by Jenner, Kris
That was when I realized how loving my family was and how appreciative I was to have them help me get through something so traumatic. It was also the first time my dad had come back since the divorce. He came to the hospital and brought me a transistor radio in a black case. I have it to this day. The end of the divorce had been rough, so he had stayed away for a while, and his visit meant a lot to me. My mom gave me a stuffed monkey named Anabelle, and that monkey has lived in every closet in every home I’ve had since.
From the moment my parents divorced, my mom worked full-time. She loved to work, and we learned from her that work was a positive thing. She had to sell our beautiful house in Point Loma, but my grandmother helped her get a house on Deer Park Drive in Clairemont, just three blocks away from Longfellow Elementary. I walked to school and was a Brownie. My grandfather Jim came over and built my sister and me a real playhouse. I’ll never forget how amazing that playhouse was, right in front of our house. We were really happy. Every day after school, my mother would give us a dollar each, and Karen and I would walk up to the little strip mall at the other end of the street and buy candy as an after-school treat.
My mom worked in many places after my parents’ divorce, but the job I most remember was in a pro shop at a golf course. My mom is and always has been so beautiful: she’s tall, and she has such a beautiful figure. And she’s always dressed to the nines. When I was a little girl, my mom dressed like all women did in the ’50s with the fashion and the drama—the hats and the gloves, everything. My mom didn’t have a lot of money in those days, but somehow she always figured out a way to look really fashionable. She went to work every day dressed like Jacqueline Kennedy. She was the mom doing the housework and making dinner, but at the same time, she was wearing these gorgeous dresses cinched at the waist. She always looked like she had on some fabulous Chanel ensemble. And her hair was perfect. She was so beautiful, and I adored and admired her.
But it was my grandmother who was most instrumental in my upbringing. My grandmother was my hero. She was born in Hope, Arkansas, and her first husband, my biological grandfather, cheated on her. So she packed up my mother and had the gumption to leave. She was very strong-willed and stubborn. She decided she didn’t need a man, and she moved with her daughter to San Diego. She was so confident, so smart, and she had a strong sense of self. She met my grandfather Jim while working as an accountant on a naval base in San Diego. She wasn’t afraid to roll up her sleeves and get to work.
She and my grandfather lived in an upper-middle-class neighborhood with an avocado tree and a birdbath in the backyard. Since my mom was busy with work, Grandma and I really bonded. After my father moved, my grandfather became the male figure in my life. He was pure working-class Middle America. Every day he put on a uniform—khaki pants, khaki shirt—and went to work for San Diego Glass, driving one of those trucks that carried big panes of glass on their sides.
My grandma bought our school clothes, cooked the greatest dinners, and bathed and groomed her two toy poodles, Bridgette and Toulouse, who were supposed to be my dogs. My mother wouldn’t let me keep them because they were too much work, so my grandmother kept them for me.
My grandmother was gorgeous like my mom, but she had blond hair and green eyes. Until the day she died, my grandmother wore a matching outfit every single day. She always wore beautiful slacks with a matching blazer and the perfect blouse and shoes. My family members, every last one of them, were always fashion-forward, and my grandmother was the matriarch. Fashion and grooming were both very important to her. Even if we were going to Disneyland, she made sure to take us shopping a few days beforehand to buy us new outfits for the outing. My grandmother took us shopping while my mom was at work, and if we had a friend with us, she got a new outfit too. It was always important to my grandmother and my mother that we looked our best.
I remember how special my grandmother used to make our holidays—big, perfect, and glorious, a tradition that I would eventually assume and take to an even bigger level. We celebrated everything endlessly. At Easter, for instance, there were Easter cupcakes and Easter cookies and Easter eggs. She always entertained as if she were expecting a party of fifty guests, even when she was having only my little sister and me. I grew to love that quality, and I think she passed it on to me. When I grew up and got married and had kids of my own, I wanted to do all the same kinds of things for my own kids. Of course, I ended up carrying on the traditions my grandmother taught me, except on steroids. Doing everything for my kids is something I learned from my grandmother. She sparked a dream in me early on: to someday have a ton of kids and become a wonderful mother.
