Kim and me, and Johan and Jeff.
We ended up going to the Beverly Wilshire and sitting in the bar and having a Margarita. I said, “We’d better go home and buy a tree.” And then we picked up a magazine that said something about flying a charter jet. Anyway, we called, and they said, “Yes, sir, we can take you at noon today.” I’d never done this, I mean, I had no idea how I was going to pay for it. But apparently, they took my American Express card. Anyway, to make a long story short, we were flying, and it was, by this time, the 24th. We were supposed to be there two days ago. We were flying, and we actually did a flyby. They buzzed the beach where everybody was sitting, because we couldn’t land there, we had to go land at the major airport. Part of the problem was, there were no lights at the airport. So, if the plane was late, it couldn’t land.
So, the next year, they didn’t take us there. They didn’t tell us, they gave us margaritas and we ended up in La Paz and had to ride the bus down, but that was another story. So, anyway, for the next – We still all go for Christmas. Not together anymore, but we still all go. We had a wonderful time. I thought the kids would be bored, because there was nothing to do, and they had a ball! [laughs]
Steven Novak: Oh, that’s really sweet! But since we’re talking about the children so much, do you want to talk more about Donja and Dominique, then?
Joanne Blokker: Dominique. Let’s see, we’ll talk about Donja, let’s see. Well, she met – This was about this time, she had met Doug, I think. I remember she had a pair of torn shorts, which Win and I were trying to get away from her. She had met Doug – When did they get married? I think they got married – there was a time when they were spraying up north for fruit flies. And these aircraft would come through right in front of our house. This was the first time Doug J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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had ever been in California. And he said first they tried to poison him with this fruit spray. What else did they do? Then they tried to rain him out. He hadn’t been in California at all before that. My husband referred to him as “the berry picker,” because he really didn’t – He’d been trained as a physicist, but he really was just a mountain man. He was leading these trips, that’s basically what he did, that’s basically what he was still doing, and he’s still doing it, at sixty plus.
And so, when they came, and they got married in Wyoming. They built a yurt, which is probably not as wide as this room, but circular and it makes you think it’s bigger than it is, because you keep going around and seeing different views all the time. All the facilities are in the center core. And they had to climb their – Their toilet was what they call a Clivus Multrum, they bought it in Sweden, and it doesn’t use water. It just flushes, and it’s very clean. The gasses do something. It’s very high-tech. This yurt was about five miles outside of Lander, Wyoming, which is pretty cold country! Maybe more, maybe it was more like twenty, I’ll have to ask him.
So they lived there, and then their first baby arrived, and then they decided maybe that area wasn’t the best place to raise a baby. In fact, our wedding present to them was five miles of gravel road, you know, gravel on the road, so it wasn’t so much ruts – But I guess she decided – They moved to San Diego, and they lived in some kind of a commune, I guess it was, but it was kind of a self-help thing, where you learned to go inward and assess your own values and history, and so forth. It was not San Diego, but somewhere just south of there, near Brown Field. And then later, they moved to Lake Marino. And then they realized, now, by this time, they had a second child, Emily, who is probably, as we speak, on her way here. They realized that they really couldn’t educate the kids there, the schools weren’t any good, or good enough. They looked around for a place they could move, or they could afford, where the schools were pretty good. They ended up in Victoria, British Columbia, and they have been there, ever since. The children went to a private school, there and then to college. Both of them went to an arts college. None of them went to a four-year college. One of them likes to do J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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classic animation, drawing cels the way they used to do in Disney period. Emily, who’s here and living in the valley, is an aspiring actress, and has been to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and is now auditioning for various roles.
Steven Novak: So, Dominique.
Joanne Blokker: Dominique, let’s see, went to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She met a boy, had a boyfriend there, who was from Bozeman, Montana. She went to Bozeman to follow him, the affair blew up, but she liked Bozeman so much, she stayed and had friends there, and finally met her present husband, who is actually probably common law, I don’t think they’re really married. But they’ve been together thirty years. Lance. They lived outside of Bozeman, in Manhattan, Montana. Dominique is here, and she was driving me around. So, I see her all the time. I see them all regularly. I think they all got good educations. They can tell you more about themselves than I can.
