Description:
Janey Crain talks about her career as an artist, her time as owner of the coffee shop The Black Brick, and her days as a beatnik.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Janey Crain
Interviewer: Wendy Gabrielson
Interview Date: 8/19/2009
Interview Location: Noble, OklahomaWendy Gabrielson: Today is August 19, 2009 and my name is Wendy Gabrielson. I am here to interview Janey Crain for the Oklahoma Voices Project for the Metropolitan Library System. Thank you, Janey, for agreeing to do this interview today.
Janey Crain: Surely.
WG: One of the reasons we wanted to interview you today is to try and document the small beatnik scene in Oklahoma City during the ‘50s and ‘60s. You were somewhat involved in that scene, but you were also an artist. First, I’d like to discuss your background and your art, and then we can talk more about the beatnik scene. Please tell me when and where you were born, and your birth name.
JC: Janey Carns, Flemington, Missouri, 1933. June 19th.
WG: Excellent. Did you grow up there or how long did you live there?
JC: I lived there - elementary school went through eighth grade at that time. No kindergarten. I begged to start school at three years old and they let me start at five. I graduated from high school when I was 16. We had to be bussed to Humansville, the only town in the United States named Humansville. Missouri has some strange named towns, but that’s a funny one. In 1950, I graduated, and then I went to Kansas City. We all went to Kansas City. There was no work around there.
WG: Your whole family moved?
JC: No, I mean all of us young people would go to Kansas City to find work. That was just – everyone did it. That was the closest large city. Springfield is really nice little city now, but at the time, my family and cousins went to Kansas City.
WG: That was after high school, then? You graduated in 1950 and then you went on to Kansas City.
JC: I walked into Hallmark Greeting Cards because I knew I was an artist even though we never had any art training in our schools at the time. We had music once a month when the traveling music teacher came to town. I walked into Hallmark and they hired me. I was so naïve that I didn’t know that you couldn’t ask for a job if you didn’t have the proper training. Now they take the best people they want out of the Kansas City Art Institute, but at that time, they were a young company. They had an art aptitude test in personnel, and I evidently passed it. They had a little classroom where they trained you to do Hallmark cards, which were cute and pretty, not funny, no gag cards. The teacher’s name was Mr. Yaeger. A lot of people think Halls were from Germany, but they actually were from Austria. Mr. Yaeger trained me how to paint cute little people and pretty little flowers. [imitating Mr. Yaeger] “Ze hair grows on ze head as ze rain falls on ze head.” [speaking normally] At Halls, they paid my tuition at the Kansas City Art Institute at night, so I went out there for some training.
WG: Excellent. Prior to that, then, your elementary, junior high, high school years, you had had –
Both together: No art training.
JC: I was always asked to do the drawings for the yearbook and everything, but there wasn’t any art classes. Just think, right now we don’t have art in some of the grade schools in our schools. It’s very, very, very sad.
WG: What was your background then? What did your parents do and –
[talking over each other]
JC: A lot of people thought that the Depression ended in 1930, but it really didn’t in the small towns. Dad had a truck. He was a custodian at the school, so that’s why I wasn’t afraid of the school building. I’d go on down there with him night and day. That’s why I wanted to go to school. I wasn’t afraid of the building like a lot of little kids are.
WG: So you’d go with your father to work?
JC: I’d go with him to work and follow him around and the big kids would make over me. That’s the beauty of being in a small town. It really is. It keeps you out of trouble too, because you know if you do anything that whatever you do, someone knows you and will tell your parents. That’s what my sisters said, that I was a goody two-shoes. I said that no, it was just that everyone knew everyone.
WG: The fear of getting in trouble.
JC: Yes.
WG: Tell me a little bit about going to the art institute there in Kansas City. Your tuition was paid?