Grandma also taught me the value of hard work.
The Candelabra was right in the middle of La Jolla, just across from the ocean. She just loved candles. A great deal of my childhood was spent in that store. My mom often worked there with my grandmother. The older I got, of course, the more often they would drag me along with them to work. I would be in the back room, doing my little chores: wrapping gifts for customers, making candles, and doing whatever else needed to be done.
The Candelabra did so well that my mother opened up her own shop in 1976, called the Candles of La Jolla. So there was the Candelabra on Prospect Street and the Candles of La Jolla on Gerard, next to John’s Waffle Shop.
Candles became our family business. I grew up working in both shops. When I was old enough to drive, I drove myself to work there. My whole childhood, beginning at age ten, was spent working in those two stores. By the time I was thirteen, I was getting a little paycheck and really contributing to the business by being there at Christmastime. During Christmas vacation, I spent my days at the candle store, wrapping gifts as fast as I could.
My grandmother actually did so well at her candle store that she was able to keep her home decorated in a just-2die4-style, as did my mother. They liked beautiful things, and everything had to be just so. They were both perfectionists. “As soon as you finish using the sink, wash it out with Comet,” my grandmother would tell me. “Clean the sink and polish it.” It was the era of “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” and that was how I was raised: with a “Whistle while you work” mentality, like in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Because of all of that, I never complained about hard work; I thrived on it. From a young age I learned that if I wanted to get ahead in life, I needed to work. It was a pretty perfect world: hard work, beautiful candles, and lots of love.
A few years after my parents had divorced, my mother met Harry Shannon. Harry was a great guy, and he quickly became her guy. They fell completely in love. It started off great, but for a while the candles in our lives began to flicker and came close to blowing out.
Harry was a drinker and he loved to party. It was the era of the Rat Pack, of course, and everybody went to cocktail parties on the weekends. Even my grandmother would have her friends over regularly. But Harry Shannon took it to an extreme. He was an alcoholic. Still, my mom loved him, dating him on and off, but always breaking up with him because she had two little girls to take care of and would lose patience with his problems with alcohol.
Harry had money. He was a yacht broker and taught his clients how to sail. He was an excellent sailor, and he was definitely a businessman. He walked around in fabulous white linen slacks, jackets, and fabulous loafers. He was the coolest, most beautiful dresser. He always looked like a Ralph Lauren ad.
He was in love with my mother. But when Harry drank, he misbehaved. Once when they were dating, my sister and I were sleeping in my mom’s bed because she had gone out that night and left us with a babysitter. When she came home, she crawled into bed with us and we all fell asleep. An hour or so later, we heard banging at the bedroom window. Harry Shannon was trying to get into the house. He was drunk as a skunk. We went to the front door and peeked through the curtain to see him pounding on the door and screaming, “Let me in, Mary Jo! Let me in!”
“Go home, Harry, and come back when you sober up!” she scream
ed through the door. “You’re in no shape to be here.”
“Let me in!” he continued.
My sister and I were, of course, scared. We crawled into my mother’s bed and sat there shivering under the covers, wondering what was going to happen next. Every once in a while, we would get out of the bed and peek out the window. He kept banging and he was banging so hard, we thought he might knock down the house. It was that bad. Finally, he went home.
That night, my mother promised us that she would never subject us to anything like that again. Harry Shannon was out of her life until he sobered up. A day or two later, Harry came crawling back on hands and knees, apologizing profusely. A short time after that, he proposed. My mother finally gave him an ultimatum: quit drinking and we’ll get married.
