Lucy Gwin was born January 5, 1943, in Beech Grove, Indiana.1 She was raised in a post–World War II Indianapolis that was conservative, religious, and Republican. It was home to people who called themselves Hoosiers and loved living in Indiana. She learned to read in 1945 from newspapers. Her young eyes fixed on stories about the liberation of Jews and others from German death camps. “The Holocaust led me to pledge my energies to the civil rights movement,” she wrote in an essay decades later.2

Her mother, Verna, was a Louisville, Kentucky, native. Gwin’s father, Robert, grew up in Indiana just over the Ohio River. They raised two daughters in Indiana. Bridget was born February 6, 1947, and looked up to her older sister, while Lucy looked out for her. Lucy called Bridget her best friend. In 2006, when she was living in Kansas, Gwin shared a family photo with a friend, using an e-mail address that typified her irreverence: biteme@mouthmag.com.3

The photo shows little Lucy and Bridget in tidy outfits and combed hair. Lucy is taller by a head and shoulders. Even taller than her is a boy who accompanies the sisters. Flanking Bridget on the left, Lucy, about six years old, wears a T-shirt with wide stripes, a pleated skirt, and tie shoes. Her lips are pursed in a faint smile. Her frame appears sturdy. She looks away to the left, twirling a string with a toy at the end. A pensive, tiny Bridget in a short-sleeved dress stands in the middle staring at the camera. She looks fragile. On the right in the photo, the boy, a youngster named Mickey, standing a step behind them, holds a string toy like Lucy’s, but it falls limp. He has Down syndrome.

The boy in the photo was the son of Verna’s best friend, Gwin told her friend in the e-mail. “I feared him when I was smaller than shown here. Mickey the Mongoloid.” In a 1998 essay she also revealed that she worried about becoming Mickey. She described her grin in the photo as a “toxic smile” because she was trying to distinguish herself as unlike Mickey, with his perpetually half-closed eyes, his slack jaw, his limited vocabulary. She spent her life “racing to be the smartest, the best-read, the funniest, the most well-spoken, the most sought-after, the memorable, the valuable, the queen . . . Not-Mickey,” she wrote nine years after her head injury. As an adult and a brain injury survivor, she regretted her “bigoted” attitude toward the boy. “I am Mickey now.”4

The girls’ upbringing was unusual. Their father would ditch the family for spells. Sometimes he would blow up at them. Once, on a trip down the old two-lane Dixie Highway, he threw everyone out on the dusty red road and drove off in their 1951 Plymouth. Lucy was eight or nine.

Clearly Robert W. Gwin was not boring. Lucy told friends he was a drinker and a gambler, an advertising man with a creative streak. She seemed to be mesmerized by her father and referred to him as “powerful” and “alive.” “He made our excitement with his Triumph Parades, his Return Victorious Parades,” she recalled in her journal in November 1989.5 He would pose odd challenges to the children, such as picking up a crawdad for $25. In 2005 Gwin described her father as a “promoter, a bookie, a rapscallion, and an ad man.” She recounted how he arranged for a circus elephant to stand on cardboard furniture sold by a client to prove its strength. “He was in the paper almost every day for one thing or another as we were growing up.”6

In the 1950s, Robert Gwin made frequent use of newspapers. He wrote letters to the editor of the Indianapolis Star and Louisville’s Courier-Journal criticizing President Dwight Eisenhower. As manager of the Indianapolis Industrial Exposition of the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce, he enticed the local newspaper into featuring his events. Sometimes he would pose for a promotional photo, a sharp-nosed bald man in a suit kneeling beside grass-eating goats or beaming astride a model from a finishing school. One news photo spotlights his daughters. The shot shows Bridget, seven, and Lucy, eleven, amid packets of seeds to be handed out at the expo. They look into each other’s eyes with little girl smiles as Bridget “attempts to count the seed packages” and Lucy holds the “jack-in-the-box bunny prize.”7 Later, Robert Gwin worked for Indianapolis Airport Advertising, Inc., and was in charge of a large local children’s art show.8

One day when Lucy Gwin was five, Verna got her ready for an outing with her father. Verna braided Lucy’s yellow hair into pigtails, tied a white pinafore over her best blue Marshall Field dress, and sent her on her way with Robert and his buddies. They traveled to Louisville for opening day of the races at Churchill Downs, where she inhaled the smells of whiskey, tobacco, and horses. The girl cherished that day with Daddy and being among men.9

About five years later, the girl had another experience with her father that she wouldn’t forget. On a family vacation in Florida, Daddy, likely drunk, asked her if there was something he could teach her to do, she wrote in her 1982 memoir Going Overboard: The Onliest Woman in the Offshore Oilfields. She answered that she wanted to drive his car. He turned over the steering and shifting to his daughter. “Sitting on my father’s lap on that hot sunny day,” she recalled, “was the thrill of thrills for a pigtailed girl age nine or ten.” Yet, despite many fond memories of her childhood brought up in the book, she also noted a sign of stress: she was a bed-wetter.10

The girls went to Thomas Carr Howe High School, which turned out large graduating classes. Bridget was known for art, music, acting, and poetry. She played violin in a school orchestra. She contributed sketches to the high school newspaper, The Howe Tower.11 In 1963, the Star published her photograph and a story about her poetry compositions illustrated with her own drawings.12 Bridget, with dark hair and a dark sweater, looks up at the camera with a gentle smile. The article noted that three of the Howe senior’s poems had appeared recently in a national magazine and that she started writing poetry at age six, when she was published in Jack & Jill. The Star also noted her art awards and the scholarship she received to study at Herron Art School.13

“Miss Lucy Gwin” made the news at sixteen for bringing her Russian wolfhound to a dog show. A photo of her with the big white-maned Domenic shows Lucy with a bow in her curled blond hair. She holds a delicate floral fan in her right hand and pats Domenic with her left hand. Her fingernails are painted, and she wears a crisp light dress. She looks pleased.14

In high school, Lucy Gwin did not mix much. She was in the Latin Club her freshman year and was on the Cheer Block, which rooted on the home team, in her second year.15 The school offered many outlets for many interests, from ROTC and rifle clubs to “feminine” career courses for future homemakers and nurses. At about that time, Gwin ran away from home to join the civil rights movement in Chicago. She took part in a Freedom Ride and a few marches.16

Her senior year photo in the 1960 Hilltopper yearbook shows a slim blonde looking to the left with a trace of a smile. She wears a light sweater and a necklace. She appears confident, ready to move on. Nearly sixty years later, alumni leaders from her graduating class of more than four hundred students did not recall her.17 At the time of her graduation, she was pregnant.

Just a few weeks after graduating from high school, seventeen-year-old Lucy Gwin became Mrs. Robert Keller. A week after turning eighteen, she gave birth to a daughter, Tracy. A few months after her head injury, she would write in her journal that getting pregnant and married as a teenager were among the top tragedies of her life, along with the death of her dad.1 Her mother was still alive when she wrote that. Her first husband doesn’t like to talk about their marriage. They had a second daughter the following year.2

Marc Thorman, a close friend of Bridget Gwin’s, recalled Robert Keller as a shoe salesman and “a total mismatch” for his wife. “Lucy was really a brilliant creative person; he was just a regular guy. They just didn’t seem right together,” Thorman said.3 Her older daughter, now Tracy Hanes, said Gwin told her that she was drawn to Keller because they were both the children of alcoholics. They had met during high school, Hanes said.4

The couple moved to Decatur, Illinois. Gwin started going out to a local taproom, the Winery Bar, where she became friends with a young bartender, Joe Maurer. She would show up in dresses and white gloves. She took an interest in a customer named Phil Douglas. They began a relationship. By 1964 her marriage was over. In her early twenties, a mother of two young girls, she remarried and became Lucy Douglas.5 Gwin, Maurer said, had walked out on Keller. “She hated that life, hated it!” he recalled. “It’s a straight, normal, everyday life like everybody’s supposed to like it and live it. Lucy didn’t want that.” After Gwin split, Keller got the kids.

