Then & Now
They were the faces of a generation... and are again, as they look back 50 years later.
JAN SMITHERS
IT TOOK THE ASSISTANCE of half a dozen people and months of dead ends to track down Jan Smithers, by far the most famous of the six teenagers Newsweek profiled in 1966. After appearing on the cover of Newsweek’s teen issue—blond, sun-kissed, seated on a motorcycle and flashing a killer smile—smithers received calls from “many, many” Hollywood agents hoping to represent her. Today, she’s most known for playing Bailey Quarters on WKRP in Cincinnati, which aired from 1978 to 1982. She was also married to actor James Brolin for nine years.
Today, however, she lives in Southern California and avoids the spotlight. (Her most recent IMDB entry, for Mr. Nice Guy, is from 1987.) “People don’t even know I’m an actor! If I ever let them know, they’re so surprised,” she says. “I’m very private about my personal life.” Asked if her life unfolded how she imagined it would, she bursts out laughing. “No! Because of Newsweek magazine, I didn’t have a chance to imagine how it would come out!”
Before Newsweek came into her life, Smithers was just a 16-year-old Valley girl. She grew up in a modest middle-class family in Los Angeles. Her father was a lawyer, her mother a homemaker, and she had three sisters, though the eldest died in a car accident at 21. Smithers was shy, liked art and was lukewarm on school. “Sometimes, when I’m sitting in my room, I just feel like screaming and pounding my pillow,” she told Newsweek. “I’m so confused about this whole world and everything that’s happening.”
She attended Taft High School, and one day a guy she knew asked her to go surfing with him. “I thought, No, I couldn’t! I can’t play hooky!” But he talked her into it. The beach was empty, and Smithers remembers sitting on the sand watching him surf, wondering what her mother would say when she got home. Suddenly, she spotted two men dressed in black walking toward her. “They looked like little pencils walking down the beach. One had long hair and cameras around his neck. They walked right up to me and said, ‘We’re doing an article on teens across the country, and we’re looking for a girl from California. We’re wondering if you’d be interested in doing the article.’”
Smithers said yes. After the article came out, her mother took her to meet agents in Hollywood. “I remember driving in the car with her. My mom was looking for a real person to represent me.” Smithers did commercials while finishing her last two years of high school.
She was accepted to Chouinard Art Institute, now the California Institute of the Arts, but quit after a couple of years to pursue acting full time. It paid off. In her early 20s, she landed a role in the 1974 film Where the Lilies Bloom, about a family of children living in the Appalachian Mountains. Four years later, she got her big break on the Friday night sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. She calls her success “destiny” but also sees it as dumb luck: “Honest to God, I don’t know how it happened!”
Smithers met her former husband, Brolin, on the set of Hotel, an ’80s prime-time drama from Aaron Spelling. “I had been in WKRP, a situation comedy, which is a fast-paced dialogue between people,”
Smithers says. “When I did Hotel, we were about to do our scene, and James asked me if I was scared. I was sure of my lines, and I said no, I wasn’t. I realized that he might be scared! And I realized he was a very sincere person. I don’t know if he remembers that or not, but our relationship developed on sincerity.”
They married in 1986 and have one daughter, Molly, who’s 28. When Smithers first learned she was pregnant, she planned to take six months off before returning to work. “I loved having a career, but when I met Molly, I just looked at her and told her, ‘You need me.’ And she looked at me so innocently. I thought, I have to stay! She changed my life. I really longed to be her mom.”
After nine years of marriage, Smithers and Brolin divorced. “It was good—really good—but somehow, somewhere, we started to wander,” she says. “He traveled a lot for work. We grew apart. He was gone months at a time.” Smithers also yearned for a life outside Hollywood. “I had Molly and wanted to be in the country and get away from that world. I just wanted a different life, and we ended up getting divorced.”