JC: My tuition was paid. I had to ride a streetcar. I had to transfer twice and use three different modes of transportation to get over there. It wasn’t really that far, it seems like now. Back then, people didn’t have to have a car. Every five minutes during rush hour, some kind of city transportation ran, and you could get on with one dime and go clear across the city and clear back again.
WG: What kind of art did you study there?
JC: Drawing.
WG: Drawing. That’s primarily the type of art that you have –
JC: No. Over the years I’ve done so many different kinds. I’ve worked at the newspaper. I’ve worked for three different magazines. I’ve done commercial art. The ads in newspapers used to be drawings, a wash drawing. Watercolor. Black and white. Now they’re all photographs. I did that. I’ve done – that’s what my grandson or my daughter wants. They’re trying to decide what they want to do and say, “But you’ve always been an artist!” Yes, but it’s been such a wide range of art. I didn’t take pottery until I was probably 30-something. I went back to school. After going to OCU and OU and Kansas City Art Institute, I took pottery at Edmond. It was called Central State University then. I kind of got hooked on the clay. The reason I really liked thinking about being a potter, besides just feeling like I’d done this before – you know how when you do something that feels good to you? I felt like there was a lot more people that could afford a pot than could afford a painting, and I didn’t want to just work at an office all day in order to support my habit. I wanted to make a living at it. I was in the first twenty years probably of the spring Arts Festival. I didn’t do the first year, but then I started doing it the second year. Greg Burns, I think, is still doing it.
WG: That brings us to you now in Oklahoma. How did you get here?
JC: Oh, I’ve been in Oklahoma now longer than I’ve been in Missouri. I came here in 19 – I’m not sure. We were visiting my husband’s parents and I got sick, and we ran out of money. We stayed because I didn’t feel good and I was pregnant. I didn’t feel well, so that’s how we ended up staying in Oklahoma. [laughs] I thought it was an ugly state when I came here. I was used to water that you could see to the bottom in the river. The first time I saw that red water I thought, “What is the matter with that?” Over by Talequah, it still looks a lot like Missouri.
WG: Once you got to –
JC: I was going to school at night at Oklahoma City University taking a painting class at night over there when we opened the coffee house.
WG: What year was that?
JC: In the ‘50s. I don’t do names and numbers. I do shapes and colors. [laughs] I had been to a coffee house in Kansas City because I was always taking canvases and paintings up there to enter in shows. You know about entering shows? That’s how you establish yourself as an artist. Even in the little Volkswagen I ripped a lot of headliners. I got a lot of big paintings in that car. I took a painting up and someone said, “Have you been to – “whatever the name of it was. I went to a coffee house and thought this is what I want to do in Oklahoma City. Up there, it was people coming in in their dress clothes after they’d been to the symphony mixed with people who’d just come out of the art institute in their grubby jeans. I thought that I could do the same thing in Oklahoma City. Guess what. Oklahoma City wasn’t ready for it. [laughs]
WG: No.
JC: They really weren’t. I used to serve the most wonderful blueberry tarts and so forth. I used really pretty demitasse cups and spoons. I had to change a few things in order to stay in business here. I must tell you that more than feeling like a beatnik, I really felt that it was sad that there wasn’t any place for young people to go. In other words, if you took a date out and you went to a movie and you wanted to go – the only place to go get a Coke afterwards was a restaurant, and the waitress would give you a dirty look if you just had a Coke. A lot of my thinking really was about giving young people a place to go. We did have poetry and I had paintings on all the walls even though the place was painted flat black all over – the floor, the ceiling, with big pillows on the floor to sit on. That’s the whole idea of a pad. We did introduce young people to fine art, really. We had the first outdoor art show hanging on the fences outside, and this was professors and students from OCU’s paintings before the spring Arts Festival.