Even close friends of Gwin’s know little about Phil Douglas. He may have sold cars. He may have been in the army. “He had some wicked scars on his body, on his torso,” according to Maurer, who socialized with the couple but never got the full story on Douglas’s background. “I don’t know who knows. And there’s a lot of people making up stories in the bars all the time. He was coming on like he was stationed up in Alaska across from Russia and, hint-hint, that they were playing war games up there for real.” One evening, said Maurer, Gwin sought refuge with him, frightened that Douglas was going to harm her.

After living in Decatur for a couple of years in the 1960s, Gwin moved back to Indianapolis. Maurer visited her there. He met her sister and mother. He doesn’t know what happened to Phil Douglas, but Maurer encouraged Gwin to stay away from Douglas. Maurer distrusted him. Yet in the fall of 1989, as she recovered from brain trauma, Gwin listed “marrying/leaving Phil Douglas” among her life tragedies.6

Needing income, Gwin talked her way into an ad agency in Indianapolis and flourished. She made herself so crucial that her employer insisted she take out an ad in Ad Age to find her replacement when she landed a job not long after in Chicago. The ad showed her creativity: instead of type, the printed ad featured Gwin’s clear cursive handwriting, and it stood out, recalled Chris Pulleyn, a friend and colleague.7

After more than a year in Indiana, Gwin was back in Illinois, working at Leo Burnett, a huge ad agency in the Prudential Building on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. She was hired to write ad copy that targeted geriatric consumers of national brands of underarm deodorant and bran flakes.

Pulleyn was nineteen in 1966 and was already a clever ad writer for Leo Burnett. She first encountered Gwin, who was then Lucy Douglas, in an audio recording room. “When I met her, she called herself ‘the Widder Douglas,’” said Pulleyn (whose was known by her given name of Martha Christoff in Chicago). Pulleyn assumed that Mr. Douglas had died, but she did not pry. Pulleyn was working on a tune for United Airlines—the well-known “Take Me Along” jingle. Gwin was amazed that the younger woman knew how to operate the recording equipment. She fixed Pulleyn with a piercing stare and demanded to know who had taught her such skills and how much she was being paid. “I told her and she said, “You’re not making enough,’” Pulleyn recalled. Gwin’s annual salary was $10,000, $1,500 more than Pulleyn’s. They soon were roommates in an apartment building near a shop where a man sold rare birds. Gwin would often frequent the place.8

Pulleyn said her memory of the time isn’t comprehensive because it was “the sixties,” and anyone who really lived through that decade of psychedelic drugs wouldn’t remember every detail. Gwin and friends would sometimes drop acid. During this time, Gwin also dabbled in working for an underground newspaper, the Chicago Seed, which kept an eye on the Chicago police, the music scene, and the resistance.9

Gwin joined a hotshot group of ad writers putting together TV commercials. She became a close friend of Neil Vanover, a heavyweight in the industry. He was a creative director at Burnett and for several other firms over the years and collaborated with Gwin, Pulleyn recalled. Vanover and Gwin had similar senses of humor and high-energy working styles. They pooled their ideas. Once they tried to persuade people to ease their workday stress by taking meditation breaks. They made posters encouraging people to unbuckle their pants, relax at lunchtime, and meditate. According to Pulleyn, the relationship was mentor and mentee.

In 1969 Pulleyn moved to Rochester to study with the Zen teacher Roshi Philip Kapleau, who was based there. Gwin and many others from the Chicago scene soon followed her. But first, Gwin would have to get through 1968, and that wasn’t easy.

Fred Spears, an Indianapolis native and navy veteran, was dating Bridget Gwin in 1968, a memorable year of war protests and political strife. They moved down to Florida and lived together for a while in Miami.1 Bridget was the more sensitive sister, not good at parties. She was a poet and a painter. She once made her sister a memorable gift: a black-and-white poster of a chair sitting inside a woman.

In the spring of 1968, Bridget visited their father’s deathbed in Florida. He was suffering from a brain tumor and his head had swollen. Robert Gwin died in June. Lucy started calling her sister, urging her to come to Chicago. Lucy pitched a plan of dropping out of the rat race and living in a commune in Oregon. It appealed to Bridget, and less than a month after her father’s burial, she moved up to Chicago. Fred Spears stayed behind. That July, he received devastating news: “I got a call in Miami, and a friend said he’d seen in the Bloomington paper that a girl named Bridget Gwin jumped out a window.”

Newspapers reported that Bridget Gwin, twenty-one, had leaped from either the third or second floor of an apartment building in the Old Town section of Chicago. The articles implied that the jumper was a casualty of a drug party. “Girl’s Tragic Plunge from Old Town Pad, Round Up Hippie Pals,” Chicago’s American headlined over a pair of photos from the scene on July 23, 1968.2

The story quoted police as saying Bridget dove through the screen of an open window in what the article called a “hippie pad.” A photo captured the aftermath: Bridget sprawled on the sidewalk with a fireman and a passerby cradling her head, a towel over her skull. The caption said police arrested five youths in “hippie garb” and a sixteen-year-old-girl. “Miss Gwin was taken to Henrotin hospital unconscious.” A second photo showed some young men being led handcuffed into a police station. They wore long bangs and long faces. One man’s jeans bore stitching in the shape of a heart and other symbols.3

A Chicago Tribune article on July 24 reported that Bridget never regained consciousness and died two days after her drop from a second-floor flat at 1520 North Wells Street, above the Midas Touch café. The report stated that six people arrested on narcotics charges gave the apartment as their address and that police were looking into whether Bridget was under the influence of drugs when she jumped.4 It was a tumultuous time. A nearby article in the Tribune discussed student uprisings at campuses across the country. Another focused on the death of eighteen-year-old Private Raymond C. Hanik of Chicago, who was killed in Vietnam.

Witnesses at the apartment said that Bridget had taken acid that day, and that Lucy had previously brought LSD to the apartment.5 Bridget’s head had swollen “as big as a watermelon,” Lucy wrote later. Although it isn’t clear what caused Bridget to jump, Lucy Gwin, in her journal, remarked that suicidal tendencies ran in the family.6

Marc Thorman saw it all. He had been staying at the apartment for a month with fellow jazz musicians from Indiana University—the young men arrested after Bridget’s leap. His band had been living in the apartment while they tried to make a start in the music business.7 They were talented, but the band just wasn’t succeeding. Their apartment was above a small nightclub, he recalled. Every evening they could hear the same bad vocalist singing the same song, “Going Out of My Head.” The place was across Wells Street from a famous jazz club, the Plugged Nickel, and well-known musicians would stop in at the apartment to hang out or jam.

Thorman and Bridget were “soul mates,” he said. They had met as teens in Indianapolis. Bridget and Lucy had come to visit him and had been crashing at the flat. He said he was tripping the day Bridget jumped. He remembered being on the floor with Bridget when she rose, ran, and burst through a screened window. Lucy, who wasn’t at the apartment at the time, was with Bridget at the hospital when she died, Thorman recalled. After he was released from Cook County Jail, he found out about Bridget’s death and met up with Lucy.

“I remember her having a tremendous amount of guilt,” Thorman said. “Bridget had gone to Chicago with the purpose of hooking up with Lucy to begin a new phase and Lucy was dragging her feet.” Bridget had extraordinary artistic talent, said Thorman, an accomplished pianist and composer who went on to become a college music professor. “It was such a loss.” Fred Spears, who became a lifelong friend of Gwin’s, traveled from Florida to Chicago to offer help. He learned that it was likely Lucy who had supplied the acid Bridget took. After her sister’s death, she fell into a deep despair.8

The young men were hauled away to the lockup by the Chicago police on suspicion of possessing drugs after the cops burst into the apartment and found narcotics. Fifty-one years after their release from jail, some of these men still choked up talking about that summer. Not long afterward, the drummer, Eric Long, who was in the house when Bridget jumped, committed suicide himself following a few failed attempts, trumpeter Randy Sandke said.9

Others did go on to become professional musicians. Another became a trial lawyer in New York. Some needed therapy and some got it. They had gone to Chicago excited about the possibilities of turning professional. After the incident, they disbanded and went back to their homes, downcast and shaken. They are reluctant to talk about what happened to them during the few days they waited in jail until the charges were dropped, But according to Sandke, who was not jailed, Long was gang-raped there. Lucy Gwin, Sandke said, is part of a difficult chapter in the lives of these men. “Police determined that the drugs were hers and decided not to prosecute,” according to Sandke. In the days before her death, Bridget had seemed withdrawn, while Lucy had been intimidating, somewhat angry. The sisters’ plans to join a commune out West, he recalled, had fallen through.

