Friends in Deed : Something Special Started in School for ‘The Girls,’ and It’s Still Going

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.

--Henry Brooks Adams, 1838-1918

Remember the time that Toni got that gorgeous guy on the gymnastics team, Frank Sinclair, to go to the beach with her at night? And then what does he do? He takes a football! Everybody else is under a blanket, making out, and Toni is throwing a football back and forth in the dark. God.

And you remember that time, with the ironing ? When Florene got us that service project to help that family whose house had burned down? We ironed for 10 hours!

Or the cheer, remember, at the games? “Hit him in the right knee! Hit him in the left knee! We nee, we nee, we need a touchdown!”

Then there was the funeral, when Janet’s husband was killed. She was only 33 then. We were all only 33 then. But remember? We even had a good time then. Janet was laughing. Then she felt guilty.

And the vow. We’re never going to forget that. How old were we then? 17. God, can you believe we were ever 17 years old? We were sitting in the cafeteria, all of us at our table near the back. And it was June 6, 1966--6/6/66--and when we realized that, we said that from then on, wherever we happened to be, we would get together on 7/7/77. And we did that. And now, it’s 8/8/88 and we’re here. All of us together, all nine of us. And we never doubted that we would be.

This is forever.

Toni, Janet, Sandy, Lauralee, Carole, Lynn, Cindy, Delfina and Carol. So far their last names have changed a collective total of 18 times what with all the husbands, ex and otherwise, along the way.

Carole’s been married the longest, since 1969, and to the same man. Most of the other girls--that’s what they still call themselves--got married within a year after they all graduated from Magnolia High School in Anaheim. The year was 1966 and the school was almost brand new then. They were in the school’s third graduating class and when they marched up to get their diplomas, they were all wearing gold robes.

But it was even earlier, 25 years this fall, that the girls became The Girls.

Florene Pebley, a.k.a. Mama P, thought that a Tri-Hi-Y club would be a good way for her stepdaughter, Sandy, to meet some friends after they had just moved to the area. So she offered to organize one, and the girls, all nine of them, joined up. They called it Y-Beta-Phi and they worked liked crazy to become the best club around. There were hours and hours of community service work and lots of meetings. The year they graduated they were named Anaheim’s YMCA Club of the Year.

Through it all, they had a blast. It was good clean fun. They didn’t smoke, they didn’t drink and they wouldn’t have known marijuana from oregano. The naughtiest they ever got was sneaking out during their slumber parties to wrap some unsuspecting classmate’s yard in toilet paper. And they loved Chinese fire drills. They’d get out of the car at a stop light and run around it, hooting and screaming, until the light changed. Sometimes Janet and Lauralee would climb inside the trunk.

But something else happened with The Girls. They never let go. They’ve made new friends, married, divorced, started careers and, among them, given birth to 14 children. Cindy’s gone the farthest afield, to Tucson, and the others have scattered throughout Southern California.

Their paths have diverged and the personalities they’ve developed are as different from each other as sweet and sour, yin and yang. But the girls’ friendship, the bond they cemented as Y-Beta-Phi’s original nine members, has only grown stronger. They are all parts of a whole.

The S.S. Azure Seas is berthed at San Pedro Harbor, its engines warming for the start of a three-day pleasure cruise to Catalina and Ensenada, and Michael the piano player is tinkling out his rendition of the Carole Bayer Sager-Burt Bacharach tune “That’s What Friends Are For.”

Encircling a bar table cluttered with tulip-shaped glasses, Janet Conatser, Sandy Leaverton, Carol Crump, Cindy Kay, Delfina Asher, Lauralee Stark, Lynn Levandowski Boyd, Carole Dare and Toni LaPorte stand with their arms around each other’s waists. They are singing along, swaying with the music and reveling in the sappy sentimentality of it all. A few of them wipe tears from their eyes.

The Miramar Lounge is maybe half full of passengers, most of them couples lingering over their drinks, and everybody’s head is turned toward the undulating circle of off-key singers. Everybody, too, is smiling, some of them actually beaming, a few others flashing slightly embarrassed grins.

But this is just the warm-up, as most everyone on the Azure Seas, staff and passengers alike, will find out soon enough. This is the start of a memory that these nine best friends have planned for a year, the fulfillment of that vow solemnly taken on 6/6/66. Eleven years ago, on 7/7/77, most of them got together for a lunch that stretched to dinner, that stretched to dancing.

In three days, however, it will be 8/8/88, and for this historic get-together it’s no holds barred. This is the year that all but one of them turn 40--Sandy’s a year older--and they are celebrating in style and en masse .

They hired two white stretch limousines for the ride from Lauralee’s house in Fullerton to San Pedro harbor, stopping along the way to have their portraits taken at a photography studio. In between they lost count of all the glasses of champagne they downed.

Already this year they’ve averaged a birthday extravaganza a month--like July’s “women only” weekend trip to Catalina aboard Toni’s 40-foot sailboat, Champagne--and the momentum is building.

Janet, an office manager for a Newport Beach developer, turns to look at a newlywed couple who have just walked into the Miramar Lounge. The bride is still dressed in her white satin gown and the groom is in a black tuxedo.

“Hey girls!” Janet says, “Let’s go over and grab him and see if she has a sense of humor!”

The idea elicits hoots and even some serious consideration, but a photographer has already begun to set up his lights for a portrait session. The bride doesn’t look like she has much of a sense of humor anyway.

“Look at that pose!” one of the girls says.

“Very natural,” someone else adds. “When’s the last time you looked at your husband that way!”

More hoots and giggles, and the girls are off on a laughing jag that blends seamlessly into the next.