When Molly reached high school, Smithers traveled to India with a charitable group. She was astonished at the hardships she witnessed there and moved by the people she met. For the first time, it dawned on her: “I could make a difference.” She spent the next 16 years going to India. “I learned to
meditate there, and I changed a great deal. I got out of myself.”
These days, Smithers’s life largely revolves around meditation, healing, spirituality and the environment. She talks about yoga guru Swami Muktananda, Indian spiritual guru Mata Amritanandamayi (known as Amma the Hugging Saint) and Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva as if they’re her family. And she believes that helping people— neighbors and enemies—can heal anyone and any situation, from fights among friends to wars between nations. As she puts it, “The answer to peace in the universe is love.” Asked what advice she’d give young
people, she exclaims, “Read Autobiography of a Yogi! Get a hug from Amma! Make use of your time here! In my life, I found these things because I looked for them. I’m always in a place to receive the next thing. This is the real march, the quiet people’s change.”
Over the years, Smithers has used her fame to support causes she cares about. “I stood for no nukes. I spoke for solar energy. I was invited to Washington and spoke in a subcommittee. I did a terrible job—it was way over my head—but I did it,” she says. “My spiritual teachers always say, Stay out of politics. But do you know what the byproduct of nuclear energy is?” she asks, then launches into a 10-minute spiel on plutonium. “I am so anti–nuclear energy.”
Smithers is surprised to learn that 82 percent of teens today believe racial discrimination will be a problem for their generation. “People are people; we’re all the same,” she says. The key to solving discrimination and violence, she thinks, is “peace in your inner world. There’s such a commotion about the world, but we can find peace at any given moment. Conflicts are not etched in stone.” Yet she worries about how the economy will affect young people. “If this whole generation can’t buy a home because they have to pay off their college education, what have we done?”
Recently, I called Smithers to ask her a few follow-up questions. We spoke for nearly an hour, and later that day, she called back and left a message. “I just thought of that whole conversation we had about discrimination,” she says with her soft voice on the recording. “I don’t really know the answer, but God does. You could write that down.”
BRUCE CURTIS
WITH PINK CHEEKS and a tired, distant stare, 13-year-old Bruce Curtis stands in front of the barn on his father’s 116acre farm, a green Army cap pulled down to his brow. It’s daybreak, and he’s bundled up in blue coveralls and a teal sweatshirt, his hands covered by soiled yellow working gloves. “If you’re looking at my picture in coveralls, you’re thinking, That kid was never in New York!” Curtis, now 63, says of the photo Newsweek published in 1966. “But I used to live in Sparta, New Jersey, and ride the train to Penn Station and work in 11 Penn Plaza. I’ve come a long way from small-town Iowa.”
Curtis grew up in Newton, Iowa, population 15,381 (today, it’s 15,150). Every morning, he woke at 6 o’clock to feed his family’s 30 cattle, 24 sheep, 12 rabbits, eight cats and one dog. After school, he plowed, hauled hay, fed the animals and put them to bed. His father was the plant process engineer for Maytag, and his mother died of ovarian cancer when Curtis was 10. “My father was very important in my life. He wanted me to be exposed to as many things as possible,” he says, speaking with a slight twang. “I had a sense of wanting to learn about things beyond just the scope of being a farm boy.”
Curtis’s father had gone to Iowa State University, where he worked with professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry, who created the first electronic digital computer. He was also involved in the Manhattan Project at Iowa State, which developed and built the first atomic bomb. “He did a lot of things under the radar. It was very fortunate for me to see that.”
In 1966, Newsweek called Curtis’s childhood “the vanishing rustic life—hunting, fishing, camping out and raising his own livestock,” and he remembers his youth fondly, without regrets. He was involved in the Newton Rotary Club, played the trumpet in the school orchestra, joined the debate team and chorus, and became class president his senior year. He met his wife, Beverly, in high school; she worked at the local ice cream shop, the Kone Korner, which Curtis’s uncle owned. “It will be 43 years this August,” he says of their marriage. “That doesn’t happen very often, does it?”