After Bridget died, Gwin fled Chicago for a farm in Bloomington, Indiana. Those who remember her during that time say she would flop onto the floor and not get up for long spells. “I was frozen in the memory of that horror, frozen in my blame of myself for the loss of someone worth saving,” Gwin would write in 1994.1 Among Gwin’s new friends during that period was Ernie Paul Walker, a photographer with a store in Bloomington called the Blow Up Shop. Walker helped Gwin cope with her pain and became romantically involved with her. He would become another in a line of male friends and lovers who stayed connected to her, but no one else was quite like him.

Walker’s best friend was Fred Spears, Bridget’s former boyfriend. It was Walker who had called Spears after reading the news about Bridget’s “plunge.” Spears met Chris Pulleyn at Gwin’s farm and became her boyfriend, and eventually her husband. They hung out in pastoral Indiana. Gwin liked to have a weekend getaway during her Chicago years, and now she needed a place where she could deal with her grief and heal.

When he became involved with Gwin, Walker had a young son and was in a relationship with a woman he called his wife, though they never married. He was a bigger-than-life personality who moved from job to job. He worked for the post office and collected garbage. During his postal service work in Bloomington, he took the risk of opening mail from the FBI addressed to students at nearby Indiana University. As a result, he was able to alert student activists about paid campus informants infiltrating antiwar groups.2 He often relocated and sometimes lived in his car. His son Peter Walker became a dear friend of Gwin’s and a childhood pal of her daughter Tracy when she lived with her mother for a time.

When Gwin was distraught in 1968, Ernie Walker shared his philosophy of life and said something that resonated with her: “Resurrection is a sense of direction.”3 He made a lasting impression, and Gwin trusted him to photograph her grieving. A picture he took at the time shows her curled on a bench in fetal position. The photo is from a series Walker shot at the University of Indiana library. The twenty-five-year-old Gwin seems to be gasping for breath, or releasing a sigh.

Another series of photos from this time suggests that Walker’s penchant for photography rubbed off on Gwin. She snapped a few selfies. They caught the pensive woman standing before a mirror, a camera in her hand, staring at her reflection.

Thirty-six years later, after Ernie Walker died in 2004, Gwin wrote a letter to his son to console him. Peter Walker, an environmental studies professor, considers it one of the most meaningful letters he has ever received. She recalled her last conversation with Ernie, a few days before he died. She wrote how he framed his philosophy on death as “just an idea.”4

“When people die, I told him, they are gone,” wrote Gwin. “We are left without them. Occasionally, I talk to Bridget, my departed sister, in an attempt to say what I did not have a chance to say before she died. She doesn’t answer. I am not consoled. Death, then, is her very real absence, not ‘just an idea.’” Ernie, she said, then told her something she craved hearing about her sister’s suicide: “That’s the worst thing, what happened to you, that has happened to anyone I’ve ever known.” He went on, “What I meant by death being an idea is that you [all of us] are a process, not a stasis.” She wrote that down.

Ernie told her that not wanting to die was the same as wanting to no longer live, and that if one cannot live, one should die “right,” which meant holding onto your perspective to the end.

In her letter to the grieving son, she described how her old friend uttered his thoughts slowly, as if he were stoned—like in the sixties, when they “tromped around the quarries of Bloomington, witness to the quickness of sulphur [sic]-colored butterflies as they danced in sunlit arches over a luxury of Queen Anne’s Lace.”

Those days in Bloomington with Ernie Walker in 1968 had repaired something in Gwin. Soon she went back to Chicago and joined another ad firm, no doubt helped by Neil Vanover, the creative director whose bond with Gwin also lasted for decades. She concluded that she was a “calamity survivor,” she wrote about her rebound.5 She would become a vice president and a creative supervisor at this second firm, Tatham-Laird & Kudner. “Everybody thought a lot of her,” said Rick Rogers, an art director at the firm. “She was a genius.”6

Vanover and Gwin fed off each other. He was a major figure in the business and was known as the voice of “Ike,” of Purina’s Lucky Dog dog food commercials and of the bacon-craving canine in the Beggin’ Strips ads. Vanover used Gwin to develop campaigns for the more buttoned-up clients, like Procter & Gamble. Vanover’s son Charles relished visiting the office and watching Gwin mentally joust with his father. She was so unlike the other women. She wore white overalls to work. Jokes and ideas burst from her.

The Procter & Gamble ad buyers, boring people, would rate the effectiveness of ads by surveying housewives the morning after the debut of a TV spot, Charles said. One of Gwin’s P&G ads received outstanding feedback, a Mr. Clean commercial that drew on her insights from years of keeping house. Two of three women contacted remembered the ad, which opened with “Gee, Mom, look at the dirt under the refrigerator!”7

“Lucy told that to me twice, so this is her proudest moment in advertising,” recalled Charles Vanover. “One of the many reasons she had to leave.” She told Charles that the business had become a soul-sapping absurdity. She kept in touch with him for years, and after Charles graduated from college, he visited her for a week in Rochester while trying to find his bearings. He was forlorn, struggling with career direction. Gwin had recently started Mouth and was revved up to expose health providers she thought were stealing patients’ money, Charles recalled.

She helped him pick himself up. She confided that she had fallen into despair herself in the 1960s and figured a way out. “She had done so many drugs, like I had done so many drugs,” he said. “She talked a lot about how she had to reprogram herself. Those talks were very valuable to me.”

Charles Vanover became a substitute teacher, then a full-time Chicago public school educator, and eventually a tenured professor of educational leadership in Florida. “She was decent to me, and that basic decency to me was so important.”

After her hiatus in Indiana and return to the Windy City, Gwin started hanging out with an artsy group of bohemian types. Mike London, a theater major who had dropped out of the University of Illinois at Chicago, was three years younger than Gwin. They became a couple and moved into an apartment house, sharing it with Mike’s brother Lee London and his girlfriend Sue Dawson. During this period Gwin also got a chance to reunite with her daughters for a spell. Mike London, Gwin, and her two girls lived on the upper floors. It was the closest thing to stability Lucy Gwin had experienced in years. Still known as Lucy Douglas, Gwin told friends that she had fled a past of ironing white shirts for a used car salesman. “That was not what she wanted in life,” said Lee London.1 Like Ernie Walker, Mike London was funny, smart, and engaging. He adored Gwin. They purchased a one-hundred-plus-acre farm near Dodgeville, Wisconsin. Rick Rogers, Gwin’s advertising buddy, bought adjoining acreage. On weekends they camped with other hippies seeking fresh air and the bucolic life on the land. Gwin and London loved birds and bought two crow chicks from David McKelvey, who worked in a Chicago shop. He would later become an author and naturalist appearing on late-night TV shows, including Jay Leno’s.2

Rogers had a crow named Rudy. Gwin named her birds Ro and Rock, thinking the pets might be able to mimic those names with their calls. The crows had free rein in her apartment, and because they ate carrion, the place smelled like rotting meat. The birds would make the trip to the country, riding in Gwin’s red Volvo. When an owl at the farm killed Rock, Gwin accused London of not doing an adequate job protecting the black bird. It was the one time Rogers saw Gwin mad. “She really went off on Mike,” he recalled.

London was handy, loved hardware stores, and made many repairs at the farm. He built a window box and erected it outside Verna Gwin’s second-floor apartment in Indianapolis so she could watch birds feeding.3 Despite their closeness, Gwin broke off their five-year relationship after Mike—who died in 2017—asked her to marry him, said Lee London. Sixteen years later, as Gwin was recovering from her accident, she wrote to another boyfriend about Mike, saying he had given her “the best marriage I ever had except we never got married.”4

Instead, around the time she turned thirty, Gwin decided she needed a change. She quit the advertising business, pledging never to go back to it, and relocated from Chicago to Rochester to become a student of Zen master Roshi Philip Kapleau.5 Before she left for New York, she gave Rogers the crow named Ro and said her wish had always been to release her birds into the wild. A male crow showed up at the Wisconsin farm, and Ro took a liking to it. The pair flew away, Rogers said, and never returned.

