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oan ©oowell
SAILOR GIRL
She's a good skipper
and a good player, and
her ship is coming in.
By Edward J. Doherty
It is the happiest tale of Hollywood where tales are many and various; a tale of the movies and the sea; a tale of windjammers and cocoanuts and outrigger canoes and romance and fascination; the tale of Joan Lowell, a sailor girl who is cruising to the stars.
Black-haired she is, and brown-eyed; the strength of the tides is in her; and the depths of unsounded seas.
For fourteen years she roamed the world of water with her father in the "Minnie A. Caine," a windjammer with only one yard. Copra and sandalwood between the Solomons and Australia. Cruises that took eight months. Voyages that took 9,000 miles — and the ship making a good five knots an hour.
Fourteen years of bossing her father's ship and badgering his crew, and walking and talking like a man. Fourteen years without the sight of another white woman. Fourteen years of overalls and bare feet and hair tied up in a mop.
Joan was three years old when her dad first took her to sea. She was the last of eight children, and her mother was ill and could not care for her. She was seventeen years old when she came back to the home in Berkeley. She had never seen silk stockings. She had never powdered her nose, nor seen a moving picture, nor ridden in an automobile.
She walked like a sailor, and she talked like one. Nobody had ever told her that ladies do not say "damn," which was the mildest word in her vocabulary.
"Ah, the things they said of me,' Joan remembers. "The way they talked of me when I came home to stay. I would never amount to much with the education I had.
CI Little Joan expresses, inker face, the poetic quality of the sea.
01 F o r fourteen years Joan Lowell lived at sea, a sailor among sailors.
I must be bad at heart. I would probably run away and marry a gob. They think all sailors are boys with funny white caps on their heads. "Old hens! They made me cry!" Joan went to work as soon as she could, carrying food to the guests in a Berkeley hotel dining room at eighty-five cents a day. And at night she studied.
She went to the telephone company, but she held the job but a week.
"You had to sit up so straight," she said, "and" every once in a while the supervisor would come along and give you a poke in the back.
"And sometimes when the board would light up all over, I'd get to dreaming. I could fancy we were in the doldrums, motionless, a painted ship upon a painted sea, the sails hanging lifeless, with neither lee nor windward — the deck hot, so hot it burned my feet. And then at night there would be a sudden downpour of rain.
"And everywhere a raindrop fell into that glassy sea it seemed to touch it with fire. It used to scare me every time, though I knew it was only phosphorous. I knew it, but I felt the ship would surely burn in that wide, wide sea of fire.
"Lights on a switchboard — lights on a ship! The red and the green lights high up, and the dim light in the binnacle box. It was still in the telephone exchange office— it was still at night on the ship, and sometimes I
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