The Girls from Ames (14 page)

Reading her email in their homes across the country, the other girls couldn’t help but think about their own children and the safety lessons ahead. But they also thought of Kelly’s loving relationship with her kids, and how that had been damaged by her divorce. In that email, she had written about cradling her injured son when he was young: “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” But the girls knew that her words went beyond the bike-riding lesson—right into the present.

 

 

K
elly’s great-grandmother, who lived until Kelly was in junior high, found her way to the northwest part of Iowa in the 1890s. Like many who settled there, she and her family were of Dutch heritage. Most of the new residents belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, which had stringent rules forbidding things like dancing and drinking.

Kelly’s parents, Larry and Lynn, married and had Kelly when they were in their teens. In 1963, they moved to Ames so Larry could complete an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in guidance and counseling at Iowa State. They lived in former World War II military barracks that had been turned into housing for married students. That’s where Kelly, not yet a year old, got her first look at Ames.

Kelly and Diana, then and now

In seventh grade, while hanging out with her friends, Kelly did the math and discovered that her mom had just turned eighteen when she had her. Over the years, the other Ames girls found it somewhat exotic that Kelly had been born to such young parents. It was almost as if it fit with Kelly’s nontraditional persona. Here they were, in seventh grade, and while Karla, Cathy and Diana had mothers who were forty-seven, forty-eight and fifty years old, Kelly’s mom hadn’t turned thirty yet.

Even though they were so young, Kelly’s mom and dad were considered to be among the strictest of all the girls’ parents. (Sheila’s parents were also young and thought to be strict.) Kelly was often getting punished for missing curfews, and she’d respond by coming up with effective plans to stay out late or not divulge exactly where was going and what she was doing.

The other girls loved Kelly’s dad as the school guidance counselor and friendly homeroom teacher, but they couldn’t figure out why he was so hard on Kelly. Looking back, her dad now realizes that Kelly was mature beyond her years in certain ways, and she was also the type of teen who had little patience for rules. Maybe, he says, he could have given her a bit more room.

Kelly recalls that it was Diana who introduced her to hot curlers. “We were all influenced by Farrah Fawcett,” Kelly says, “so I purchased my own set of curlers. Then one day my dad and I fought and he took away my hot curlers to punish me. I threatened to run away from home if he didn’t give them back. I didn’t want to be without those curlers! My anger was beyond reason, and because my parents were on their way out for the night, they decided to give me my curlers back so I wouldn’t do something terribly dramatic or embarrassing while they were gone.”

Knowing Kelly as long and as well as she does, Diana can now reach back into their childhoods to psychoanalyze things. Kelly was a firstborn; she has one younger brother. “I was a lastborn, so I had more freedom,” Diana says. “Kelly’s life was the complete opposite. She was always getting grounded, always getting into trouble.”

Diana’s mom was a busy working mother, a dietician, so Diana says she had more opportunities after school “to test the waters.” Her parents trusted her, and she was generally a good kid. Plus, her mother and father were more lenient, probably because she was the last of four children. As a result, she feels she got her fill of wildness when she was younger. The way Diana sees it, Kelly as an adult still has things to get out of her system—including figuring out her romantic life now that her marriage has ended.

 

 

A
s she headed into her teens, Kelly was certainly attractive and confident, with a nice figure and an easy way of interacting with boys. So she got plenty of attention. But because Diana was her best friend, Kelly often felt like the less noticed sidekick.

There were many moments when it was hard for her to be around Diana. Known as “the knockout” of the Ames girls, voted “best body” in a school poll, a member of the Homecoming court, Diana was literally a girl who could stop traffic. As Karla tells it: “People turned heads to see her.”

One day, Diana was walking down a street near Iowa State, and college boys in a passing car noticed her. They began hooting and hollering, calling to her out the window. Then boom! The boy at the wheel slammed his car into the car in front of him. Karla witnessed the whole thing and wasn’t surprised. As she saw it, it was an accident waiting to happen. “Diana was just so pretty,” she says.

Kelly found herself attracted to the high-school jocks and the occasional naughty guy, while Diana tended to like guys who were thin with rock-star hair—guys who were younger versions of Rod Stewart. So it helped that Diana and Kelly found themselves attracted to different types of boys. A part of Kelly also felt lucky to be hanging out with Diana, because the cute guys would want to be around them.

Like the other girls, Kelly also appreciated that Diana rarely seemed conceited and didn’t flaunt her looks. Diana had a sweetness about her that, most of the time, allowed them to be OK about her attractiveness.

Still, Kelly felt a near-constant competitiveness with Diana from the earliest days of their friendship. She’d avoid school activities if Diana was involved in them. Though Kelly had studied dance for ten years, when Diana signed up for the jazz dance class in high school, Kelly dropped out of it. “I just didn’t want to compete with her,” she says now.

They were partners in physics class until Kelly started failing and opted to drop the class. Looking back, she now believes she failed on purpose, because she didn’t want to measure herself against Diana.

Kelly never went to the senior prom because the guy she liked ended up asking Diana. Kelly didn’t stop Diana from going with him; she smiled through it. But it was not an easy experience for her.