The place was integrated from day one and served anyone who came in the door. Clara Luper, bless her heart, gets all the credit for integrating Oklahoma City, but I’m here to tell you I had something to do with it too. A long time after she started having sit-ins at the drugstore, we’d been open all that time and serving anyone. She came in with a group of teenagers, and when I handed them all a menu, they got up and left. It was kind of sad that they didn’t understand, or they probably didn’t have any money. We didn’t have a cover charge. You just – well, we did, and if you didn’t want to order anything, if you just wanted to sit and play chess and listen to the music, for 25 cents you could stay. A plain cup of black espresso and a plain cup of American coffee was 25 cents. Then we had the exotic fruit drinks that I concocted and stole the idea from the one in Kansas City. I just made them up. I made simple syrup and then bought pomegranate juice. That’s really popular now, right? I was buying extra strong, full strength pomegranate juice and mixing up a cold drink and it was called Granatina. It was the same way with rose water and orange blossom water. I bought it at Lebanese Grocery Store, mixed it with simple syrup and made a soft drink that you couldn’t buy anyplace else. I don’t know what Steve served down in his coffee house. I don’t remember. I know we would go down there on the night we were closed, and he’d come to our place on the night he was closed. We were closed on Sunday night and I think he was closed on Monday.
WG: You all had the art all around, and that was pretty well-received. Did you have live poetry readings or people playing music?
JC: Yes. Steve had live music, and we mostly played jazz. That’s how we became acquainted with a lot of the Black population in Oklahoma City because they liked jazz. I even remember the first jazz album I bought. It was Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue.” I wore it out and bought another one.
WG: Great album. I read an article that said you basically had a record player in the coffee shop and people could just play albums. How did that work?
JC: They played their own. That worked too. We were open 18 years, and that’s how we stayed in business. We just changed with whatever people wanted. We started out beatnik and went through hippie to teenagers bringing in rock n’ roll albums. We didn’t care.
WG: So they could bring in their own albums and then you also had a collection there in the coffee shop?
JC: Yeah.
WG: Where did you actually come up with the name for the Black Brick?
JC: We’re painting everything black. Tiny grooved wood – you had to push it down into that groove. The building now that everyone thinks was the Black Brick – the Blue Door – is still there, barely, leaning walls and everything. The Black Brick was south of there a few blocks. It was also an old grocery store. That’s a grandfather clause. That’s how we were able to open a business in that area, and as we’re painting one night, there was a big hook in the ceiling. For some reason, I don’t know who, someone just hung a brick on that hook. Whoever was painting the ceiling painted it too. That’s how it became the Black Brick. My husband took a full sheet of plywood and cut three circles and put light behind it. He mounted that on the front of the building and then when the lights were on, we were open. If the lights were off, we were closed. It was that simple.
WG: Excellent. You mentioned your husband. Let me ask you. Where did you meet Bob and was he –
JC: In Missouri. He just went along with it because it was something I wanted to do.
WG: And he was a tool and dye maker? What exactly did he –
JC: A folding carrier, the market baskets. That’s where he worked in the daytime.
WG: How was he intrinsically involved in the coffee shop? What was his role there?
JC: He was a good bouncer. [laughs] I remember one night, a teenager came in, just stumbled into the place. He was reeking of beer. He fell against the stained-glass window and I came up behind him and marched him back out the front door. My husband says, “You’re going to get me in trouble some night.” Something I can’t handle or something to that effect. Sometimes a mom would come to the front door and just kind of look around and I’d go up to her with a menu. She’d say, “Oh, no. I don’t want to come in. I just know my kids are coming here and I wanted to see what it was.” Parents trying to keep track of their kids. I guess Holly’s was the first drive-in that Oklahoma City got where kids could go, but really, it’s hard to believe that there wasn’t any place just for young people. It wasn’t that I was proclaiming it was just for young people, but like, you know the place on the Paseo, the Mexican restaurant that was there? Was that El Chico?
Unknown Male: El Charrito, maybe.