After high school, Curtis went to Iowa State, where he studied animal science and agriculture business. He’d wanted to become a veterinarian, but he says there were around 900 applicants the year he applied to Iowa State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and only 89 were accepted. He was not one of them. Instead, he’s spent the past 42 years in the meatpacking industry, working for companies involved in slaughter and production all the way to the manufacturing and sales of fresh and processed meats. His wife and two sons followed Curtis in his many jobs to 11 cities, from Chicago and Cincinnati to Oklahoma City and New York. “I’m pleased with where my career has gone. It’s tied to an industry
that’s part of my background. It’s a very demanding business environment, and I’ve been successful from plant level to corporate to ownership of a company,” he says. “I’ve experienced downsizing a couple times in that career, which gives you some humility and also gives you some strength.”
In 1998, Curtis moved back to Newton, rebuilt the family farmhouse and now is a co-owner of Shelby Foods, which turns meat products into the raw materials for the meat, pet food and pharmaceutical industries across the U.S. and the world.
In the 1960s, Newton was the manufacturing muscle for Maytag. The company’s headquarters, located in the tiny rural town, helped it flourish and employed thousands. All that changed in 2006, when the Whirlpool Corp. bought Maytag. The company closed a year later, taking with it many of the jobs that sustained the community.
Upper management—and the kinds of families that came along with it—disappeared from Newton, Curtis recalls. “It’s a little more diverse [now],” he says. “It’s a little more of a labor type of environment here. The school is smaller by population, so that has changed sports and academics.” One positive addition has been the Des Moines Area Community College’s Newton campus. “It’s done a great job working with the school system to get high school students some of their further college credits. That is something we didn’t have years ago,” Curtis says.
Still, he worries about teenagers and the world they’re inheriting. “I’m concerned about what college students will have for jobs. Terrorism for me is for sure a concern. We seem to have a world that’s intent on destroying itself, and for me that’s very unsettling,” he says. Teenagers’ greatest challenges, he thinks, will be self-confidence, employment and success. “You need to make things happen,” he says. “It’s not a given that there will be jobs for you. You have to go search it out.”
Asked what advice he’d give young people today, he says, “That’s a good question. Boy...” Then he goes silent. After a long pause, he says, “I was fortunate with the environment I grew up in and the family background, and some teenagers probably don’t have that opportunity.” He’s also worried about drugs. When Curtis was in high school, he remembers some people drinking. “Today is scarier. You have scary things with meth and some of those things that really are ruining a lot of families and wrecking a lot of lives. It’s a state problem. We’re located along Interstate 35 and 80, and that drug traffic moves up [from the South],” he says. “Unfortunately, it is available. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d want to go through [being a teen] again.”
CHRISTOPHER REED
CHRISTOPHER REED was never one for labels. “I’ve always disdained the word teenager,” he told Newsweek in 1966, when he was 17. He believed the word had “hostile connotations,” and he referred to teens as they rather than we. “People think anyone who’s a teenager is automatically a delinquent,” he said. “I don’t feel I’m a member of the vast portion of kids my age.”
Growing up in a townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Reed was a model of good behavior and an honors student at the elite Browning School near Park Avenue (graduates include John D. Rockefeller, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., Jamie Dimon and Howard Dean). He rarely smoked. He avoided bars. He did his homework, practiced piano two hours a day. In his free time, he played hockey on the roof of his school and wandered through museums and galleries, and hoped for a girlfriend. His parents were divorced; he had two younger brothers. Every Saturday, he spent five hours at a rundown community center on the Lower East Side teaching children to read. Even at that age, he was sophisticated enough to understand life beyond his privileged bubble: “Everyone is always talking about the big problems of today’s teenagers. But do they really have any? They have the same problems as older people—the world’s problems.”
