Port Arthur Texas Has a Janis Joplin Museum — The Town That Hated Her Now Sells Her Face on T-Shirts D

Port Arthur, Texas. Population approximately 50,000. Located on the Gulf Coast near the Louisiana border. An oil town built on the Spindletop discovery, which in 1901 produced the largest oil gusher in American history. A town that smells like petroleum when the wind comes from the wrong direction.

A town that knows what it is and has made peace with it. Today, if you drive into Port Arthur, you will see signs. Janis Joplin was born here signs. Janis Joplin grew up here signs. A historical marker in front of her childhood home on Lombardy Street. A mural on the wall of the Ben J.

Rogers Regional Visitor Center that is visible from the highway. Driving tour pamphlets at the tourism office taking visitors to St. Mary’s Hospital where she was born, to Thomas Jefferson High School where she was bullied, to the church where she sang in the junior choir, to the radio station she used to visit, to the beach where she went to teenage parties.

At the Museum of the Gulf Coast on the second floor, there is a permanent Janis Joplin gallery. Personal effects, memorabilia, artwork, a letter she wrote to her mother, her high school yearbook, and a replica of her psychedelic Porsche painted in the same swirling imagery as the original, butterflies and cosmic eyes and the eye of God.

In the gift shop, Janis Joplin t-shirts, Christmas ornaments, posters, trinkets. “Who wouldn’t want a Janis Joplin t-shirt to call out the inner hippie?” The official tourism website says. This is the town that voted her ugliest man on campus. This is the town that laughed her out of class, out of town, and out of the state.

Her own words said on live television to Dick Cavett in 1970. The town that hated Janis Joplin now sells her face on t-shirts, and this story is more complicated than it looks. Janis Joplin was born in Port Arthur on January 19th, 1943. Her father, Seth, was an engineer at the Texaco refinery. Her mother, Dorothy, worked as a registrar at the college.

They lived in a modest house in a middle-class neighborhood called Griffing Park. By every external measure, it was a normal American childhood. A house, a family, a church, a school, the things you were supposed to have. The internal measure was different. She was the wrong kind of girl, too interested in art, too interested in music that Port Arthur didn’t value, the blues, the black music coming from the radio stations across the Louisiana border, too loud, too visible, too much opinion, too little interest in the things that made you acceptable in a Gulf Coast oil town in the 1950s. By the time she reached Thomas Jefferson High School, the cruelty was organized. The boys voted her ugliest man on campus, not even ugliest woman, ugliest man, as a specific targeted humiliation.

The girls kept their distance. The teachers didn’t stop it. She found refuge in the Port Arthur Public Library, in the records she could borrow and listen to, in Bessie Smith and Lead Belly and Big Mama Thornton, in the idea that somewhere, in some other version of America, there were people who sounded like what she felt inside.

She graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1960. She left for San Francisco 3 years later. She never really came back except once. In 1970, the same year she died, Janis Joplin returned to Port Arthur for her 10-year high school reunion. She arrived with an entourage, feather boa, sunglasses, the full performance version of herself.

She held a press conference. She was cordial. And then a reporter asked her, “Were you invited to the prom?” She looked down. “No,” she said. “I was not invited to the prom.” The cameras caught it. The bravado gone for a moment. The Port Arthur girl underneath the rock star, still there, still carrying the same wound.

She had also, before the reunion, gone on the Dick Cavett Show and told the national television audience that her classmates had laughed her out of class, out of town, and out of the state. Port Arthur had watched that broadcast. Port Arthur knew what she had said. The reunion was not warm. She didn’t find the acceptance she had been looking for since she was 16.

She went back to Los Angeles. She never came back to Port Arthur again. She died 3 months later. Here is where the story gets complicated. Port Arthur didn’t immediately embrace Janis Joplin after her death. For a long time, for most of the 1970s and into the 1980s, the town’s relationship with her memory was ambivalent at best.