JC: Anyway, the Cruz boy that’s really popular now, his dad had that restaurant. (Transcriber’s Note: She means the Oklahoma guitarist Edgar Cruz.) It was the only one I knew of in that part of Oklahoma City, and a lot of times after they closed, which they closed before midnight, he’d bring all of his employees over and they’d have a – what do you call it? When you just sit down and play?
WG: Just a little acoustic jam session?
JC: Yeah, a jam session of Hispanic music. What is his name that lived across the street? Mason Williams lived across the street. That building that he lived in has been torn down now. Mason would come over after he’d get his homework done and play for free. It was interesting over the years just to see the different changes. One day he came back as a pop star with the Oklahoma City Symphony. My daughter and I went. I didn’t want to act like a groupie, but I took a Black Brick matchbook, and I wrote a note inside of it and asked the attendant or one of the ushers to take it backstage because I didn’t want to go backstage and bother him. I didn’t know if he’d give it to him or not. He could have just thought I was a crazy woman and thrown it in the trash. Well, about a month later, I got a nice, long letter from Mason bringing me up to date on what all he’d been doing. He said, “We didn’t know how great those years were, did we?” [laughs]
WG: Retrospect. You were really wanting to be there for the youth and for the kids, but it sounds like you got people of all ages and all kinds of people.
JC: We did. I remember one group that came in a lot, the sportscar drivers. They found us. They would come in and plan their gymkhanas and play chess and drink espresso. Sometimes you’d come by and there’d be nothing. I had a Porsche and didn’t go to all those things, but they had all their MGs and things out on the street. We had a group that learned about the coffee house that were out of the FAA, the training place, from all over the United States and they found us. They’d come in there and get together just to talk and drink coffee. We sold, in the wintertime, hot apple cider more than we did coffee. I don’t know how many gallons of hot apple cider I’ve heated in my life. We used a cinnamon stick stirrer in them, and then when the war in Vietnam was going on, it became impossible to buy cinnamon sticks. They were available but way too expensive, so I told my husband that instead of going up on the price, we were going to use suckers. You could get a hot cinnamon sucker, a little square sucker. We used those for stirrers. That was just as popular as the cinnamon stick. We had several kinds of hot tea, also, with regular little teacups.
WG: While you were there, it sounds like it was an extremely popular place, but did you ever have any real trouble? You said Bob was the bouncer.
JC: He was – this is how popular it was. Back then you had to dial the operator to get a phone number. People would dial the operator and she’d say, “They don’t have a phone but the address is 2611 North McKinley.”
WG: She knew where you were. That many people were looking for you. For those people who might not really remember beatniks, what were the beatniks like and what kinds of things did they believe? How did they dress?
[talking over each other]
JC: All black. I wore black leotards and you had to buy them at a dance studio. There wasn’t anyone on the street without nude-colored stockings on. No tights. Just imagine. Everyone wore the same color stockings. I’d go to the dance studio and get black leotards, black shoes, black skirt, black turtleneck sweater. I meant to bring a photo and I still have the metal plate for the menu. It’s pinned up on the wall. I know exactly where it is. Like I said, people like Larry Beerman would come in and read poetry. The idea of being different was probably what was more appealing in Oklahoma than what the beats stood for. Anti-establishment. Anti-war. The hippies became so much more popular and well-known than the beatniks. This week it’s all been Woodstock on the radio, the anniversary of Woodstock. One just kind of flowed into the other in my memory. I don’t know what the textbooks say about it.
WG: Did you ever notice any encounters as far as trouble with the police or things like that for being a beatnik?
JC: No, not in Oklahoma City. My husband and I with two little children were stopped in a small town in Arkansas one time, just because he had a beard and we were in a Volkswagen. Volkswagens were still unusual back then. He pulled us over and pulled out his big pistol and pulled us over to the curb. We had two babies in the car! We’ve always had times when anything that’s different than the establishment is suspect, no matter how peaceful, no matter how calm, no matter how quiet we try to be. If you’re different, there’s a problem. We’re still saying it, so I guess human nature doesn’t really change much over the years, does it? You want to believe that it does.