That very day, he quit. He wouldn’t have another drink until the day he died. Just like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Harry and Mom flew to Puerto Vallarta and got married, taking a few friends along for the ride. It was June of 1968, and I was thirteen. My sister and I stayed with my grandparents. We were standing there with my grandparents when Mom and Harry returned, thinking, Wow, we have a stepdad! From that day forward, I called Harry “Dad.” He embraced my sister and me as if we were his own. Harry taught me a big lesson in life: if you want something bad enough, and are willing to change your life for it, you can do anything. Harry taught me how to find inner strength.
Soon after their marriage, Harry announced that he was going to invest in a new company. “We’re going to move to Oxnard, California,” he said. “And we’re going to harvest abalone.”
“Abalone?” I asked. “What’s abalone?”
He explained: abalone is a big, red, edible sea snail.
Ugh!
I had lived in the San Diego area my whole life. I was in junior high, and we were all very happy. But here was Harry Shannon talking about giving it all up for sea snails, abalone, something we had never heard about before, and my mother telling us it was a done deal. Harry, my mom, Karen, and I were all moving to Oxnard—the strawberry and lima bean capital of California, 155 miles north of San Diego—where Harry could invest in something called the Abalone Processing Plant. Mom put her candle shop on hold—she had someone work there for the summer—and we moved up to Oxnard. We moved into this small apartment. We had no friends. We didn’t know anybody.
I hated abalone.
I hated the idea of abalone harvesting: of fishermen catching abalone and bringing abalone back to Harry and his partners’ plant. He had people there pounding and preparing the abalone for sale. We would go to these restaurants and eat abalone burgers. Again, ugh! Why couldn’t he have bought a McDonald’s franchise? That would have been a great idea to a girl of thirteen. Burgers, yes. But abalone? What? The whole move was just a big hot mess.
That same year, I started my period. I was away from my friends, away from any family, stuck up in Oxnard, surrounded by abalone. I was yearning for my grandmother, missing my old life and that part of my family. I wrote her probably three hundred letters during that miserable Oxnard summer. I cried my eyes out every single night, missing her. I could have said, “Oh, I’m getting the next train to La Jolla.” I guess I could have lived with my grandmother. But that was my mother’s first year of marriage, and I was part of a family unit. Still, all I could think about was getting out.
The only highlight of this time was when a girlfriend from San Diego called and said she and her dad were going into Los Angeles to a big sale at Judy’s. Now, Judy’s I loved. Judy’s was famous. Shopping there was fantastic. So I met my girlfriend at Judy’s in L.A. with some cash that my grandmother had sent me, and I had the best time. I felt like such a big girl, such an independent woman, who could go into a big city all by herself with a girlfriend and go shopping. I could get used to this, I thought. I liked the independence of making my own decisions.
But when I got back home it was still Oxnard. And abalone. In some ways, the move to Oxnard was my first step toward me being independent. I thought, Okay, life isn’t going the way I expected it to. I’m stuck up here. It made me think that I never wanted to be “stuck” again. I couldn’t wait to be able to make decisions for myself after that. I never forgot the things I learned in Oxnard, most important that I never again wanted to be in the position of being completely powerless to do something about a situation I didn’t want to be in.
Then the unthinkable happened: three months after our move to Oxnard, Harry’s partner took all of the money in the company—$15,000—and skipped town, never to be heard from again. My parents kept it quiet at first. We were young and they didn’t want to worry us.
I was happy when I found out. Not for the loss, but I was so excited to be going home. We were packing up and moving back to San Diego almost immediately. I couldn’t pack fast enough.
It was a major failure for Mom and Harry. He’d lost everything he had invested. We weren’t broke—we still had the candle store—but Mom and Harry were essentially starting over. That was scary. But still, I was thrilled to be going back home and my parents were ready to make something wonderful happen for them again.
We rented a house across the street from my grandparents’ in Clairemont. I was not only back in San Diego, I was also living across the street from my beloved grandmother. I spent time with her every single day. It took Harry a while to financially recover from his Oxnard/abalone fall. First he went to work for his brother, who had a very successful car dealership in San Diego. Harry was very entrepreneurial. He bought a car rental franchise called Ugly Duckling Rent-A-Car and started renting out cars across the street from Sea World. It was in a little run-down building, but he and my mom fixed it up. Eventually they opened an antenna installation company as well, and Harry would crawl up onto people’s roofs like Spider-Man and install television antennas.