Steven Novak: Well, they sound adventurous.
Joanne Blokker: Oh, they are! Oh, yes!
Steven Novak: And you were adventurous, I mean, living in Europe, and taking all these bike tours.
Joanne Blokker: It seemed like the next thing to do: it wasn’t very difficult. I didn’t have any feeling of danger, particularly. Now I get tired if I just think about flying eleven hours to London!
Steven Novak: [laughs] Right. Well, then, at least two of your children were spiritual seekers, I would say, or at least it sounded like that.
Joanne Blokker: Yes. They all meditate.
Steven Novak: Was that coming out of you, a little bit, or...?
Joanne Blokker: No, I don’t think it did. I think it just sort of came out of their environment. I supported. I don’t think my husband – He learned to meditate. He was a J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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lapsed meditator. He never did meditate much. Occasionally, we’d go do the panchakarma treatment at the Chopra Center, when he started at Lancaster, Massachusetts. My husband looked twenty, thirty years younger when he came out. He did. Of course, they took away his cigarettes, and they took away his John Coltrane tapes, because we had a Walkman when we were there, and we’d go around, we were supposed to listen to this Gandharva Veda music, which is supposed to just go through your brain and relax your nervous system. But he put his John Coltrane tapes – He didn’t really like it very much, I think. I still go to the Chopra Center here in Carlsbad twice a year, because, I mean, for me it’s beneficial.
Steven Novak: Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that right now, since it’s come up, the benefits you find from it?
Joanne Blokker: Oh, it’s part of my health maintenance plan, and I go twice a year there to – some kind of what they call panchakarma, which is the Ayurveda or Indian way of cleansing. And it’s the perfect health, you know, they believe in balancing your Doshas, or your system.
And then I go twice a year to the Golden Door, which is another kind of spa. It gets your metabolism up. It’s a little different. That’s also in Escondido. And then four days a week, I’ve been doing some kind of body work. Mondays and Wednesdays, I go to a gym with a personal trainer for an hour. And Tuesdays I go to Pilates with one personal trainer. And then on Fridays, I go to a Yoga class. On Thursdays, I drive to San Francisco to get my hair washed, and then have lunch with friends. I try to also walk. I think moving is important.
So this is part of my stay-healthy maintenance. I like to go to the Chopra Center. I’m just back, actually. I came back two weeks ago. It really is beneficial. Well, there, the one down here is actually better in many ways, because you start at 7:00 in the morning and you finish at 6:30 at night. And you’ve got two yoga classes, two meditation sessions, group mediations, and a couple of lectures, and then oil treatments, which everybody loves. It’s really nice. It’s very beneficial. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Steven Novak: I think this might be a good halting place, Susan, does that sound okay to you? And then we can come back in the morning? And then if we don’t finish tomorrow, we’ll just have a rain check, okay?
Joanne Blokker: Yes, take a rain check, or you could either come and see me.
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Susan Kitchens: Today is December 5th, 2014, and we are here for our second interview with Joanne Blokker. I’m Susan Kitchens, with my colleague, Steve Novak. This is for the Whittier Family Oral History Project.
Steven Novak: Joanne, we wondered if you had any thoughts after our last session of things you wanted to add to the record?
Joanne Blokker: Mainly about my Aunt Ellen Andrews Wright, who was my social mentor after my mother was taken ill, for all of my, I guess, really formative years, from about the seventh grade, and through college, essentially. She had parties for me, and she saw that I was properly cared for. My mother, actually, was able to go out with us and buy clothes. She liked to shop, so we were well taken care of. Aunt Ellen Wright was married to Uncle Tom, Charles Wright, who was called Tom. He was a banker. He owned the Pasadena Bank here in Pasadena, with his partners. He went around with a guy called Jerry, so they were called Tom and Jerry, basically. But his name was Charles. They were married, gosh – Well, I went to their wedding. She was married in her forties, which was quite late, in those days. They had no children. I was sort of her surrogate daughter without all the trouble, she didn’t have to take care of me, essentially. But she was very kind, and very sweet, and took all my friends out.