Florene, who has boarded the ship to bid her Y-Beta-Phis a bon voyage , tells a story about artificially inseminating the pigs that she raises. And then she goes on to the horses and then from there, well, things really take off.

The girls are back in high school, except, as Florene points out, back then, they had no idea . They didn’t even know what inseminate meant.

But today, as then, the laughs are easy, the humor sophomoric and the good time completely unabashed.

Not that it’s always that way. There was the time, eight years ago, when Carole Dare gave birth to a brain-damaged son. She changed some after that. Now she’s more organized--she planned this cruise--and she’s the one who mothers the other girls when they need it. Carole is responsible.

Then there was Carol Crump’s double mastectomy, Toni’s two hysterectomies--they messed it up the first time--and all those divorces.

Carol’s last husband--there have been four--came home from a business trip and announced, apropos of nothing, that he wanted out. It happened two days before her 20-year high school reunion, and Carol felt like her heart had been slashed open. But she went to the reunion; the girls were there and they helped her to heal.

And even this cruise, wild and giddy fun, is helping Sandy to mend. It’s been less than three months since she finished a drug-abuse rehabilitation program, after what Sandy says was about a year at the bottom. Strung out on cocaine and running with the wrong crowd, she lost custody of her three children and watched three of her businesses fail.

During the real bad times, not even the girls knew where she was. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, when Florene called, that they found out. The girls dropped everything to drive to Florene’s house in Riverside County, celebrating Sandy’s birthday, and her homecoming, with lots of laughs, hugs and tears.

“When you guys came up for my birthday,” Sandy was telling her friends one evening aboard ship, “I was so scared. But I can’t tell you what it meant to me.

“Now, this weekend, I feel closer to you than ever,” she said, her eyes starting to brim with tears. “And boy, you’re never going to get rid of me now! I love you all.”

It was that word love, usually said through tears, and that feeling of love, usually shown through hugs and heartfelt guffaws, that kept coming up time and again throughout the girls’ weekend celebration.

“It’s like a marriage,” said Delfina, a Riverside beautician who brought her 17-year-old daughter, Angela, along on the cruise.

“You’re either there for each other or you’re not.”

“It’s a magic that doesn’t come along more than once in a lifetime,” added Carole, who also lives in Riverside.

“I have a lot of other friends,” Janet was saying, “and I know they do too. But I am never completely uninhibited with them like I am with these guys.”

Carol, an electronics technician at the U.S. Naval Weapons Center at China Lake, put in this: “The older we get, the closer we get.”

And Toni, who supervises construction of Sidewinder missiles at Ford Aerospace in Newport Beach, said: “I think maturity has something to do with it. When I was younger, work was everything to me. Now I see how important this is. . . . We love each other.”

Maturity, perhaps, was not the first word that sprang to the minds of the patrons of Hussong’s Cantina on that early afternoon in Ensenada, Mexico.

Not when they watched nine women, all wearing teal T-shirts with the words “Champagne Cruisers” on the back and 8-8-88 above the front pocket, lead a wavering, sometimes stumbling, conga line around the bar.

Or when they watched them balance themselves on each other’s folded knees, a wobbly row of bodies supported only by cane chairs. Or when they saw them pose for that picture with the Mexican policeman, the one in the dark aviator sunglasses. Cindy’s legs ended up around his neck and the guy even broke a smile.

Lauralee finally mustered her best booming voice to announce to all bar patrons, in general, to please stop buying them drinks. By that time, most of the girls had gulped down five double shots of straight tequila, Cindy had danced atop one of the tiny round tables and the mariachis had played their version of “Tequila!” for the umpteenth time.

The place was a madhouse and it wasn’t even 1 p.m., on a Sunday no less. Several middle-aged men came over to offer original quips like, “Hey, you guys are having too much fun!” and on four separate occasions, wives sent over their husbands to have their pictures taken with the girls. One teen-age girl brought around a Hussong’s poster and asked all of the Champagne Cruisers to autograph it in purple crayon.

And Lynn! Lynn the elementary school teacher from Huntington Beach. The girls had never seen her cut loose like this. No one would say exactly whose idea it was, but Lynn didn’t object when 26-year-old Armando Pasano, in the tank top and the bulging biceps, slathered her neck in salt. That was in preparation for his own double shot of tequila. And Lynn held the lime in her teeth.

“You know,” Toni would say later on, “if our husbands did this, we would kill them.”

But, of course, husbands would never have to know. Their absence was noted, and appreciated, for this weekend of female fraternity that led them partying straight--if not quite sober--into 8/8/88. How else to get away with all-night gossip sessions and rather audacious remarks, in camera , about a few male passengers?

And even as it was, the names of husbands, past and present, kept coming up in stories, like when Toni popped up from her seat at the captain’s cocktail party Saturday night aboard ship.

The cruise director had just asked that everybody celebrating an anniversary come on stage and without a moment’s hesitation, Toni ran forward. She and Gene, her third husband, had been married five years on Saturday.

“But I left my Italian Stallion at home to be with the best friends that anyone could ever have!” Toni blurted out, grabbing the microphone from the cruise director’s hand.

“Oh,” he said, waving his arm over toward the girls. “You’re with the group over there .”

More hoots and more hollers and the assembled passengers loved it.

“Yea, for you!” an older woman said, walking up to the girls with her husband in tow. And what of the next big event, on 9/9/99? The girls are already thinking about it. Europe is mentioned, as is a cruise around the world.

But these three days aboard the Azure Seas, friendship at its exhausting best, will be hard to beat. And the girls aren’t about to stop trying.