After high school, Reed attended Harvard. “I went from one privileged boys school in Manhattan to an elite institution. I guess I’ve been living it down ever since,” he says. When we imagine the futures of dutiful, privileged youngsters like Reed, we often think: lawyer, banker, hedge funder. But Reed wanted to make the world a better place.
His professional life has revolved around local
farming, the environment, activism and education. “I’ve always been open to the idea that the most interesting changes happen on a small scale—grassroots. Institutions can do something that isn’t top-down and that has real impact. So it’s not a surprise that I would have landed in a small community that would easily be overlooked yet has its own contribution to make to changing the world.”
Reed, 67, lives in Philmont, New York, a village about two hours north of New York City. His longtime partner is an herbalist who founded High Falls Gardens, a small farm turned nonprofit dedicated to Chinese medicinal herbs. Reed is a community and environmental activist—he spent a lot of time protesting in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street, and in the early 2000s he helped wage a winning battle against a proposed cement plant in Philmont. Recently, he joined a local steering committee tasked with figuring out how to use the area’s post-industrial infrastructure and history of water power to enhance the community. Reed jokes that he started working in the local food world “before it was fashionable” and, for the last 15 years, he’s collaborated with small farms as a consultant and educator. He also worked as a woodworker and a contractor, and has taught piano for over 40 years.
“Because I rejected certain paths of success, I sometimes wondered if I was a failure,” he says. “It’s taken me a long time to know that there was a positive. That the things I chose to do did have meaning.”
Reed looked up to his parents for their social intelligence (his mother was an artist, and his father worked in insurance), and he admired his uncle, Henry Hope Reed, an esteemed historian and architecture critic, for his principles. “He said his elite education was worthless. Everything he learned, he learned on his own,” Reed says. “He had advice for me when I was a teenager that I still remember: ‘See things as they are.’ I think it takes courage to do that. Maybe it doesn’t take as much
courage if you’re already under the gun economically. It’s easier to see through the halo of illusions if you are suffering from tap water that’s polluted or have no way of surviving if you have a major illness because it’s too expensive.”
Reed doesn’t have children, but he’s taught many young people over the years, and their fearlessness is what impresses him most, especially in the face of a future marked by student debt, fewer well-paying entry-level jobs, public health crises and wealth inequality. Asked what advice he’d give teens today, he says he’d tell them that “even the ugly truth is an important thing to pursue. Behind the ugly truth there are also beautiful truths about the resilience of people.”
When reminded of his early aversion to the word teenager, he bursts out laughing. “I remember saying that, and I remember the flack I would get about that too. Seeing people in aggregates and typing them is a very bad idea,” he says. “I instinctively bristle now at these broad-stroke judgments, whether at Muslims or another embattled group. There’s something going on to render those groups defenseless or vulnerable. Then they’re condemned on top of that. That seems grossly unfair.…
“Life over a half-century is humbling. I hope that I’m cultivating more ability to empathize with different kinds of people. I’m still struggling to be more human. That’s a lifelong challenge.”
LAURA JO DEGAN (Formerly Davis)
“I HAVE BEEN VERY NERVOUS about this,” Laura Jo Degan, 64, says at the outset of our phone interview. “I have to tell you the truth: I wasn’t sure what ya’ll wanted. I’m nothing.… I’m not.… My life is pretty ho-hum.”
Fifty years ago, when Degan (who at the time went by her maiden name, Laura Jo Davis), spoke
to Newsweek, she was a content 14-year-old. Growing up in Houston, she played volleyball, cheered, water-skied and rode horses. Once a week, she volunteered as a candy striper at a local hospital. Degan loved riding Honda motorbikes and worked hard in school (she cried when she didn’t get an A or a B). Smoking, to her, was “repulsive,” politics uninteresting and the Bomb not worth worrying about: “It’s a stupid thought. I guess I feel it will never happen to me.” She firmly believed her future would “fall into place.” Her greatest concern in life? Boys.