Gwin flitted into an affair with writer Michael Disend. He left Chicago to study Zen in Rochester, and she moved to be with him, Disend said, but he broke off the relationship.6

Friends, including Chris Pulleyn, had already moved to the city on Lake Ontario to study with Roshi Kapleau. It was Pulleyn’s then husband, Fred Spears, who had become a Zen enthusiast and had inspired his wife and friends to go to Rochester to study the spiritual discipline. Gwin and others from her group would follow, including Joe Maurer and Ernie Walker, the Londons, and Sue Dawson. The group became a fellowship of friends and lovers, “a lost tribe,” sometimes with Gwin as the chief.1 Over time, many of them would swap partners and enter and leave relationships among the tribe.

A head-spinning scene once played out at a Rochester maternity ward. Chris Pulleyn had married Fred Spears, Bridget Gwin’s former boyfriend. Spears and Lucy Gwin had bonded after Bridget’s death and became almost like siblings. Then Pulleyn struck up a relationship with Ernie Walker, Lucy Gwin’s onetime boyfriend and Spears’s best friend, and became pregnant by him. In Rochester, she fell in love with a Zen enthusiast, John Pulleyn, who became a partner with Joe Maurer, Lucy’s pal from the Decatur bar, in a painting and wallpapering business. Chris, who was divorcing Spears, later married John Pulleyn. When she delivered her son, the hospital staff was confused when all the men in her life showed up claiming to be her husband or the baby’s father. Spears, Walker, and John Pulleyn were also joined by a fourth man, the birth coach.

Chris Pulleyn, who is still married to John, reflected in 2019 on her years knowing Lucy Gwin, from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. Pulleyn continued to practice Zen Buddhism and became a licensed marriage and family therapist. She came to believe that her former Chicago roommate had “a borderline personality disorder” because Gwin exhibited fight-or-flight tendencies and was often on high alert.2 According to Tracy Hanes, her mother quit Chicago because she had become bored with the advertising business and the slow times between new account assignments. Gwin eventually grew bored in Rochester, too, Hanes said.3 But first she showed off some entrepreneurial aptitude.

On the outskirts of downtown Rochester, Gwin opened Hoosier Bill’s Homestyle Kitchen. The registration for the restaurant was filed with the Monroe County on January 1, 1973, under the name Lucy Douglas. With the flair of a pop artist and the budget of a Salvation Army officer, she set out to decorate and promote the eatery. It opened later that year with mismatched furnishings painted the same shade of yellow, animal knickknacks on the windowsills, and red gingham countertops. Farm art hung on the walls.

The space was cozy—just big enough for a few tables and a tiny kitchen. It was situated on Monroe Avenue, a major city thoroughfare, in a storefront in a row of old buildings not far from Gwin’s apartment. She distributed flyers on colored paper with a sketch that marketed the place as hog heaven: they showed a pig with a halo flying in the clouds and the motto “If you can eat better at home . . . I’ll meet you there for dinner.”4

Although friends said she detested Indiana because of its conservative small-town attitudes, the big picture window of the restaurant displayed a tracing of the outline of the Hoosier State. The restaurant’s name was painted diagonally in old-fashioned script through the tracing along with the slogan “Pretty cheap, awful good!” Specials of the day along with prices were posted on construction paper in the other windows. A banner over the door spelled out “HOWDY!” in giant letters. “It seemed to be funded on two cents,” said Marjorie Lake, a sous-chef at the restaurant.5

Gwin served excellent meals in a homey, informal atmosphere. Customers could enter the tight triangle of a kitchen and order the special or choose selections from a steam table. Many of Gwin’s friends and several boyfriends worked at the place. Some of the cooks had trained at the Culinary Institute of America and offered treats such as shrimp purloo or homemade clam chowder.

A November 1973 Rochester Democrat and Chronicle article showed a picture of “Hoosier Bill” Thompson, briefly a partner in the enterprise.6 William M. Thompson, a native of Wabash, Indiana, had been drawn to Rochester around 1973 by the Zen center and started hanging out in Gwin’s circle. He was known to greet people with a “howdy.” He claimed to be the personality behind the restaurant and Gwin, six years older, was the brains. “Lucy was one smart cookie,” said Thompson.7 He loaned Gwin half his $2,000 in savings to get started. She borrowed other funds from some men from the neighborhood. These lenders drove a big black car, Thompson recalled, and required Gwin to install one of their cigarette machines. Gwin put it in the cellar near the restroom. Later they persuaded her to add a jukebox. Thompson returned to Indiana in 1974 when the Rochester construction job he was working ended. He became a track maintenance worker with the Norfolk Southern Railway. After a couple of years, Gwin sent him $1,000.

His favorite memories of the time involved sharing a flat with three other men near the apartment house where Lee and Mike London lived. His roommates included Spears and Maurer, and a male dog named Rochester, which loosely belonged to Ernie Walker and his son Peter. The sheltie mix was resourceful and brought home much bigger female dogs, such as a Doberman pinscher. Lee London recalled that Lucy Gwin acquired a puppy from a litter sired by Rochester. She named it Who Puppy, or Who for short. Gwin let that dog roam, resulting in run-ins with the local animal control officer. When Gwin was out of town one day, the officer impounded Who and put it down. Gwin was incensed.8

Gwin was tough to work for, Marjorie Lake recalled—sometimes sweet and helpful and a moment later a thunderclap of fury. She was a “difficult” person, Lake said, and had self-control problems. But the restaurant was “one of a kind.” It seated about thirty and was a regular stop for the Zen students who were in Gwin’s Rochester network as well as visiting friends from the Chicago advertising world. Lake credited Gwin with pushing her to take the initiative of calling up a fellow she liked—Joe Lake. She married Joe, they had six kids, and remained together.

“Relentless” was how cook Susan Plunkett recalled Lucy Douglas, as Gwin was known at the time.9 Plunkett respected and admired her boss’s pioneering spirit and was thankful to get her first cooking job at Hoosier Bill’s. Plunkett later opened her own Rochester eateries, including the nightclub and restaurant Jazzberry’s. “I learned that it was a tough business and you have to learn how to control yourself,” Plunkett said. “If you look at Lucy’s history, Lucy was an adventurous person who tried a lot of things whether she had any experience or not.”

And she had a temper. Gwin once struck waitress Nancy Fairless with a stick on the back of the knees, Fairless recalled. She described her former boss as brilliant, with a “simmering creative streak that would erupt.”10 Fairless, who later married Gwin’s friend David Scates, became a girlfriend of Gwin’s ex-lover Ernie Walker. Although “Lucy was very good at getting people estranged from her,” Fairless stayed friendly with Gwin’s older daughter, Tracy, who sometimes worked at the restaurant. Fairless eventually moved to Florida with Ernie Walker and took Rochester the dog with them.

Fairless played a part in a violent incident between Tracy and her mother. Gwin had refused to let the teen get her ears pierced. The girl went around Gwin and got Fairless to sign the authorization. When Gwin saw the piercings, she punched Tracy. “I shouldn’t have done that,” Hanes said, “but I don’t think it also warrants getting hit in the face in a restaurant in front of people we both worked with.”11

Her mother struck her one other time. Tracy had gone with friends to a roller-skating rink but had not set up a ride home. After Gwin got the call and went to pick her up, she started hitting the girl, Hanes said. She got the feeling her mother didn’t want her around. Hanes remembered finding jobs to do at the restaurant, but Gwin would butt in as if to discourage her. “She’d fill the job I was doing,” Hanes said. For example, Gwin disliked cooking but took over as an assistant chef after the teen began doing that work. “So I got a job at a grocery store,” said Hanes.

Gwin was caught in another complicated relationship at the time. While Tracy was living with her mother and Joel Frank, Gwin’s boyfriend, she would hear them fighting through the walls.

Next door to Hoosier Bill’s, Gwin helped Joel set up another original store, the Tin Rhino. It sold unusual gifts, like glow-in-the-dark rocks, items one could buy for a few dollars, and well-made household goods such as Dutch ovens and Amish silverware. A flyer, sounding like Gwin’s voice, promoted the place. It announced its “very grand opening” and came with handwritten ads and sketches of its “misbehaving merchandise”: a $9 Polish birdhouse, a $1.10 banana harmonica, a $6.50 piano in a sardine can. The flyer touted the store’s “cantankerous parrot” and outdoor sign that belched smoke.1

Joel Frank was an artist, a highly ranked bridge player, and a talented bluegrass banjo player, but he was not known as a businessman. He also suffered from bipolar disorder and didn’t always take his medications.2 He was married with a child when he arrived in Rochester in the 1970s. He was drawn by the photography program at the university and by the Zen Center, where he was one of a small group from Ohio’s Oberlin College, including Chris Pulleyn. Now deceased, Frank lived with Gwin and Tracy for several months in the mid-1970s.