Right now, I’m working with the alternative ed kids in Noble. I just really enjoy teaching art to those kids because these are kids that dropped out of high school or quit high school and now they’ve decided, “Oh, I do need that diploma.” They’re back, and I talked to the teacher yesterday. She says we’re going to have about 20, somewhere between 12 and 20, in my class. This town, thankfully, lets them come to my studio when we’re working on clay or mosaics or anything messy. When we’re working on a mural or drawing, something cleaner, I go up to the high school. I’m still working with kids. [laughs] I still get along better with kids than people my own age. I’m sorry, but when I go down to the senior center to deliver magazines and see eight little ladies playing cards and they say, “Janey! Come and join us! We have so much fun!” I look around and think, if this is fun, I’m not ready for it. [laughs] I mean, it’s scary getting to be my age now because there’s not going to be enough time to do all of the things I want to do. It’s not depressing. It’s just aggravating that I don’t have enough hours to do everything I want to do before I die. I would go to school the rest of my – I don’t have the letters after my name, but I would go to school the rest of my life if I could. I would be enrolled in some college class just because it was something I wanted to learn, not to get the degree. There’s been times that I could kick myself because I didn’t get it because that would have earned more money, but I wanted the knowledge more than I wanted the degree, so I wouldn’t take the classes that were the requirements to take something else. When I went to OU, I walked in with a portfolio and asked the head of the art department if I could take such and such class that I didn’t have the prerequisites for. He just looked at my portfolio and said, “Sure.” Now, I don’t know if you can go to school like that anymore. I don’t know if they’d let you.
WG: Thinking –
JC: You think I’ve marched to a different drummer my whole life? [laughs]
WG: That’s excellent, and I’m thinking as you’re going to OU and showing your portfolio, can you give us a timeline of how things happened in your art career and taking those classes? Tell us a little bit about the path you took.
JC: When people talk about hating to turn forty, thirty was my bad birthday for some reason. I wanted to go to OU, and my husband didn’t want me to. I just knew I wasn’t getting everything I wanted at OCU, and I wanted to go to OU. One of the customers there at the coffee house was commuting and he said, “Well, you can ride with me.” I started at OU riding with him. We still had the coffee house. When I’d get to class, I remember Jean Babinger’s painting class. The kids would all gather around and talk to me because they wanted to find out what was going on in Oklahoma City. We just spent too much talking. That’s all there was to it, but they were coming over to my easel. I wasn’t causing the disruption. Jean Babinger chewed me out for distracting the students. Art students were poor. They didn’t have a car. They didn’t have any way to go to Oklahoma City and see what was going on. I did own the coffee house while I was going to OU. I know that. I remember that incident, being called out for talking to people too much.
I was 50 when I got a divorce and the state Artist-In-Residence program has really been a wonderful thing for me. I’ve worked all over the state through that program. That’s what I tell young people now, like these high school kids I’m working with here in Noble. It’s sad, but it’s true. People judge you by who you run around with and how you dress and how you wear your hair and so forth. It shouldn’t be, but it’s true. I said, “at your age, it’s especially true.” My age, it’s not as important because I don’t care. I know who I am. I have friends that smoke pot three times a week, and I have friends that go to church three times a week. I don’t do either one, but I’m a strong enough person now that I know who I am. I’m not going to be influenced by these people either way, whereas if you are sixteen or seventeen you may be. My grandson now is nineteen. He was so much fun as he was growing up. I was playing with him. Last year when he graduated from high school, he graduated with six or eight college credits. He told his mother he wasn’t going to college. “I want to work and make some money. I’m tired of going to school.” She’s gritting her teeth because you know you can’t say too much. You have to tread that narrow line of how much to say to keep from driving them away. He hung sheetrock for a year and now he’s enrolled in college. He started yesterday. [laughs] His mother and I are both – [loud sigh of relief].