The second thing I wanted to mention is that when my parents were divorced, part of the divorce settlement was that my father took out life J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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insurance on his life, several annuities, I guess they were, so that we would be sure to have money for college, because I think my mother’s family weren’t too sure that he really thought college was necessary for women. He flunked out; he hated Stanford. He flunked out of a few colleges. But they kept sending him appeals, asking for money. I don’t know if he actually flunked out of Lafayette. I think he attended Lafayette and he attended USC. I know he flunked out of Stanford.
With that money, we were able to live for four years in Berkeley while my husband went to school. And after that, we moved. Actually, one of the policies matured. That’s how we got the down payment for the house in Palo Alto. So that’s what I really wanted to say from yesterday.
Steven Novak: Well, thank you! You know, when you were talking about Mary Ellen, I was thinking about sex education. And I remembered the story about the rabbits.
Joanne Blokker: Yes.
Steven Novak: Was there any sex education for your girls, or just kind of, you hear it from your friends?
Joanne Blokker: We heard it from our friends. We vaguely knew about menstruation. My mother told me. She was very clear on that. And also, when she was pregnant with Donald, this was in, I guess, he was born in ’38, wait a minute, nine years? Yeah. ‘Thirty-six. She gave us a little book that showed how babies grew in their mother’s stomachs, and so forth, and were delivered. But we never thought much about it. We were quite young, and so as far as actual – Yes, people said that, A, there was sex, because otherwise people wouldn’t get born, but we sort of just went out with boys, mainly for dancing. And not particularly with the idea, at least not at the young age, of marrying. Well, my aunt was always thinking about future possible partners, but I knew I was going to go to college, and everything would expand, and so forth. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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So that was really all. It wasn’t really sex education in the class, in the sense that they have it today, which is very clinical. It involved, I don’t know if it was boring or not, but it sounds boring!
Steven Novak: Not romantic.
Steven Novak: My grandson told his mother that she should eat a lot, so she would have another baby, figuring she had to get fat.
Joanne Blokker: Oh, that would make it – How old is your grandson?
Steven Novak: Well, now he’s four, but I think this was when he was about three.
Joanne Blokker: I think that’s pretty observant for a four-year-old.
Steven Novak: [laughs] So, let’s see. One more question. This is kind of a major life question. Your mother’s hysterectomy really had a huge impact on her.
Joanne Blokker: Yes.
Steven Novak: And then, on you, also.
Joanne Blokker: On all of us. Yes.
Steven Novak: I was just wondering, why did she have that, do you know?
Joanne Blokker: Yes. At the time my brother was born, she had had problems. She had three children quite close together, which was kind of a strain. My aunt always blamed my father for all of this, because she thought he was a monster. But my mother knew about birth control, but didn’t use it.
I mean, it was out there, because as soon as I got married, or even got pregnant, I got birth control a little late from the doctor. Let’s see, what was the question again?
Steven Novak: Your mother’s hysterectomy, and the birth control? J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Joanne Blokker: She apparently had had something – Oh, she had – Donald came by Cesarean section, and when they opened her up, they saw something that they felt would be dangerous, and would be life-threatening. So that’s why they did it.
Steven Novak: Like cancer, perhaps?
Joanne Blokker: Yes. Well, it could be a future, you know–
Susan Kitchens: Your name is Joanne. I assume that means you are named for your grandmother?
Joanne Blokker: Yes. Joanna. Joanna Elizabeth Whittier.
Susan Kitchens: Did you hear stories about your grandmother and your grandfather, describing their personality, things like that?
Joanne Blokker: No. Actually, my father never talked much about it. The only person that would have known them would have been – well, my Aunt Ellen, who always said they had a beautiful home, parties up at the Whittier mansion. But she didn’t really know him. He was kind of a self-made man. She was a kind of a snob, is what she was. [laughs] And it was like, he was very nouveau, he was a very rough diamond from a farm in Maine. He managed to make a lot of money, and he was apparently very strong. But this is what I’ve heard later. We really didn’t hear stories about him when we were growing up, at all.
