Mother lived in Compton and Venice during her school years and recalled that they were very lonely. She was friendly with her two stepsisters and said she adored the older one, Marion, but was always in competition with the younger one, “Baby,” over her father’s affection. My granddad, the policeman, was very strict, and life with him was very rigid. Early on, he did have a job working for Jack Benny, who was a radio and movie star before his hit television show. She recalled times when she would visit Benny’s house for a birthday party, and how she received lovely gifts such as a porcelain doll set of the Dionne quintuplets. For fun, Mother used to play at being in radio shows. Then Granddad became a policeman, and his attitude seemed to become a lot more serious, as he emphasized to Lu Anne that she must follow rules without question. She was a good student and from all accounts very sweet and warm—an all-around good girl. But she never felt truly at home in Los Angeles. When she would tell me these stories of waiting for her mother and brothers to come rescue her and take her back to her real home, I always pictured her as poor little Cinderella.
The day finally arrived when her mother came to visit, when Lu Anne was about 12. At the end of her mother’s stay, her father took my mom aside and told her that her mother wanted to take her back to Denver.
Whenever my mother told this story, this is the place where she would break down. My mother said she did not give it a second thought—she packed in five minutes and was so, so, so happy to leave. She kissed her dad goodbye and did not look back. She would always say, “All those years he raised me, loved me, and I did not even consider staying with him.”
To make matters worse, when she started school in Denver that year, 1942, she changed her last name to Henderson so it would match her mother’s, who had married Stephen Henderson, an Air Force photographer. She just wanted to fit in at school with the same name as her family, so no one would know she was from a broken home. When her father found out what she had done, he wrote her a hurtful letter, accusing her of betraying him. Furious, he said he felt his name was “no longer good enough” for her. After that, they did not communicate for years. Not until almost a decade later, after I was born, did she finally visit with him. At that time, she was introduced to her half brother Dan, who was only a year older that me. The problems between them must have been more than they were willing to forgive, because I never knew my Granddad Bullard or his family until many years later when Dan and I connected through a genealogy site. Mother believed her dad was a brokenhearted man for many years after she left him, and she carried that guilt for life.
Lu Anne with her father, James Bullard, Los Angeles, 1938. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)
Even though she used the name Henderson, her relationship with her stepfather, Steve, was rocky. The life in Denver was quite a bit different than her life in Los Angeles had been. She said she was shocked to see her mother drink and smoke, which her father would never have allowed with the Bullard women. Her mother owned Thelma’s Crystal Bar. She recalled quarrels between her mother and Steve, on nights when she would come back late from the bar, that often left Thelma with black eyes. She had never seen a man hit or abuse a woman before, and so she became very angry and lashed out at Steve verbally as well as physically, especially once she became a teenager. Though Steve and Gramps remained married the rest of their lives, Lu Anne’s rift with Steve was never repaired; but they did eventually learn to tolerate each other for Gramps’s sake.