WG: Some kids need that. Tell me a little bit – you said you were in the state Artist-In-Residence program. What exactly is that?
JC: It means that the visual arts, musicians, poets – I think it started as poets in the school one day. Money for poets in school. You might ask Patrick Riley about that. I knew about it and the year I got a divorce, everyone said, “You’re going to need to get a real job.” I’ve been working so hard, how could – [laughs]? Anyway, I applied to the program and got accepted. I thought that this will let me see if I want to become a teacher or not because I was going to have to borrow money if I went back to school. The program was matching funds. A school would write a grant if they wanted creative writing, music, whatever. It’s been wonderful for me because it’s put music and art into schools that couldn’t have had it any other way. For years, I worked all over the state. Since I’m getting older, I’m just working in Norman and Noble.
WG: Forgive me for being ignorant here. You’re employed by the state and you teach art in schools?
JC: Yes, but not – they don’t guarantee you any employment. Do you see what I mean? You have to sell yourself. That’s the way it has to be to be fair. Of course, I’ve been in it so long now that I’m able to get a lot of work, all I feel like doing. I’m 76 so I don’t have the energy I used to have, sad to say. If you work with young people, you still feel young. You wait and see. Inside your head you’re going to stop at about 28, and that’s the way you’ll feel the rest of your life inside your head. Then you accidentally see yourself in the mirror at the mall and go, “Oh God! My mother!”
[both laugh]
WG: Yeah, I try to avoid mirrors, myself.
JC: I think that you can change professions through your whole life, and I have been making pottery now even though I still paint and make jewelry. That’s why you won’t see me in a great, big, New York gallery. I cannot stay focused on one art form. People that really make it big time nationally stay focused on one art form.
It’s been an asset as a visiting art teacher because like the summer camp downtown I worked at for so long down at Stage Center, it’s three-week sessions. The first session, we’d do clay so it had time to dry, and the middle session we’d do painting and drawing, and then the last session I’d teach weaving because they could take that and carry that with them while we went up to the gallery and hung their work. It just worked out great to be able to teach all of it. Some people will do so much. Some kids like one thing intensely and don’t want to get their hands dirty in clay. They got a taste of it all. When I go to a school, that’s what I try to talk the teachers into doing, is giving them all the visual arts.
I know people don’t always agree with me, but I really think our biggest industry, the prisons, wouldn’t be nearly as full if we had music and art in elementary school. If it was treated with the same importance instead of like recess, if it was treated so people were proud of it, because we all process information differently. The kids that don’t process information like the linear logic way and make bad grades in first grade, then they never seem to quite catch up. I know there’s people that don’t agree with me on that, but that’s my feelings. The cultural life of the coffee house was just part of that feeling. I wasn’t marching and protesting and beating the drums to be like me. I wanted to give people an alternative for their recreation if they wanted to come. I still don’t know how to play chess. I was too busy making hot apple cider.
WG: Exactly, but you provided the opportunity.
JC: Yes, for other people.
WG: Something that you mentioned that I didn’t really get a chance to ask you about was that you did have a daughter. Was she your only child and what was her name? What about your grandson? Tell me a little bit about your family.
JC: Suzanne is – I lost one child. The boy died at 25. Suzanne is alive and well in Oklahoma City, a pillar of society. She’s an accountant and people are always asking her if she’s an artist too. She says, “No, and my mother can’t balance her checkbook.” We get along great. My grandson is Seth Keller. He started to OSU this week and keeps saying – that was his excuse for not going right off the bat out of high school, saying, “I don’t know what I want to be.” That is something none of know when we’re nineteen. We think we know, or we have an idea. but it keeps changing. When a school asked me to come and do career counseling on that day when the kids have visitors do that, I hate to do it because careers will be inexistence by the time they finish college that don’t even exist now. One of my adult pottery students is a physicist and he said, “Janey, you’re going to probably live to see the day when computers really are smarter than people.” I don’t want to hear that. That just is beyond my imagination. Anyway. Who knows what he’ll end up doing? I just want him to be a good person, and I know he is that right now. He’s kind and not mean and that’s the main thing that you want for your children.