“Some people thought Joel was a certified nut case, but I’ll tell you what, that guy made some sense sometimes,” said Bill Thompson. Frank once told him, “It’s hard to remember the future.”3 Frank had severe mood swings, and he and Gwin often quarreled. Friends recall Gwin sticking him with a fork during one argument. The fork incident made some question Gwin’s mental stability. Mark Seganish, a Zen Center participant and friend of Frank’s, said he witnessed the stabbing and Gwin seemed to be the aggressor. Seganish said the couple were arguing during breakfast and Gwin jabbed at Frank’s arm, breaking the skin. Someone called the police. When the cops arrived, Gwin switched from a raging screamer into the picture of calm, blaming Frank for the disturbance. “That’s what was scary to me, how she could turn it on and off,” Seganish said. After the police left, he and Frank walked away down the sidewalk between snow banks. When they heard a car engine roar, they turned around to see Gwin in her red Volvo chasing after them. They had to jump out of the way, said Seganish. He believed that Gwin picked fights with Frank as some sort of psychological manipulation of a weaker man. “Joel was very vulnerable,” Seganish said. “He needed a mother and Lucy wasn’t that person.”4

Gwin and Frank broke up. Then in 1978, Hoosier Bill’s collapsed just short of bankruptcy after a five-year run. The restaurant, Seganish said, was doing well until a city sidewalk project reduced foot traffic from downtown. The Tin Rhino had closed earlier. According to Seganish, both businesses demonstrated Gwin’s special vision. A carpenters’ union flooring specialist, Seganish laid the yellow-and-white tile at Hoosier Bill’s and helped construct the Tin Rhino. The store might have succeeded, Seganish thought, if Gwin had been managing it. Frank was not up to running a business and spent money on himself instead of paying bills.

Twelve years later, Gwin wrote to Frank, who was living in an alternative residential community called Sonoma Grove Trailer Park in California. She told him about all the writing projects she was pursuing, including her new magazine and a memoir about her experience of sustaining a head injury in an accident with a “drunk driver.” Her working title was “Bang on the Head.” Gwin sometimes attributed her accident to an intoxicated motorist, although there is no evidence regarding a drunk driver in legal or insurance documents, and the Rochester Police Department has no record of charging anyone with drunken driving in connection with her accident. In her 1990 letter, she seemed to miss Frank. She brought him up to date on some of their old friends from Rochester, including Chris Pulleyn, who she said had opened up an ad agency in Rochester that had blossomed. Gwin said she herself was done with advertising: “Telling lies for a living sucks the big one.” She noted that she was a grandmother at age forty-seven but had seen only one of her two grandchildren, and only once. She revealed that few members of the old gang were still practicing Zen. She lamented that she was the only one still toking up—the sole post-hippie hippie. “What happened to hippiness?” she wondered. “What happened to good dope shared among friends with visions of a beautiful tomorrow?”5

When she was running Hoosier Bill’s, Gwin had written poems to and about Joel Frank. The poetry was a mix of tenderness and torment. In one poem she wrote of hearing “rivers of explanations justifications more than anything self hate” and that “in calm compassion,” they could work things out. “You Joel, and I Lucy are on opposite sides. There is too much to say in our favor. Different yes rock and water but good stuff in a steady stream.”6

In the early 1970s she had tried practicing Zen, and did some deep, daylong meditations—sesshin—at a retreat at Princeton University in New Jersey. Led by a Japanese master from California, the sesshin involved sitting still and being quiet, with the object of exposing one’s demons, said Fred Spears.7 Instead, Gwin’s mind drifted to food, pinball, smoking dope, making curtains, going to the laundromat, she wrote in a journal. She was astounded when the master asked the assemblage, “How do you realize God when driving your car?”8

Gwin did not fully embrace Zen like some of her friends. She tried other things, including Rolfing, a form of physical or mental therapy that involves a type of intense, sometimes painful massage. She and Joe Maurer drove to Toronto so Gwin could try a session. Each session was divided into multiple parts, and the program typically required ten meetings. At her first meeting Maurer waited outside while Gwin went into a private room. The Rolfing had just begun when Maurer could not believe his ears. “I’m hearing some horrible, horrible sounds—hysteria and pain and agony,” he recalled. “She couldn’t even go through the first baby steps of the thing.” Gwin walked out and never returned.9

Maurer had trauma of his own to deal with—he himself had been in a serious car accident a few years earlier—and he returned to Toronto several times. He completed a dozen sessions, finding Rolfing emotionally and physically rewarding. He credited it with helping him lose weight. But Gwin wanted out after the first fifteen minutes, and her screams alerted him to something about her. “Whatever life handed to her just hurt too much,” Maurer said.

Taking the advice of her friend “Slammin’ Sam” Baxter, Gwin decided to head for the Louisiana coast after shuttering her restaurant in 1978. Baxter had recommended the adventure of finding a cooking job on one of the boats there, and it was a rare case of her following someone’s suggestion.

First, she bid good-bye to her daughter Tracy, who had graduated from a Rochester high school. Tracy had opted to live with her father and her sister Christine and a blended family in Illinois. Her dad came and got her. Gwin’s daughters would not see much of their mother again. She reasoned that the girls preferred living with their father because he offered the stability of a realist. He was a person whose life did not fall apart every few years. Gwin was at a crossroads, she later wrote. “If I was no longer to be a mother, a restaurant owner, a neighborhood somebody, just who was I to be? What was I for?”1

She drove down to Louisiana with her latest boyfriend, a guy she nicknamed Seymour. He was a hard drinker and a painter in Joe Maurer and John Pulleyn’s wallpapering and painting business.2 When she got to Morgan City, Gwin talked her way into a job as a $45-a-day cook on a boat that ferried people and supplies into the Gulf of Mexico, servicing the oil rigs. She planned to adopt the life of a sailor.

For a year Gwin worked the oil rig routes on a variety of boats, first in the kitchen and soon as a deckhand, reporting to a series of captains as a member of crews made up of colorful, uncouth, rugged men. Her experiences became the subject of her 1982 memoir, Going Overboard. It was at this time she dropped Douglas as her last name.

Lucy Gwin’s US Merchant Mariner identification card shows a slender brown-eyed blonde with an ardent stare. She is listed at five feet five inches tall and 140 pounds, a member of the seaman/wiper/steward’s department.3 In her book she described herself in the vivid, direct way she delivered the overall narrative. “I am not pretty, let alone beautiful,” she wrote. “My face is a long flat pan with a prominent chin and an oversized forehead, some cur cross between peasant German and coal-mining Welsh.” She estimated herself as ten to fifteen pounds overweight, and thick-boned. She said she had big feet, an unspectacular nose, and a natural mess of hair that was either yellow or brown, depending on sun exposure. “I do like my hands, which are large and useful, with long and literally sensitive fingers. I have a nice voice sometimes, dark and female. But my few good features will never qualify me for prom queen in this age of anorexia.”4

Yet the men around the oil rigs were attracted to her—those from other ships and sometimes her crewmates. She suffered slights and misogynous jokes. “Never had my nose rubbed so long and hard in the wrongheadedness that constitute male definitions of female,” she wrote to her friend Chris Pulleyn back in Rochester.5 She bedded one of her captains, which turned out to be one of many mistakes she made aboard the three-hundred-ton boats that were her workplace. Some of the men exhibited belligerent, if not sociopathic tendencies. One pushed her overboard in an assault that could have killed her. That experience, and her attempts to outwork crewmates, provided the title of her book. The incident demonstrated her will to live as well. She described fighting to swim back to the boat and scrambling to safety. And she proved she would defend herself: she punched a captain who called her a slut. Not long after, she took a look at herself in a mirror. Typically that would be something she avoided, like being photographed.

