Born in Oregon in 1959, Jeanne spent the first few years of her life traveling around the United States with her family. Her father worked for the then-budding IBM computer company, which accounted for their nomadic lifestyle. Eventually, when Jeanne was about four, the family settled in Woodstock, New York, a rural town that would later become famous for the 1969 hippie music festival that took place there. Jeanne, being but ten years old, wasn’t old enough to attend the festival. But in the years that followed she would become a child of the hippie movement, experimenting freely with drugs and sex, and rebelling against her conservative parents in ways that shocked and angered them.
Her mother and father were both from the same small town in Vermont. They were, by birth, country folk. Speaking with slight redneck accents, they raised their children harshly; Richard would often bring out his belt when the kids misbehaved, while Caroline was a silent alcoholic. The four children, of which Jeanne was the second-born, were hardened by their parents child-rearing methods. They turned against one another—it was each child for himself.
Woodstock, meanwhile, was bursting with the youthful hippie movement. It was a town full of long-haired youths, listening to rock and roll, taking psychedelic drugs, and professing a love for freedom and individuality that contrasted sharply with their parents’ generation. Jeanne often clashed with her elders; she was banned from a girlfriend’s house after she lashed out at the father for being a racist, and she tested her own father’s racism when she tried to go to the prom with a young black man from school.
Jeanne hated growing up in “the sticks,” full of close-minded rednecks as it was, and as she spent high school being unmercifully punished by her wrathful father for her rebellious behavior, she knew she would eventually have to get out of that town.
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