WG: That’s excellent. Tell me – you said that the Black Brick was open for eighteen years. When did it close and how did that come about?
JC: It came about because I wanted to turn it into a gallery and we had pottery in there. The building next door, we owned it too. It’s all been scraped off now. OCU owns all that property now. In fact, I was just in a show at the gallery at OCU and when I delivered my work and went back to pick it up, I could not believe the changes. I go to the city all the time, but I hadn’t been right there in that neighborhood. Blackwelder is closed. It’s not a through street anymore. I went to the gallery at OCU, and I taught as an adjunct at OCU a couple of semesters. Change is one of the hardest things in life for people. I do believe that we don’t want to change. Nancy that teaches computer here at the library, I enroll in her classes and then some school calls me and I have to drop out. Finally one day, she said, “Janey, you’re never going to learn to use a computer unless you sit still.” [laughs] I have to sit down. Anyway, one of the kids that used to come to the coffee house gave me a used computer and I learned to play my CDs on it, and then it died. I just donated it to a vo-tech for the kids to tear apart because I hate how much of that is going in the landfill. Maybe Oklahoma City has a place to recycle. I don’t know. I don’t know whether I’ll ever buy one or not. I’m too close over here to the library. They’re going to have new computers all the time. They’re usually out of date by the time you get them out of the box, so I’ll just come over here. Being this close to the library was a big, big selling point when I was looking for a place to be.
WG: Good choice. Then you just decided to close the Black Brick?
JC: We turned it into the gallery first.
WG: How did things progress after you closed it and turned it into a gallery?
JC: I kept watching the ads for a – I’d heard that there was such a thing as free gas.
WG: False advertising?
JC: Free gas?
WG: Yeah. Was that false advertising?
JC: No. I found an acreage in Hughes County that had free gas, so we moved over there and built a kiln and had gas to fire the pots with, and I still came back to sell. The museum used to be at the Fairgrounds, and there was a rental and sales gallery out at the Fairgrounds, so my work was in there. I lived out in the country and made the work, so when the marriage ended and I was 50 years old, I moved back to the city. That was when I really started doing residency work. In the meantime, we sold the property that the Black Brick was on when we moved to the country. OCU has covered it now. I don’t know what building is over it now. Did you say you did talk to Steve? Is the building still downtown that he –
WG: [slowly, as if thinking] I don’t think it is. [speaking normally] He has two places. The Blue Dye and The Gourd, and I’m pretty sure one of them was torn down, but it seems like I recall Maybe one of them was still standing.
JC: Now when you have places like the Red Cup, it’s a coffee house but it’s different. When I go to an art opening at a gallery, people don’t walk up and say, “What’s your latest work? What have you been working on?” No. They want to talk about the Black Brick. [both laugh] They say, “Why don’t you open a coffee house again?” and I say, “Because the world has changed. People have changed. I can’t have a coffee house like I used to have, and I don’t want a Starbucks. I don’t want a coffee house that sells $5 coffee.” That was a stage of my life and I’m in another stage now.
WG: Sure. You did mention the Red Cup, though. Would that be a place that you think might be comparable to the place you used to have?
JC: As close as anything right off the top of my head, yeah. People go in there and enjoy just visiting. I even saw – what is it – Panera Bread has it where you can hook up your laptop and so forth? The same feeling. Even some of the commercial restaurants are going back to that easier-going lifestyle. I didn’t live too far from the Red Cup when I was still in Oklahoma City ten years ago.
WG: When did you move to Noble?
JC: Ten years ago.
WG: Is there anything that you might like to talk about that I haven’t really asked you about? Some crazy story you want to get out there?
