Adversity tempered by tradition, travel and friends ... Joanlee's eulogy

This is the eulogy I gave at Mom's memorial service yesterday. Thanks to all at Villa for organising, to Kaci Machacyk for flying in from Vegas to open the ceremony with an amazing rendition of "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again", and to everyone who came. We raised more than $2500 for Villa in the charity auction of her work that followed.

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Looking at the bare facts, you wouldn’t have picked the ‘80s as the best of times for my mother. Her marriage had broken down. She found herself on her own, emotionally distressed and financially strapped with a teenager to bring up. And yet, I’d suggest that the ‘80s were the making of Joanlee Ferrara. All that adversity pushed her to great things, while her friends in St. Louis provided the emotional support to keep her going.

This, I suspect, is the era from which many of your strongest memories come. Joanlee teaching advance placement art history at Villa … a class that most of the people who took it can now reflect was a deeper, more insightful … and certainly more heartfelt … foundation in Western Culture than most University classes. There were those great school trips to Chicago, where … in addition to teaching us all the delights of museum exploration … she passed on her love of travel and luxury hotels. (In Mom’s mind, Stan Musial was a legend not because he was one of the greatest ball players ever to grace the game, but because he got her art history trip a magnificent, long term deal at the Palmer House.)

Later on, when budget cuts eliminated her programme at Villa, she went on to reinvent herself at The Saint Louis Art Museum, where she inspired who knows how many hundreds of children by making art a grand adventure that they could understand with their hands and hearts as well as their heads.

Throughout the decade she was forced to really stretch her pennies. And yet, she wasn’t going to let that get in the way of the things she thought were important.

My mother … who was, let’s face it, chronically disorganized … became a master of scholarship applications and financial aid forms, ensuring that I could go to one of the nation’s best … and most expensive … universities when she had no hope of paying even a fraction of the tuition. She skimped on utilities, clothes and entertainment in order to scrape together the money for me to make my Fleur de Lis debut, something I must admit I didn’t see the point of at the time, but was vital to her.

And of course, there was the travel. There are few things Joanlee loved as much as heading to the airport … but in the ‘80s, she couldn’t really afford to do so. Undeterred, she got a part time job as a travel agent. Organising and leading group tours got her to Europe multiple times when she had no ability to pay for her own trip.

Here, she was in her element, as she herded her flocks through the delights of the great European capitals, feasting on a rich diet of art, architecture, shopping and local delicacies. (I don’t know which story I heard more from her Spanish trip … the delight at the private tour of the Lladro factory, or the horror of an intact roasted suckling piglet being placed before her at the dining table.)

It was an era where the travel industry essentially gave away free samples so that agents could experience what they were to sell, and boy … did mom take advantage of those discounts. That’s how we managed to spend the summer after my college graduation wandering through Italy, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland … despite the fact we could hardly afford to keep gas in the car. In Joanlee’s mind, the educational and emotional benefits of a good trip were always going to trump the basics of everyday life.

This is, of course, the woman who, in the two years after a terminal cancer diagnosis, and while undergoing serious chemotherapy, managed to get to … five Caribbean islands, four Hawaiian ones, Los Angeles (three times), Disneyworld (for a full week of being a kid again with her nephew and his family), and … finally … back to London. Yes, she was failing fast and just two months from death, but she pushed herself through the Gaugin exhibit at the Tate Modern, then held court with my friends in a fine restaurant overlooking the majestic, illuminated dome of St. Paul’s.

And yet, for all that she loved to travel, she always insisted on coming back to St. Louis. I made several attempts as she neared retirement to get her to liquidate everything and move to Florida. Lauderdale by the Sea had, after all, been her beach escape since her teenage years, and daily access to a beach would have made her exquisitely happy … while maintaining that amazingly deep tan we all used to admire. But she wouldn’t do it. This was home. And for all she loved new experiences, it was tradition and history … especially family history … that kept her grounded.

No drive through the Central West End could be made without triggering a stream of tales about City House; Kathleen, Bonnie and Karen weren’t just my mother’s friends, they were characters in oft-told stories from an idyllic St. Louis of the 1950s … Mom had written Happy Days in her head long before Gary Marshall brought it to TV. A certain stretch of Baxter Road always produced the tale of Mary Lou Clifford driving Mom out to Chesterfield in the early ‘70s and suggesting it would be a great place to invest.

There’s a spot near Forest Park where a colleague of my grandfather saw my mother cruising in her 1958 Chevy convertible, clearly cutting class. The incident sparked the confiscation and sale of the car, and repeated tellings of the story whenever we drove through the scene of the disaster. We couldn’t pass Chaminade Drive without accounts of Betty Crean’s Derby Day parties, evidently the social event of the ‘70s.

And any visit to the Hill’s Missouri Baking Company would spark a whole range of family stories, from my grandfather being the favored doctor of the original bakers, to my grandmother teaching my mother to make pizza with their fantastic dough, to the toddler version of me being cute enough to con Joanne Arpiani out of multiple cannoli on every visit, all of which I ate promptly and with a seemingly limitless capacity. (Frankly, these days I am more likely to remember that last tale at Weight Watchers meetings.)

Of course, St. Louis is like that. Our “where did you go to high school” culture assumes you’re born here, die here, and generally have Mississippi and Missouri River Water running through your veins. This is a town with a long memory and intimate social connections … a very small town, despite its population size. Mom both hated and loved that, but it made her who she was. It meant that the people around her at the end were the people who had always been there.

Marian Briscuso, beloved friend since they were toddlers in Bellerive Acres, who flew in from Baltimore for the final week. BJ Wenger and Lucie Nordmann, City House sisters who shared her memories and could give her tough love when she needed it. Anna Ahrens, first student, then colleague, always a kindred spirit. My father, with whom she reached a comfortable peace at the end. Tricia Hannegan, who spent almost as much time in our house as I did from the tender age of 3. And Annie Bruneel, who she really did forgive for spilling that glass of illegally obtained red wine over her pale blue living room carpet in 1982.

The conjunction of places … things … people … and history. Call it roots.

You’ll see it a lot in her paintings. After decades of teaching about the work of others, and coaching children to discover their own creativity, she picked up her own brushes again. She produced more work in the year after her cancer diagnosis than she had in the three decades preceding.

Sure, you’ll see a lot of wonderful foreign spots in her watercolours. She found it hard to resist England. It was, after all, a second home … as well the place that had captured her daughter and provided a much-approved future son-in-law. There are some lovely Italian scenes, a few French spots. But her most meaningful work, I think, is the St. Louis stuff. The scenes from the botanical Garden, the views from Chandler Hill Winery. Most significantly, her beloved trees. Old, tough, with roots sunk deep into the Missouri soil. Just like Mom.

She had an abiding respect for tradition and history. She treasured old friendships. She loved to travel. And when times seemed worst, it was the adversity that pushed her on to better things. This is what I hope we’ll all remember about her. And, more importantly, I hope it’s what we’ll all be inspired to incorporate into our own lives.