She revealed that mirrors scared her. They showed imperfections—a total of thirty-four she counted as an unhappy teen. Her reflection had once spooked her when she was on acid in 1967 and saw her face melting in the glass of a medicine cabinet. On the boat that night, she saw herself staring back and noted she had become slimmer, firmer. “But the mirror woman’s black eyes, volcano eyes, warned me off.”6

The second chapter of the 288-page memoir set the tone for her account of months at sea among people she initially got along with, but with whom things did not end well. She wrote about the horror of Halloween night in 1978. It was about a week before she started working on the boats. That night Seymour came home drunk and angry, complaining that she was leaving to live a mariner’s life with a bunch of men.

Gwin and Seymour became lovers around 1976 in Rochester. They had break-ups and rows but found enough in common, particularly pot and sex, to extend their relationship. In January 1976 they were having difficulties when he was jailed and needed bond money. She penned a long letter that was expository and desperate. She referred to her Buddhist vows to liberate and to uproot and to see inside oneself. She wrote of the rounds of pain one passes through before reaching the entrance of “harborings.”7

She laid out secrets she’d been harboring herself. One time in Chicago she had gone to a South Side doctor, who gave her pills to cause an abortion. “I was the mother of two children I already didn’t want—had left,” she wrote. She’d had another abortion in 1975, she revealed. The letter seemed to be written in shifts as she got drunk. She marked the time as two a.m. when she unveiled another secret: “I always have awful fights. Nobody wants me. I don’t blame them. I’m not surprised you joined the ranks of the formers. I’ve been unbearable to all men all my life.” She told him she’d loved him but questioned what love was other than an “enormous need.” She wanted Seymour to know her past so that it would be easier for them to part. “I want to kill myself, quit,” she concluded, before a P.S. in which she brought up a night when he’d hit her repeatedly. “Do humans forgive? Does God?”

Almost three years later, as she disclosed in her book, Seymour grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out of bed in the house they shared in Louisiana. He forced her to the kitchen floor and sexually assaulted her using two knives, one at her throat and one inside her. “The rape lasted just a little while,” she wrote. “I don’t know how long. Just the barest little slice of my life, maybe not even as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette, or pick out a magazine at a newsstand.”8

Gwin delivered an engrossing narrative in her memoir, but she may have boasted and embellished here and there. For instance, her former restaurant’s home-style meals became “gourmet.” Her position in Chicago became “advertising executive.” She described herself as a vice president with an expense account, able to take two-hour lunches and enjoy “profit sharing, stock, the works.”1 She may have gotten facts wrong. Tracy Hanes said her father had not flown in on a private plane to get her in Rochester, as Gwin wrote. He had gathered his Illinois family in a car and driven to New York to attend her graduation. When she told Gwin that she was thinking about rejoining her dad to attend college, Gwin got upset. “She asked me to leave,” said Hanes.2

Though Gwin worked harder and longer—she called herself “Super Woman”—than most of the deckhands on her crews, she found herself blackballed from the boats, unable to get a post. Her adventure at sea turned into a struggle to find someone to trust. Even a father figure, one of her captains who had mentored her, emerged as a duplicitous character. But the experiences gave her material for her book, which sold in the nonfiction and feminist categories. It also drove her to discover the value of the legal system. She wrote about going into the stacks at a public library to study the Civil Rights Act. She determined that she had grounds to sue for sex discrimination. She contacted numerous Louisiana lawyers. None would take her complaint because they had conflicts of interest or preferred to handle other areas of the law. She wrote letters to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the American Civil Liberties Union, the civil rights department of the Maritime Bureau.3

Finally she found someone to take her suit. In the three-paragraph “Acknowledgment” that concluded her book, she thanked lawyers and Bayou Lafourche Legal Services, Inc., for the memoir’s being subsidized “unwillingly” by the boat company’s settlement with her. She also thanked David Lewandowski, a former Hoosier Bill’s chef who came down to live with her when she was writing the manuscript, and Sue Dawson and Verna Gwin for saving the letters from which the first draft of the book was created.4

Dawson, Lee London’s former girlfriend, remembered receiving the letters and returning them to Gwin for the project. She said that at first Gwin’s missives were bursting with excitement at the discoveries she was making on her voyages. Dawson remembered the letter about Gwin’s rape, too. She’d go into detail about things she loved doing—such as getting the chance to pilot the boats. Dawson said Gwin had a habit of getting exhilarated over something and sharing her findings, for instance, when she first heard Elvis Costello’s songs and urged friends to buy his recordings. With her passion, Gwin could have made millions of dollars if she had stayed in advertising, Dawson said, but that wasn’t for her. She dared to take risks, like entering the male-dominated field of offshore drilling. “She was an outsider,” Dawson said. “That’s an interesting thing right there: Why would someone choose to be an outsider?”5

Gwin claimed she typed out her memoir while stoned. “I laughed LOTS while I was writing it,” she wrote to a friend, Mary Johnson, in 2000. “They could hear me laughing up and down the bayou.” Pecking night and day, she finished a first draft in three weeks, barely stopping to eat, bathe, or spend time with her boyfriend, David Lewandowski. “My sweetie would come home from work at the Avondale Shipyard, lead me into the bathtub and wash me while I read out loud what I’d written that day. Cuz I wrote until the stink literally poured off me. (Do you stink when you really write? Boy, I do. I’m stinking right now for that matter.) Then he’d feed me but had to do it by hand, one bite of beans and rice at a time, cuz I was back at the typewriter.”6

The publishing world recognized the strength of her words and the value of her story as the “onliest little woman in the offshore oilfields.’’ Viking Press gave her a contract and recommended changing the title from Unwelcome Aboard. Going Overboard hit bookstores in 1982 and received some favorable reviews.7

Her agent, Rhoda Schlamm, said Gwin stood out among her clients. She liked Gwin and thought her book was a tightly written “page turner.”8 Gwin visited her in Manhattan and was unforgettable. “Very strong personality, witty, acerbic, fine sense of injustice,” Schlamm recalled. Viking Press editor Barbara Burn Dolensek said that Gwin was unlike any of the other writers she encountered during her long career. “I just remember thinking she was the most amazing woman I ever met,” Dolensek said. “She was tough and, at the same time, nice and able to overcome some horrible things. I remember being terribly impressed and [thinking] that I wish I was like that.”9

Viking received Gwin’s 75,000-word manuscript in February 1980 and in April responded that the story was gripping but needed something else: “We want to know more about you, Lucy . . . Your feistiness, your anger, and your determination are there but we want to see the other side.” Dolensek said it seemed Gwin was hiding parts of herself and she had to stop doing that.10

In November, Dolensek wrote a three-page single-spaced response to a new draft. “This is a book,” she wrote. “You’ve gotten the perspective while keeping the anger and the joy and I’m very glad about that.” She urged Gwin to attempt another draft to make her characters more vivid, insert more background about herself, and reduce the Cajun dialect. The toughest editing demand came on the last page, a directive for more “dramatic tension.”11

“The book sags in the middle,” the editor wrote. There were too many examples of rejection and masculine offenses. She directed Gwin to cut at least fifty pages to make sure readers didn’t side with the captains who repressed Gwin “because you were so desperate and persistent.” Gwin put the book in shape as directed. The book did all right. Viking issued Gwin a royalty statement for the six months ending October 31, 1982. It showed sales of 2,211 hardcovers, good for $3,503.42 in royalties. She had received a $7,500 advance.12

In the Los Angeles Times, reviewer Carolyn See praised the book and addressed Gwin directly: “You sneered at them, Lucy, even as you recorded their language and their personalities with a genius-ear . . . It doesn’t matter, you got a good book out of it.” See opined that the memoirist had a “better career than deckhand waiting for her.”13

The book ushered in Gwin as a woman of letters. She purchased high-quality off-white stationery with her name and address printed in the upper-left corner in boldface: “Lucy Gwin, Writer.” Multiple news outlets reviewed the memoir, and the author made appearances on morning network TV shows.1 Gwin told her friend Mary Johnson in 2000 that the interview she couldn’t forget was the one in which Jane Pauley of the Today Show asked her why she didn’t just quit the boats when she realized she wasn’t wanted. The TV celebrity, Gwin said, didn’t understand destitution. “I was poor,” Gwin wrote in 2000. “Jane hasn’t had poverty. How could I explain that to her? . . . I didn’t have a toehold on earth. I had to make good at something. Do you know what it takes to uproot and plant yourself again, alone and broke?”2