After college, Kelly and Diana spent six weeks backpacking together through Europe. Kelly, always adventurous, decided to emulate the Europeans and sunbathe topless. Diana declined. Kelly could be impulsive, a risk-taker, opening up to strangers on trains, asking them questions. Diana was often more sensible and careful. They both grew up on that trip, and some experiences left them uncomfortable. At one youth hostel, they tried to get to sleep while a couple in a bed across the room appeared to be having sex. On another day, because of a transit strike, they decided to hitchhike to where they were going. They were quickly picked up by creepy men in their thirties and were relieved that they were actually driven to their destination and allowed out of the car.

At times, the trip tested and strained their friendship. Diana was the quintessential American blond beauty, and the men of Europe definitely noticed. “Everywhere we go, your blond hair is like a magnet,” Kelly told her. Diana shrugged. What did Kelly want her to do about it? In one café, a man tried to woo Diana, and Kelly listened to his patter and thought to herself, “This guy’s just icky. I’ve had enough.” She went off and sat alone at a table sipping her drink as she watched the guy fawn over her friend.

Despite their differences, Diana says “it’s really a love-hate relationship between us, but much more love than hate. My closest sibling is eight years older than I am. Kelly was and is like a sister to me; we love each other and bicker like biological sisters. I have shared more things with her than anyone else. And we always laugh.”

“Diana is good for Kelly and always has been,” Kelly’s mom says. “People with two different personalities work well together. It’s like in a marriage. Opposites attract.”

Of course, at the same time, Kelly and Diana feel twinned in more ways than they can count. For instance, in driver’s education class the summer before they turned sixteen, Diana and Kelly were assigned the same instructor and the same car. So they had their first driver’s seat views of Ames from behind the same steering wheel. “To this day,” Kelly says, “I can’t parallel park without thinking of Diana hanging out the window, telling me how close I am to the curb.”

 

 

A
ll her life, Kelly has liked finding causes to rally behind. With the other girls supporting her, she ran for student-council president at Central Junior High. Her campaign platform included a promise of regular “Flip-Flop Days” and “better salad dressings in the lunchroom.” She delivered on both. When she was coeditor of the newspaper at Ames High, her contrarian impulses and casual rebelliousness took many forms. She wrote editorials haranguing students for not reading the paper: “One would think that Ames High contains a vast number of illiterates!” Another editorial op-ed piece she wrote celebrated school pranks as “constructive in boosting student morale.”

Angela was her coeditor in chief, and for one story, they featured retirees at the local nursing home where Sheila worked. Many of them were born in the 1880s and 1890s, and they were asked to think back to their teen years and describe what they thought the future held for them. The old people spoke of how optimistic and appreciative they were: “I never thought there would be radios, television, airplanes flying all over the world.” “I thought the world was a wonderful place.” “During the Depression, you worked and even if you didn’t have much, you enjoyed what you had. We looked ahead to a better future.”

Then, the newspaper asked graduating Ames High students: “What do you think the future holds for you?” Out of twenty-seven responses, twenty-three were bleak: “The world will destroy itself.” “I don’t think the future looks good at all. Technology is taking over.” “Everyone is going to get more and more bitter toward each other until utter chaos will break out.” “I think it is going to be disastrous and I am glad I only have one life to go through it.” “My guess is there will be another World War before 1990.” Of all the students interviewed, Cathy was just about the only optimist, and even she was vague. “The future will be exciting,” she said. “You won’t know what to expect.”

As coeditor, Kelly liked the idea of using the school paper to question everything, to rile people up, to print stories calling Ames “a plastic oasis in the middle of a huge cornfield called Iowa.”

She had the same authority-questioning impulses in the classroom. Several of the girls were in English class together, and they were asked to select a famous hero and write an essay about him or her. A few of the girls picked presidents. Those who wanted to choose a female settled on the usual suspects, women such as Helen Keller or Amelia Earhart. But Kelly decided she didn’t want to write about a man, and she didn’t want to write about a dead woman. She wanted a true living heroine, and no one came to mind. So she decided to write an essay about the sad fact that she had no female heroes at all. Her teacher wasn’t pleased.

The other girls figured she was Kelly being Kelly. As Cathy always told her: “You just like to be different. You just like confrontation.” Everyone else could find a hero, male or female. Why couldn’t Kelly? (Her theme song could have been “Iowa Stubborn” from
The Music Man
—which, coincidentally, mentions Ames in its lyrics.)

In Kelly’s mind, she wasn’t just being difficult. She would have liked to write about a sports hero, but most of the female athletes celebrated back in the 1970s were gymnasts or skaters, and they were girly in ways Kelly couldn’t relate to. She saw no clear heroines on TV, either. Like other young women of their era, the Ames girls would speculate about who they’d be on
Gilligan’s Island,
Ginger or Mary Ann—very sexy or very cute. Though Diana was more demure, she had the looks of a perfect Ginger, of course. And Sheila was pure Mary Ann. The rest of them? “I guess we’re all Mary Anns,” Kelly decided. Those were the women and the choices girls were seeing on TV. There was no one suggesting any of them could play the Professor on
Gilligan’s Island,
and it didn’t occur to them either.