JC: Sure. I told you on the phone – when you called, you said, “Are you the Janey Crain that owned the Black Brick, and if so, will you talk about it?” [laughs] When I meet kids I’m working with, high school kids, they’ll say, “Miss Crain, were you a hippie?” I said, “Well, I was a beatnik first.” Then they want to know what a beatnik was. I tell them they were very quiet, calm, passive.
WG: Pot smoking? I didn’t ask you if there was a big drug scene.
JC: Oh, you should have! [both laugh] No, that was – like I said, I have friends that do it. I think the general public doesn’t realize how many bankers and schoolteachers smoke pot, but I don’t. That’s what one of the kids, one of the teenagers – one night I was trying to show them how to do something and I said, “This is not rocket science, and if you don’t quit smoking so much pot, you’re not going to have a brain.” They just cracked up because they thought it funny. I knew they were stoned. They said, “Well you drink beer. I saw it in your refrigerator.” I usually try to get it out of there before they come. I said, “Yeah, I have a beer with a sandwich. I don’t buy a 12-pack and drink it all at once.” [both laugh] That’s just like saying if you rode a tricycle, you’re going to end up a biker.
WG: It could happen.
JC: Well, I think there are many, many, many things that cause us to be who we are or who we’re not. The superficial things may have a bigger influence than I want to admit. I know good parenting, and good schools, and all that is important, but I sometimes think when I see some young people, they were who they were the minute the popped out of the womb. What makes some people make bad choices and some people make good choices? We don’t really know the answer to that yet.
I remember a grade school in Putnam City asked me to come and be the visiting beatnik for the day. They had all written a poem, and they all had on a black t-shirt, and all the little boys had taken an eyebrow pencil and made goatees and they had studied Ginsberg. I took a copy of the menu and I sat up in front and listened to their poetry, and every time they’d finish it wasn’t applause. It was – well, I can’t snap my fingers. [laughs] Their teacher thought that was a good day of history. The other day, I was teaching a children’s class at the fire house and after the kids left, another teacher just cracked up. She said, “Janey, when kids work with you, they don’t just get an art education. They get a world education.” I said, “What are you talking about?” She said, “I heard you tell them about stick shift cars and how they worked.” [both laugh] I did. I remember little eight-year-old girls asking, “Miss Crain! Tell us what it was like when you were a little girl.”
I’m a walking textbook about some things. I remember the day we got electricity. I remember Pearl Harbor Day. I remember all these things that these little kids are reading about. One of them, one day I walked into the classroom. It was right down the street here in Noble, fifth grade or fourth grade. The teacher said, “We have a pretty well-known visiting artist coming today.” When I came, a kid held their hand up and said, “Are you Georgia O’Keefe?” I said, “No. I’m afraid not.” I remember telling some child that I remember the year we got electricity in our house. I studied with a kerosene lamp. “Did you know Abraham Lincoln?” [laughs] Kids do say the darnedest things.
WG: You are that fascinating though, Janey, truly. It’s been such a pleasure to get to interview you and I thank you so much.
JC: I hope I didn’t talk too long.
WG: No. It was perfect, absolutely perfect. Thank you so much.
JC: You’re welcome so much. Maybe I’ll be here twenty years from now and we’ll talk about what life was like.
WG: Let’s do it again.
JC: Do it again. My daughter complains about all my stuff that she wants me to get rid of. Art teachers are terrible. The other day I took a bunch of stuff from her house, and she was saying, “Oh boy, I got rid of a few pounds.” I said, “Yeah, but you’re going to have to come down and get rid of it again when I die. I’m planning on living to be 100, so by that time you’ll be 80 and you’ll be ready to go too and we’ll just play Thelma and Louise and Seth will have to get rid of all of it.”
Both together: Load up the U-Haul and just drive it off the Grand Canyon.
JC: Well, thanks for asking me and thanks for having me.
End of interview.