Now that I think back, we didn’t. The only person that would have known would have been my father, or Uncle Lee and Paul, and I never heard them say anything. That’s all I can say. Now, maybe some of the other cousins know more than I do. What I’ve gleaned, I’ve gleaned later, since we’ve been doing this history, and what other people who’ve worked with him said. So that’s about all I can say. They said that he met his wife, I think, singing in the choir, in the church. So I guess he went to church in Los Angeles. And then he took her to Bakersfield. The lady in the boarding house was upset, because she didn’t allow unmarried people in the boarding house. He had to explain that he was married, it was quite legal. So they lived up there for a while, I guess. And then, well, he worked in the oil fields. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Susan Kitchens: When you were growing up, were you curious about them?
Joanne Blokker: Not really. I was more interested in myself. I mean, and this is maybe when I got to be around college age, but then I was busy with my life, then. It really didn’t enter my head to be curious.
Aunt Ellen used to tell me a lot about her father, her family, and I was interested in them. At one point, I took a trip. This was when my mother was ill. I guess they thought I probably should get out of the house, because it wasn’t a good environment for me. So, I took a trip in a car in 1930 – I guess, well, Donnie was here, he was born in ’36? It was 1937, up around in that area. I was eleven, so it would have been ’38, then. We drove all the way back to Cleveland, Ohi, to see my grandfather’s brother. I went with my cousin,Grace Andrews, and her husband, Marshall. Marshall was my mother’s first cousin. And Horace Andrews of Cleveland was an attorney, and that was Marshall’s father. We went with the Andrews, and their younger son, John. Their older son, Hayward, was in college. He was in USC. So the four of us went on Route 66. I enjoyed it very much. I had never been in a place that was like Las Vegas. Las Vegas wasn’t there. We actually went to Boulder. There was no gambling – I mean, there might have been a little gambling, but it wasn’t like it was later. It was really hot. We saw the dam, which had just been completed. It was considered a marvel, and so forth.
When we got back East, I was very impressed with how much greenery there was, and the rain and thunderstorms and so forth. I recall one incident there. When you think about it, some things don’t change. My cousin, John, the young one, was college age. He told a story he’d heard kind of impinging on Franklin D. Roosevelt, and it had to do with he was drowning in a pool. My great uncle was grumbling at the table, he said, “Why didn’t they let him drown?” This was an attitude I wasn’t familiar with, because we were kept from a lot of that. We didn’t really see real anger, political anger. We heard remarks. But, you know, some people’s families now, later, they get really upset about – They get the news, and they just get upset. We never saw any of that. This is the first time I had an inkling that maybe Mr. Roosevelt – Well, J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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everybody in my family was voting for Landon, and I knew that. But he might not be as appreciated, but everywhere.
Steven Novak: I meant to ask about politics, last time you mentioned a story about telling your father Roosevelt had died, and he seemed happy.
Joanne Blokker: Yes. He smiled.
Steven Novak: What about you and Johan, were you Republicans?
Joanne Blokker: We were vaguely liberal, sort of, I would say, middle of the road. I was a Republican, and I would say middle of the road. I once voted for Johnson, because I think his opponent was – Gold?
Steven Novak: Goldwater.
Joanne Blokker: Goldwater, whose claim to fame was the underwear business. I had lived in New York. I just couldn’t vote for a man who invented something called “Antsy Pants.” These were men’s underwear with little ants crawling all over them! I thought that didn’t seem to be part of the – So I voted for Lyndon Johnson. Otherwise, I’ve been pretty straight down the road Republican. But I’m not an activist.
Steven Novak: Well, maybe we should talk about your brother and sisters in a little more detail. You told us a little bit about their going to school, I think. And you said that, I think Ellen was involved in your meeting Johan, maybe that was because she was on the trip?
Joanne Blokker: Yes, she was on the trip.
Steven Novak: But let’s talk about them. Patricia didn’t marry. Donald did marry.
Joanne Blokker: He married Mary.
Steven Novak: Please tell us about their families, and then their deaths, too.