After that, Harry heard about a new business: car striping. People were taking tape and striping their cars with pinstripes. Remember that? That became Harry’s newest venture. He became the best car striper in San Diego. He went from car dealership to car dealership, becoming “the Car Striper Guy” and striping five cars a day at dealerships all over the area.
Harry taught me that if someone says no, you are talking to the wrong person. It’s a mantra I have made my own. Just like my grandmother, Harry showed me how to do whatever it takes to get the job done and make a living. Nobody handed him anything on a silver platter. Harry thrived on hard work.
The whole experience—Harry’s alcoholism and recovery/Oxnard/abalone/car rental/car striping—was a kind of wake-up call for me. It taught me how fast your life can turn around on a dime. I learned a lot of lessons I was able to use later. One minute I was with my grandmother, my mom was off getting married in Puerto Vallarta, and life was dandy. I went to school, I got good grades, I had lots of friends. I was a very stable kid, really responsible. The candles were burning bright. So when my life became so unorganized and messy, it made me uncomfortable. The years after the debacle in Oxnard were wonderful for all of us, and highlighted what a wonderful man Harry Shannon really was. My biological dad, at that point, was gone. He was a really good guy, but we had lost touch with him. He moved back east and then to the Midwest, moving all over, trying to find work. I didn’t even know where he was or what he did at that point. He called or sent letters periodically, but he was really just doing his own thing.
Harry, meanwhile, treated us as if we were his own kids. He showed us unconditional love. He redefined for me what family means. He showed me what it meant to be a good husband and contributor. When my mom wanted a new patio for the backyard, for example, he went out and brought home a truckload of bricks and laid my mom a gorgeous new patio for her new backyard. He was just a doer. If my mom needed something ironed, he did it. He was the family ironer. He was the best at ironing in the world. He would make it look like a professional job! He taught us by example what it meant to be an active part of a happy family.
Mom and Harry’s bus
inesses were doing well, and soon we were moving into a beautiful house in University City, a brand-new neighborhood where an entire area had been leveled—acres and acres and acres—to create a new development. Everything was new. It was a neighborhood full of kids with brand-new schools, brand-new houses, brand-new everything. Our new house had red shag carpeting, gorgeous in those days. On Fridays, my mom would make me rake the rug to fluff it up before I could go out with my friends.
By that time I had a second job, other than the candle business. I worked in a doughnut shop. I would report to work at five a.m., where I would literally scrape the glaze off the floor and sell coffee to customers. Then I would walk across the street and catch the bus to school. After school, I would work in the candle shop. When I came home, I would rake the carpet before I was allowed to go out with my friends. I never complained about the work. By the time I was a teenager, I knew that I had a beautiful life in La Jolla and I wanted to keep it going. I was determined to make something of myself one day. But in those days my idea of success was getting married and having babies. Six babies.
Boyfriends? Sure, a few. Just like any normal teenage girl, I loved hanging out with my friends. But mostly in groups. Weekends at the beach. Surfing at La Jolla Shores. Every day during the summer. But no real serious relationship yet. I always saw myself as being with an adult. I was biding my time.
When I turned sixteen, Harry surprised me with a brand-new car, a red Mazda RX-2. I would often drive that red Mazda east on the freeway that connects La Jolla with Clairemont, thinking about my plan. I always had to have a plan. I believed in dreaming big, working hard, and setting goals.
At that age, most girls were thinking about the prom. I was thinking, Fuck the prom. I want to get married and have six kids. I felt like life would start when I got that done. I graduated from Clairemont High, but I didn’t go to college. No interest. School wasn’t my thing. I had already set goals for my life, and college wasn’t part of it.