Degan’s seemingly unshakeable optimism—not to mention the cheerful photos Newsweek published of her gleefully riding a Honda motorbike and smiling brightly in a close-up—masked the hardships she’d endured.
The year before Newsweek’s cover story, Degan’s father, a photographer for Shell Oil, died of a heart attack on Mother’s Day. “There were real traumatic things—i guess you can tell from my voice,” she says, trembling. “Financially, that put a big strain on the family.” Degan started working at a local florist, and her mother got a job running an OB-GYN medical center. Degan’s brother and sister were older, so “it was just my mother and I, really, for a long time at the house.” And there was the bombing. On September 15, 1959, Paul Orgeron, an ex-convict and tile-setter, walked into Poe Elementary School with his 7-year-old son, Dusty, and a briefcase jammed with dynamite. He wanted to enroll Dusty, but the principal told him they needed the boy’s address and birth certificate. Orgeron vowed to return with the paperwork the next day. But instead of leaving, he took Dusty out to the playground and started blathering about God and power in front of about 50 students. Then he detonated the bomb hidden in his briefcase. Body parts flew everywhere. The blast killed six people: Orgeron, Dusty, the janitor, another teacher and two children. Seventeen more students were injured, including two who lost a leg, and the principal suffered a broken leg.
Degan was 8 years old, in her third-grade classroom when the bomb exploded. At first she thought it was the Russians. Her teacher led everyone outside, but as an appointed school monitor, Degan had to run into the bathrooms and the teacher’s lounge and shout “get out!” While her classmates exited the building with their teacher, who instructed them to look away from the carnage, Degan left by herself. “I came out, and because I wasn’t told not to look, I looked,” she says, sniffling. “Everything was in black and white, except for [the principal’s] dress…. That color of her dress was just so embedded in my brain. It was the most vivid purple.”
Degan didn’t talk about the bombing for many years, and then it was only with her family and best friend. “I was shattered,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep without the light on or somebody in my room. For a long time. We all got past it. They didn’t send counselors into the schools in those days. You just sucked it up, and you went on to school.”
When Degan graduated from high school, her mother “scraped up all the nickels and dollars we could find” and sent her on a trip to Europe. It was the summer of 1969. That fall, Degan started her freshman year at Louisiana State University. “I was convinced I could do anything with plants—cure diseases and stuff like that. I was going to be the mad scientist. That all went down the tubes because I realized you had to know a lot about chemistry.” She studied landscape architecture instead.
Sophomore year, she was thrown from a horse and crushed her spine against a telephone pole. She didn’t think she would ever walk again or finish college, but she eventually did both, graduating from LSU seven years after she started. She was the first person in her family to earn a degree.
Degan, who came from five generations of Texans, moved back to Houston and worked as a landscape architect for 15 years. She and her husband married in 1980, when she was 30, and they have two children. She now works for his contracting business, but over the past 20 years she’s spent most of her time taking care of three relatives with Alzheimer’s disease. “When people ask me why I haven’t been involved in my career—i’m a caregiver.”
Degan’s life has hardly been “ho-hum,” but when she reflects back, her memories are tinged with a wistful hint of regret. “I guess I’m where I’m supposed to be. But with that in mind, I think I should have—how can I say?—i could have done more with my life. I think you always feel [that way] when you’re reaching the end of life,” she says. “I’m looking at retirement now, and that’s pretty scary with the economy. So I shoulda made a lot of money. That
shoulda been my goal, but I never had those goals. I think my biggest goal was I wanted to be happy. I saw people who did not have a lot of joy. So I just want to be happy.”
“Teenagers all have these really bizarre expectations that they’re going to be Mark Zuckerberg,” she says. “And then, don’t even get me started on Hollywood…. I choose not to look at that sort of thing. I’m sorry. I want to live the life of Mrs. Cleaver. Why can’t it be like that?”