Joanne Blokker: Well, Patricia didn’t marry. Mary Ellen married Bill, William Solaini, and they have four beautiful girls, three of whom are in town right now. Actually, the J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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oldest girl is married to Bernie Babcockand lives right across the street, here. Her sister, Donna’s, husband just died. She was out here for the meeting yesterday. It was good to see her. And then there’s a sister, Joanie, I guess that’s named for me, who lives in England. And, let’s see, Debbie is married to Bernie, and they have one daughter. Donna was married to Chris Coffin, they have three sons, and they live in Chicago, or in Lake Forest. They’re all back there now. Joanie was married to Jonathan Draper, who was a Brit. She met him over at USC in the choir. They were both musicians, both music majors, actually. I guess that marriage fell apart, and Joanie went back to England, although they lived here for a while. She went to England, and she studied law, I guess. Don’t ask why, I’m not sure, because she’s not practicing. And they have two daughters. She’s now into sound healing, with forks. I don’t know if you know anything about this, very spiritual.
Steven Novak: No.
Joanne Blokker: She’s quite a lovely person, too. And then the youngest was Katherine, who was born just before we moved to New Jersey, in 1965. And Katherine has scoliosis. She actually has a rod in her back, but it’s a new kind. It was developed, probably now twenty years ago, by a man in Miami, so they flew down there. And she seems to be fine. Let’s see, my sister Mary Ellen had one other pregnancy, I guess a miscarriage, which was a little boy, which they had wanted very badly. And then she developed, I guess, uterine cancer, and she basically didn’t take care of it, is what happened, in the eighties, or late seventies and early eighties, so she died just before her second daughter got married, basically. But they went ahead with it. She died six weeks before the wedding, but they went ahead.
Patricia led sort of a sad life. She lived in Venice, California. I think she had her own friends, and her own way of living. We’d see her occasionally. When my brother died, we took her, of course, to the services, and I went with my mother. My brother was, I say – Of course, I really wasn’t there most of the time, because I was older, and I was out with my own life. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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But when he moved to – He was stationed in Vacaville, and we were living in Palo Alto. So then he’d come down with his friends. When he got married, we were all invited to the wedding, except I wasn’t taking any of my children, because I didn’t think they ought to go, and everybody else was insulted, including my oldest daughter, Donja, who was about four. How old was she, then? Maybe five by then, you know. But she actually had the measles, so it turned out she couldn’t go, anyway. And then they were married, it was probably the early sixties, maybe 1965, because in 1965 is when he contracted leukemia, and he died at the end of the year. He had three children. Brian, his son, and Gale are now married. Gale’s married to a tenured professor at the University of Michigan, so she lives in Ann Arbor. They have two children, and I don’t know, I think Brian has three. And then the youngest son is Donald, who lives in Cabo, San Lucas. He isn’t married. He was, but it didn’t work out, and he didn’t have any children. And I think Mary, my brother’s widow, is still living back in Chapel Hill. That’s what I can tell you about that.
Steven Novak: What about your aunts and uncles on the Whittier side? Like, Lee Whittier? Paul? Helen?
Joanne Blokker: Well, Lee and Laura were always very good to me. I think they felt that I might have gotten the short end of the stick, because they were always very kind to me. Lee Whittier has a reputation of being very gruff. He was the kind of person that would invite people to come on his airplane and tell them the time and if he got there fifteen minutes early, and if they weren’t there, he’d leave. So, I mean, he really – I was brought up not to be a crybaby, or I’d be sitting on the dock when everybody went sailing. They didn’t put up with any acting out, or anything. None of them. Which was probably good, Laura was a lovely person. I think they met in Berkeley, at Cal. I believe Laura actually finished, Lee did not. My stepmother and her husband at the time were there at school, both of them, with her first husband. And my cousin and my Aunt Laura said they used to be chaperones at various parties for the rest of the students, she remembers it. Because I was all upset about J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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my father’s remarriage, and my aunt had stirred me up, too. And they were very kind.
