Janis Hart was one really sweet lady. I met her in 1971 at the Worlds Fair Pavilion in St. Louis' Forest Park. She was eighteen or nineteen and had a really stunning figure and a very open, fun-loving personality. She seemed to get along with everybody and appreciate everything. I think on our first date we went to see the movie Shaft. She lived with her parents and had a big monster dog. Her mother ran a wig shop. We rode around a lot on my motorcycle, and she fried her lower calf on my exhaust pipe. She was wearing shorts. I shot some pictures of her on the beach at Alton Lake.

In all honesty, Janis was not always the most responsible person, a fault that you often find in people that are really fun-loving. In Janis' case, I was more than willing to overlook minor flaws. We once had an argument over her theft, with friends, of a stop sign. She thought it was a great prank. I told her it was a dangerous, irresponsible crime. Of course, this was when she was just out of high school. As she matured, her attitudes along these lines must have changed, but we never discussed that subject again. But I suspect that somehow Janis' less-than-sober approach to life contributed to her early check-out.

I saw Janis on and off until 1975, when I started living with my first wife. The last time I saw her, she was attending the University of Missouri at St. Louis. She was interested in child psychology. Janis asked me to Xerox a bunch of copies of a paper she had written. I worked as a parole officer and had access to a machine at work, but I didn't score any points with the surly secretary when I ran the machine out of paper with this obviously personal job. I had to give up before I had quite finished assembling all of the copies that she requested, but she characteristically was nevertheless very grateful when I delivered what I had. I have a mental image of her hurrying away to her class with this large slug of paper under her arm.

In 1984 I read that Janis had died in an auto accident. She had flipped her car on Union Avenue just a short distance from where I had wrecked my BSA 15 years earlier. I hadn't seen her in almost a decade, but that was a very sad day for me.