Gwin sat down with reporters to talk about her book. She discussed her background and even posed for photographs. A picture of her in the Rochester Times-Union in 1982 shows Gwin at her writing desk, a standard typewriter behind her and photos on the wall of naked men who appear to have physical deformities. Gwin stares at the camera with a tilted head, her hair pulled back, and her long hands draped over a crossed leg. In the profile, Gwin, age thirty-nine, told the Times-Union that she intended to “make her living by the typewriter.”3 The article said that Gwin sold the option to Going Overboard to “Stan Rogo [sic],” producer of the TV series Fame, for $100,000. Stan Rogow, who went on to make several television shows, most notably Lizzie McGuire and Flight 29 Down, remembered Gwin thirty-eight years after signing the deal to use her memoir for a potential television program. He read the book and was struck by the thought that it would make a good show: “The notion of oil rigs and a woman working there and a woman in a man’s world—I remember that was the appeal,” said Rogow.4 But the project never got off the ground. No script was ever created and the option lapsed, netting Gwin only $5,000 to $10,000 of the potential $100,000 if the show had been made. Rogow had a vague memory of the actor he had in mind to play Gwin: Susan Sarandon.

The Times-Union article detailed Gwin’s early marriage to a shoe salesman and her exit from the ad business, saying she had given up the Procter & Gamble account to pursue Zen in Rochester. The reporter contacted Verna Gwin in Miami, who described her daughter as characteristically courageous and having overcome childhood timidity. “She was always a very inquisitive and bright child. I sort of expected things to happen,” Verna told the newspaper.5

Adweek’s write-up noted Gwin’s work in the 1960s for the Chicago firm Tatham-Laird & Kudner, where she was one of the “creatives.” It reported that Viking hoped to have Gwin’s book made into a TV movie. Gwin was busy writing another book, the article said, about human mating habits in the twentieth century. Adweek also reported that she was cleaning houses three days a week and freelancing to make ends meet.6

Another creative person from the entertainment industry envisioned Going Overboard as a motion picture. Trudy Elins called Gwin in 1990 to inquire about rights to the story. Elins, who was a production assistant for comedian Bill Cosby’s TV show from 1987 to 1992, was thinking about moving into movie production. Elins had met Gwin a decade earlier in her hometown of Rochester. She had read the memoir multiple times and was enthralled by Gwin’s feminist tale of trying to find space in a man’s world. The book also offered amusing pointers such as how a deckhand can lasso a post by mimicking a discus thrower, or how a woman can repel unwanted advances by picking her nose. In Rochester, Gwin had befriended Elins, who was twelve years younger and was searching for job opportunities. Gwin told her stories about Illinois and Louisiana and gave her advice, from career tips to insights Elins still laughed about forty years later: To get out of jury duty, declare you suffer from explosive diarrhea. Gwin urged her to go into ad copywriting, handed her a list of ten agency contacts in Chicago, and instructed her on how to write bold pitch letters. That led to twenty interviews. “If she took an interest in you and thought something would be best for you, you darn well better do it,” Elins said. A Rochester agency hired Elins, and she wrote ad copy there until moving to New York City in 1984. “She helped launch my career,” Elins said of Gwin. When she reconnected with Gwin in 1990, she found out about the car crash and the magazine project. “Drama followed her everywhere,” Elins said.7

One warm day after her return to Rochester from the bayou, Gwin was strolling with a girlfriend in her Park Avenue neighborhood when she saw a man working on a green 1969 Plymouth Satellite. “A 318 V8 automatic,” David Arico recalled. He was fixing his ex-girlfriend’s car as a favor, and she called him later to say a woman had left a note for him on the Plymouth. It included a telephone number. That was how Arico met Gwin. On a dinner date he realized that Gwin, ten years his senior, wasn’t a good match. “It really became very obvious that romance was not an option,” he said. Her energy impressed him, though. The two became friends, and he sometimes did work on her apartment. She lent him a copy of her memoir. He recalled how she’d hang out on her second-floor porch with plants and bamboo curtains. “She had manic drive,” he said. “I can remember she would get this expression: her mouth would get tight and she would bull ahead and push forward.”1

In time he met Gwin’s new boyfriend, a fellow named Foley, a big guy who was a baseball enthusiast. Gwin would quiz Foley from a thick book of baseball trivia. Since he was a good mechanic, Arico was enlisted to accompany Gwin one time when she was scouting a used car, a Mazda. She needed wheels because she had gotten a job in advertising again. He evaluated the car and gave it a thumbs-up, and she bought it.

Through her professional contacts, she made friends with a couple in a printing business who needed a part-time printer. Gwin recommended Arico, and he got the job, in a building that was next door to the Rochester Center for Independent Living. He met a social worker at the center who was helping people with disabilities. They became inseparable. In 2007 she died of a neurological condition, leaving behind Arico and a therapy dog. Arico credited Gwin’s note on his ex-girlfriend’s car with leading him, indirectly, to the love of his life.

Gwin continued writing and research for proposed books, often involving people on the margins. She began a work of fiction based on a nineteenth-century story about a person who had two faces. The envisioned novel, with the working title “Mordrake’s Other,” would be about a man who had a second face at the back of his head—a female “evil twin.” In her sketch of the story, Gwin wanted Mordrake to differ from the Elephant Man, whose afflictions were physical or medical. Mordrake suffered from a social affliction, an “open battlefield of the self.”2 Gwin, sometimes so up, sometimes so down, may have related to the dual personalities. Was the concept autobiographical, an indication of self-awareness, or another example of a curious, creative mind?

She drafted other characters for the novel. One was a mother, age sixty-six (Verna was sixty-nine at the time), who was distant, intelligent, and focused on trivial matters—ignorant of the “raw and the genuine.” Another character, Mordrake’s father, would be “shamed, heroizing, furious, seeking some impossible blessing.” The hero, Edward Mordrake, would kill himself at age twenty-three by slashing his own throat. Edward’s death would also still the feminine voice from the other side of his head.3

In 1980 Gwin set about writing a nonfiction book she intended to call “Women Without Men.” A manuscript of early chapters featured two women who had broken away from relationships and were experiencing independence. A third was a lesbian, and that section was excerpted in a feminist newspaper based a few blocks from Gwin’s apartment in Rochester. Touting itself as a publication from Susan B. Anthony’s hometown, New Women’s Times published Gwin’s article, “Karen: I’m Lucky. I’m a Born Dyke.” In it, Gwin noted that she was working on a book about “socially stigmatized women (the ‘ugly’ or the ‘crippled’ for instance).”4 In her book manuscript, Gwin revealed that in 1980 she decided to live without a man. “I have spent twenty-five of my thirty-seven years flinching from it, fighting it off,” she wrote, but found man-less life unusually peaceful, spacious, free of personal problems. She called herself “a crusading separatist.”5

Gwin also wrote an essay called “The Marriage Conspiracy” and gave speeches promoting the theme of independent women. The Women’s Studies Department at the University of South Carolina, billing Gwin as the author of Going Overboard, promoted her address on campus in March 1985 with a publicity photo. The notice shows Gwin looking away from the camera, her head cocked, holding a cigarette in her right hand.6 “For many women, being without a man is an almost ultimate horror, right up there with terminal cancer,” Gwin stated in her essay. Modern society, she argued, judged women who were without men, and women should be angry when they sensed the question “If you’re so terrific, how come you’re not married?”7

Her treatise, developed during the 1980s, was presented after Gwin had gone through two divorces and married again, in 1983. This third marriage, to John F. Foley, a year younger than Gwin, came with little fanfare.8 Foley, a United Auto Workers employee and union activist, as well as a heavy drinker, had been on the periphery of the extended “tribe” of Gwin’s friends.9 Foley’s father ran the Top of the Plaza, a revolving restaurant that was once a premier jazz venue in Rochester.