Aunt Helen and Uncle Hoke, they were all very good to us, sort of distant. We used to go over to the Woodwards’, Helen and Hoke Woodward’s, at Holmby Hills. We would stand on Sunset Boulevard and wait for the bus with our nanny, and we’d get the bus to North Faring Road, or it’d let us off at Sunset, and we’d walk up the hill to their house, and we’d be there for the afternoon. You’d go back down, get the bus. I just loved going on the bus. I thought it was a big adventure. I don’t know if the nannies thought that. We had a nanny, and maybe me and Mary Ellen, possibly Patricia, the three of us. Because Mary Ellen was about the same age as Win, and Patricia would be the same age as Marcia. I was older. And Lee Whittier, Lee and Laura lived on South Mapleton. Well, first they lived on Maple in Beverly Hills, in kind of a bungalow, and then they moved to this larger home in Holmby Hills, which was on Mapleton.
Paul Whittier and Olive lived on Belagio Road in Bel Air. I guess they were out and about all the time. Paul was sort of a man around Los Angeles; he was quite active. In fact, because he was spending money too fast, they formed a trust and got his shares away, his Belridge shares, and put them in the trust. They were afraid he’d have to sell, and they didn’t want that to happen. Because of that trust, they were able – That was when Belridge was finally sold, it was able to make it happen. So it was, actually, a good thing.
What else happened? And then, there was Laddia and Peter over there. You know, these were great times. We’d go to their houses for Christmas, and I would spend time at Balboa with Lee Whittier’s, because they had – I guess when we were talking about this – four lots on the peninsula. Each one of the family, each of the children had one lot.
My father sold his to Lee, and I think Aunt Helen sold hers to her brother, Paul. So then there were two family members there, but they had double lots. That was what I remember, when we spent time at Balboa later. I would walk down there, and Laura-Lee. Sometimes I’d sail down by myself. Why J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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did they let us do that? We’d saile across the bay and parked the boat – Well, we had an anchor at Corona del Mar, and walked over the cliff down to go bodysurfing in Corona del Mar. And then come back, and sail back. I’d leave Laura-Lee off, and then I had to sail back up the bay to Bay Island. And this might take all afternoon. I probably got back around 5:00, maybe. And nobody seemed to worry about predators, or anything, not to mention the bay, twelve-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds, messing around. So we had a pretty good life, I have to say.
Steven Novak: Oh, so you sailed yourself? You mean, really by yourself?
Joanne Blokker: Yes.
Steven Novak: So you were skilled, probably.
Joanne Blokker: Laura-Lee and me alone, the two of us. We had learned to sail, we could manage the boats, and there wasn’t that much wind, it wasn’t dangerous. And of course, we could swim like fish. We were very confident.
Steven Novak: That’s exciting! Well, you just brought up Belridge. Maybe that’s something we could talk about. My sense is that before the sale of Belridge, you were affluent and well-off –
Joanne Blokker: Comfortable, but I wouldn’t say total affluence. For instance, I couldn’t afford a nanny for my kids, like I had had. I vaguely resented it, but not seriously. Fortunately, because of the war, we had been trained to cook. Actually, my mother paid for it. I had a lady that came in once a week on Thursdays and cleaned, and I did most of the washing, because it wasn’t that hard. But we first didn’t have a dryer. I had to lug it to the Laundromat, for years. In fact, we didn’t have a dryer, or a washing machine, until we moved to Palo Alto. You know, you make do. You do it, put one foot in front of the other. I was a little bit annoyed, maybe, because I would have liked to have help. I wasn’t going out, we didn’t go out at all. But my husband was raised in Holland, and he didn’t expect me to go out. He was shocked when he heard I wanted to spend time away from the family. So there was pressure on both sides. J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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Steven Novak: And then, well, you mentioned last time that your father had sent the telegram back, “No more money!”
Joanne Blokker: That’s right. That’s right. So we came home.
Steven Novak: And you also spoke admiringly of your own children, that they all were standing on their own feet.
Joanne Blokker: They are. They have funds. They don’t have a lot of funds. And I’m now – I’m in very good shape, right now. When my husband left HP, he became a venture capitalist, and he did quite well. He managed to die at the height of the dot com boom, which meant our house was valued at Woodside – Well, we paid $350,000 for it. I thought, God, it was more than I had ever heard of anybody paying for a house, and that the bank would own it. And it turned out later that it went way up in value, it was worth, well, the property is good, it’s beautiful property, and we put a lot into it. But when he died, they valued it at $12 million, which was way over, I thought. But it’s what other houses were going for. People were buying. And then, of course, it crashed. And when I came to sell, I got about $6 million, which was about the right price. It’s probably gone back up, now. But, so – How did we get to this?