She had criticized them publicly. She had lived a life that made conservative Port Arthur uncomfortable. She had died of a heroin overdose. She was not the kind of celebrity that a Gulf Coast oil town with a conservative cultural identity knew how to be proud of. Her brother Michael said it plainly, “10 years after her death, she was an old star.

” It took a while for her to achieve iconic status. It took a while for Port Arthur to figure out what to do with her. What they figured out, eventually, was that she was worth money. The Museum of the Gulf Coast opened its Janis Joplin gallery. The tourism office created driving tours.

The historical marker went up in front of the childhood home. The mural appeared on the visitor center wall. Each of these things happened gradually across decades as Janis Joplin’s cultural standing grew and as Port Arthur’s economy, dependent on an oil industry that had been declining since the Spindletop era, looked for ways to draw visitors.

What the town discovered was that the most famous person who had ever come from Port Arthur was the girl they had voted ugliest man on campus. The girl nobody had invited to the prom. The girl they had laughed out of class, out of town, out of the state. Her face was now the most valuable thing the town had.

In the museum’s gift shop, you can buy a Janis Joplin t-shirt for around $20. The tourism website suggests it as a way to call out your inner hippie. The same website includes a carefully written account of her childhood that describes her as sometimes mocked by classmates for being the artsy type, which is one way to describe being voted ugliest man on campus.

The museum houses her high school yearbook. You can look at it and find her face among the other students. The girl who didn’t fit, the one who was too much, the one they couldn’t wait to be rid of. In a church closet in 1991, someone found a small painting, a picture of Janis Garden of Gethsemane that Janis had made at age 13.

It is now on display in the Museum of the Gulf Coast next to her rock star memorabilia. A 13-year-old girl’s Sunday school painting in a museum because she became famous. Is this wrong? The easy answer is yes. The town that tormented her now profits from her memory. They didn’t deserve her when she was alive.

They have no right to her now. But here is the complication. Port Arthur is a struggling town. The oil industry that built it has been declining for decades. The economic trajectory of the region is difficult. The museum employs people. The tourism brings dollars. The Janis Joplin t-shirts are sold by people who need to sell something.

And some of those people grew up in Port Arthur loving Janis Joplin. Not the classmates who bullied her. They are in their 80s now or gone. The people running the museum and leading the tours and selling the t-shirts are often people who were not even born when Janis died. People who grew up proud that this voice came from their town.

People who feel a genuine connection to her story. The institution failed her. The town as a collective social force failed her. The specific individuals who voted her ugliest man on campus failed her. But those individuals are not the town today. The town today inherited the failure and is trying to do something with it.

Whether that something is sufficient is a question nobody can answer for someone else. There is one detail in the Port Arthur Janis Joplin story that stays with me more than any other. At the Museum of the Gulf Coast, you can see Janis Joplin’s high school yearbook. The yearbook from Thomas Jefferson High School, the school where they voted her ugliest man on campus, where the boys made fun of her and the girls kept their distance and the teachers looked away.

Her face is in the yearbook, ordinary, unguarded, the face of a teenager who doesn’t know yet that she is going to change the way the world hears music. And around that face in the yearbook are the signatures of her classmates. Some of them wrote things to her. Some of them signed their names without comment.

Some of them probably didn’t sign it at all. Those classmates are old now. Most of them have spent 50 years watching the world celebrate the girl they treated badly. I wonder sometimes what that feels like. To have been in the room when something extraordinary was forming and to have mistaken it for something wrong.

Port Arthur, Texas has a Janis Joplin museum. The town that hated her now sells her face on t-shirts. She would have found this very funny. She would have said something sharp about it to a reporter and then laughed at herself for saying it and then had a drink and said something kind about the people who were just trying to make a living.

Because that was also who she was. Under the boa and the Southern Comfort and the banshee wail, the woman who bought everyone drinks on her birthday and sat alone in the corner. The woman who paid for Bessie Smith’s tombstone and didn’t tell anyone. The woman who sat in Etta James’ session and just said, “I love your singing.

” She would have found the museum funny and she would have been glad that her painting of Jesus finally got out of the church closet. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.