They would not live together long, splitting up within a year. Citing “unhappy and irreconcilable differences,” Gwin and Foley drafted a separation agreement that spelled out that they would live apart as if unmarried but with the potential for reconciliation.10 The official separation declaration was not filed with the Monroe County clerk until September 2009.11

In June 1983, two months after Gwin’s wedding, Verna sounded effusive. “She’s so happy,” she wrote to a friend. “I’m so thankful that she found somebody she’s really happy and in love with.” She noted that Lucy had acquired her dress at a Goodwill store. Verna said she regretted not attending the ceremony and wished she could have been in Rochester to see the magnolia trees, daffodils, and forsythia in bloom. Verna’s letter featured her hand-drawn envelope art, in the same blue ink as her handwritten note. The drawing was of birds.12

Despite her disdain for the advertising business, Lucy Gwin began soliciting and getting work again with agencies. Letters to various firms during the mid-1980s—in Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse—showed her writing pitches with verve. She began some letters by addressing the president or chairman in a disarming style, affixing a suffix such as “Himself” after the person’s name. She would conclude that she would be following up the letter with a call “(and that’s a threat).”1 She wrote that she had been freelancing for agencies at the time, traveling between Rochester and Chicago, and joked about needing to settle in one place so that her dog remembered her.

In the letters, she stated that she had been representing Needham Harper Worldwide in Chicago on a special squad of freelancers that pursued $226 million in new business and succeeded in netting $93 million of it—contracts with Michelob Light, Kraft (a new product), the Clorox Corporation (new detergents), and Sears (apparel)—with another $75 million expected. To one Rochester agency head she wrote: “I’m tired of living in hotels and shuttling home at $400 a crack. And I’m still determined to live out my days in Rochester. But I’m not looking for a regular job any more. (Why should I wake up in the dark to propel myself to a punitive tax bracket, when, as a freelancer, I can sleep in and deduct everything from paperback novels to nail polish? Eat your hearts out, full-timers.)” She revealed that she had been working with a “small, ambitious Rochester agency” on some projects.2

That small, ambitious firm was SanFilipo Younger Associates. SYA’s clients ranged from local retailers and restaurants to larger corporate customers as well as other ad agencies. Gwin joined as an in-house freelancer but often misrepresented herself as a partner, to the chagrin of Fred SanFilipo and Bruce Younger, who described her as hard-charging—perhaps too hard-charging.

Her aggressive style helped her firm develop a series of in-your-face promotions for a local pizza shop, setting off what became known as the Pizza Wars. She developed an ad that described a local shop, Mr. Shoes, in phallic terms. The ad suggested that consumers “Bite the Large One,” the heavier, bigger slices offered by Mr. Shoes, and eschew the puny pieces sold by a chain restaurant, which was depicted with the Domino’s Pizza, Inc., colors. Another ad beckoned customers with a $2-off discount if they ripped the Domino’s ads from the yellow pages of the phone book and brought them in with their order to Mr. Shoes. Domino’s sent a cease and desist letter.3

Gwin helped make SYA more visible. The agency won an award in 1988 from Art Direction magazine for an article Gwin wrote on the power of brainstorming. Her essay resulted in a story in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle about Sanfilipo Younger’s methods of coming up with ad campaigns.4 Another piece in the newspaper quoted Gwin and the partners and called the team a “creative hit squad.” In the article, Gwin declared that “fear is important.”5

Despite the seeming success of the relationship, the partners were not getting along well with their associate. They valued Gwin as a seasoned veteran and acknowledged that she possessed expertise galore. But they were tiring of her overabundance of opinions. “She thought so much of her ideas she didn’t have any room for seeing other points of view on them,” said Younger. “There were some incidents in client relationships that became untenable, embarrassing, unprofessional.” In one case a computer consultant wanted the firm to create a newsletter. Gwin refused to write the copy, saying that what the client needed were ads to get his brand recognized. She seemed to view accounts from a big-city perspective, according to Younger. Her sights were sometimes set too high for their clients’ budgets.

Gwin nevertheless helped SYA grow and broaden its understanding of the components of an ad campaign. She came up with enterprising schemes. But she would stiffen if someone didn’t see eye to eye with her. “You never knew how she was going to react to something if she thought it was ignorant or stupid,” Younger said.

Although he and Gwin were never close friends, they socialized at group dinners, where they usually talked about marketing stratagems and work. Years later he could still recall the car that she drove around in—a red Celica.

That car often had a bottle of whiskey under the seat, said Emmett Michie, a poet and friend of Gwin’s for fifteen years. She helped him get a job as a novice writer at SanFilipo Younger. He later inherited the job of trying to lure new clients and put together a tape to show off some of Gwin’s ad clips. He used some footage from her Chicago years, including a Virginia Slims cigarette spot and a McDonald’s restaurant ad. She was a mentor, a former lover, and a valued friend, Michie said.6

He met her in January 1984 after responding to a personal ad in City Newspaper, a weekly alternative paper in Rochester. The unnamed woman advertising her “fascinating history” turned out to be Gwin. Fourteen years her junior, Michie fell into a romantic relationship with her. Gwin celebrated her forty-first birthday amid their whirlwind three-day first date. He said he broke off the sexual affair because he wanted her as a friend, and she was a good one.

That worked for years. They had long talks, wrote, and drank together. She revealed that her father was an alcoholic and a promotional whiz, and that she had been a shy, promiscuous girl in high school and felt people looked down on her. They were close, but according to Michie, his alcoholism grew out of control. She urged him to get addiction treatment. He lived with Gwin for periods and saw her change after her accident. When he visited her at the New Medico rehab center, she seemed childish and more impulsive, he said, and she asked him to help her break out. He declined.

When she returned to Rochester, she was more herself, but unable to find words sometimes. He thought she was using her immense intelligence to mask gaps in recall. “You would see there were cracks below the surface,” Michie said. She persuaded a young brain injury patient named Randy to leave New Medico and join her in Rochester, and the three of them lived at her apartment in the spring of 1990. Michie broke his sobriety and Gwin lost her temper when she saw him drinking beer with Randy. “She punched me, split my lip. And then she immediately reverted back like she was eight years old and was terrified of me. She called the police on me, and I’m the one bleeding,” he said. He assumed that in her eyes “I had become her father.” Decades later, after years of recovery, and dealing with his manic depression, he concluded that Gwin was a classic case of “ACOA,” a traumatized adult child of an alcoholic.

In 1990 Gwin took Michie to a demonstration where people in wheelchairs were zipping around buses. They were protesting a transit company’s decision to upgrade its fleet without adding wheelchair-accessible vehicles. It was an affront to those who, like Gwin. had pushed for the Americans with Disabilities Act, he recalled. She talked about how someone else could be the Martin Luther King Jr. of the disability rights movement, but she wanted to be its Malcolm X. “She was on fire about that possibility,” Michie said. He eventually went back to school and became a teacher of children with emotional and behavioral disabilities.

Just as Gwin’s behavior on the job produced perturbed customers and co-workers during the day, her private interactions sometimes left people feeling bruised as well. One time at a party, she put out a lit cigarette on the bosom of Sue Dawson, once a close confidante. Dawson suspected Gwin was retaliating for Dawson’s having had a fling with Gwin’s lover David Lewandowski when she visited them in Louisiana. Lewandowski had been living with Gwin while she was writing her book about working on the boats, but by the time of Dawon’s visit, they looked to be on the verge of breaking up. Dawson had apologized for the affair in a letter, and Gwin had responded. “She wrote me saying, ‘Next time I wouldn’t invite the vultures to my funeral,’” she said. Dawson, a psychotherapist who specializes in working with children with depression and autism, believed she must have crossed a boundary with Gwin and her friend wouldn’t forgive her. Gwin seemed to have tapped into a “demonic side” or a “defense mechanism.”1

Terri Tronstein Jerry, an ad industry collaborator from Syracuse, New York, would socialize with Gwin and another female friend from the advertising business, Susan Jay, now deceased, whom Gwin helped get a job at SanFilipo Younger. They’d argue and laugh and get drunk together. Sometimes Jerry and Gwin would talk about how suicide would be a good alternative to the blues and aging. Jerry and Gwin acquired terrier-poodle-mix puppies from the same litter. Gwin chose an adorable male and named him Digger. She’d talk to the dog like a human, treat him like an adult, and allow him to come and go as he pleased. Jerry remembered Gwin as “always volatile” and “funny” and recalled that she owned a mink coat. They found common ground in disliking Ronald Reagan.2