LAURA RICHARDSON (Formerly Hausman)
WHEN LAURA RICHARDSON moved from Boston to Berkeley, California, halfway through high school, she left behind her old friends and didn’t look back. “They were a bunch of perfect, first-class... finks,” she told Newsweek in 1966, when she was 17. At Berkeley High School, Richardson’s new friends were into discussing five topics: Vietnam, the Bomb, civil rights, marijuana and sex. “I really fit in here,” she said.
Newsweek’s original profile of Richardson (who went by Laura Hausman at the time) showed her in a paisley kneelength skirt, an orange turtleneck and black cardigan, strumming a guitar in front of a peace sign with the words Peace and Freedom written around it. She was against the Bomb (“It’s so completely stupid... to just be able to push a button and destroy the world”), against the Vietnam War (“My solution is simply to get out”), for the legalization of marijuana (“It’s sort of like taking whiskey, only it doesn’t cause cirrhosis”) and “vociferously” for legalizing homosexuality.
In high school, richardson volunteered at a program for black children in San Francisco’s Haight-ashbury neighborhood, participated in a “women-for-peace” march and joined the high school arm of the Vietnam Day Committee. “School is just a place where I go to shake my head and stay awake,” she said.
Her views on the world haven’t budged in the past 50 years. “I’m as radical as I’ve ever been,” says Richardson, 67, who now lives in San Leandro, California. “I still think society is basically gonna collapse due to bad economics, because we’re spending money constantly that we don’t have. Like a pyramid scheme. I think it’s going to be that and the environment that’s gonna kill us,” she says. “[This country] is run by the rich. If you’re poor, you stay poor. It’s not a democracy. It never was.”
When I ask Richardson what she did after high school, she replies, “I definitely took some time off. I didn’t start college—drugs were rampant in those days, and I certainly had mine.” She drove cross-country playing folk music and the blues with someone she says is Woody Guthrie’s nephew. They landed gigs in clubs—she sang and played guitar—and after a few years she returned to California and enrolled at California State University, San Bernardino. She couldn’t afford to graduate, so she dropped out after a couple of years. She spent her 20s and 30s in a haze of music gigs, parties and “average jobs” and has spent the past 10 years working as a vehicle registration clerk. She met her husband when she was 36, and they have no children.
Richardson’s father was a dentist, her mother a housewife, but after her parents divorced, her mother got a job as a secretary. She eventually went back to school and earned a degree in anthropology. “She didn’t know it, but she had a rare cancer of the small intestine, and just as she was going for her first job, it killed her. I was 34. She was 54 when she died,” Richardson says. Her older brother died of heart disease at 54. “There’s nobody left. I’m it. My father lived until his 70s. His heart got him too, but he got to do everything he wanted to do.”
Richardson talks with a hoarse, raspy voice that sounds as if it’s about to give out any moment. When she was 44, she was diagnosed with throat cancer. She beat it, and while she may not be able to sing anymore, she still plays the guitar, keyboard, dulcimer and ukulele. Clearing her throat, she says that she has regrets—“everybody does”—but she wouldn’t change a single opinion when it comes to her politics.
“The gay marriage thing is great! We’ve done something right. I know marijuana will do some very interesting and positive things; it isn’t just about getting high,” she says. Yet she has harsh words for America’s “so-called election,” its health care system, overcrowded prisons and the legal sys-
tem, which she says is “run by very rich and usually white guys.” As for racism, “I don’t see a cure…. I think economic equality would make things a lot better, but that isn’t happening in this country.”
Her one piece of advice for young people reflects her regrets: “Educate yourselves. Oh yes. In any way possible.”
The greatest challenge facing teenagers today, she thinks, is the environment: “Everything else is kinda superfluous if you don’t have a planet that can be lived on. I don’t think teenagers will have it as good as we did…. It’s a pessimistic view, but, man, have they got their work cut out for them. If I was growing up today, I’d be damn angry about it.”