Steven Novak: Well, you were talking about your wealth before the sale of Belridge. When when they sold Belridge, did that have a huge impact on your life?
Joanne Blokker: Yes. That’s when we all got – I always thought that we wouldn’t get money until somebody had to die. When they sold Belridge, of course, that was, as you probably know, the largest takeover up to that point, ever. And nobody knew who we were. We were just totally insignificant. I said, life was kind of fun. Yes, it did have an impact. We were more secure, more comfortable, more able to make investments, and do the work that we wanted to do on our house, improve it, and have more help in the house. By this time, I was late fifties, fifty-plus, fifty-five, I guess. So I had really, basically, done everything before. Everywhere I lived, I was able to usually have help for one day a week, of some kind. So, it wasn’t horrible. I tried to get the kids trained to take care of themselves, too. Because nobody took care of them, J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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picked up after them. Pretty soon, they all seemed to embrace some spiritual discipline that involved cleanliness, because it costs money if you leave your junk around and it gets ruined, and you can’t find it, and so forth. Pretty soon, after they were about thirty, they sort of began to get on to that. I have to say they’re pretty self-sufficient. Dad left them some money. I wouldn’t say a lot, like, maybe $20,000 a year, or something like that, which today keeps them off welfare, but you’re not going to go out and buy Ferraris with that. I would say they’re sort of in the middle, right now. But then, when I die, all of the Solainis and the Whittiers, and my children, will share in about a hundred-million-dollar trust that was formed. Those were the trusts that were formed, that he put into trusts for me, for all of my brothers and sisters, and for his second wife, which was fair. He treated her as a fifth child. I thought that was very fair. So when Belridge was sold – Well, actually, she died before it was sold, so her shares went to her children, which was fair. But when it was sold, of course, then it went up exponentially. It became very valuable. So I would say yesh, there was a huge impact. It merely meant, mainly, that I suppose, well, we were able to do more charitable work, and things of that kind.
Steven Novak: Let’s maybe talk about that another time.
Joanne Blokker: And then, of course, when my father died, he had formed a foundation. Well, he had a foundation. But he used to spend all the money every year. When he died, half of his estate, about $40 million, went into it, directly. How did that work? No, that’s not right. Well, he formed a charitable lead trust, which funded, basically, the estate. That paid off after ten years, to the heirs. And the heirs were, at this – See, he actually gave, including me and my husband, my sister and her husband, and the children each got something. It was quite interesting. But it didn’t happen until, let’s see, until ’89, ’90. Yes. So, a long time. No, after ’93. And then, the government realized ten years was too short. The idea was that it was a charitable lead trust. You had to pay out 10 percent every year, and by the end of ten years, it would all be used up, except that they invested it so well, that we were able to still have $40 J O A N N E B L O K K E R I N T E R V I EW, F I N A L
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million in it, after they paid out the money to all the heirs. So that’s how that went.
Steven Novak: When you talked about the creating of these trusts, what’s really interesting is that there was the Whittier company and the Whittier family.
Joanne Blokker: Yes.
Steven Novak: And they’re kind of connected together.
Joanne Blokker: Yes.
Steven Novak: Because people in the company help the people in the family.
Joanne Blokker: We depended on them. It was kind of a loose arrangement. They would, you know, send a plane for Aunt Laura; they paid their bills, my stepmother never saw a bill. That made her nervous. That would make me nervous! It was all paid down at the office. She had her own money, too, from her divorce. She managed, but she really said it was kind of nerve wracking not to know. She knew what she was spending, and she was trying to be careful. And that’s the kind of thing, that’s finally why we created the trust company. We realized we had to stop that practice. My cousin, Laura-Lee, still gets kind of services. Well, they supply services. But they charge for them. Well, they get you out of jail. They got Peter out of jail once. He was waving a gun on the freeway. It was my cousin. That’s Laddia’s brother. He lived up in Oregon. He had a girlfriend wh