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By Root 965 0

—if we are to believe her—she lost a coin toss. One of Kermit’s fellow band members had been going steady with a co-ed. Since the band usually traveled with the basketball team, the two couples told their parents they were going to a game in Bowling Green, where several justices of the peace married young couples without checking into their background, making Bowling Green, Ohio, popular among love-struck young people. Unknown to the parents, however, there was no basketball game that night in Bowling Green: Kermit’s friend and his girlfriend were traveling to Ohio to get married. Kermit and Genora came with them to witness the event. Just after this couple exchanged vows, the bride in effect said to seventeen-year-old Genora, “Well, since we’re here, why don’t you and Kermit get hitched?” Genora agreed on a coin toss. She picked heads. It came up tails, which meant she’d marry Kermit. “Boy, I’m telling you,” Genora later said, “I must have had spaghetti for brains.” When the two returned to Flint, Kermit went to his home and Genora to hers. Raymond and Lora wanted to know how the basketball game had gone. She remembered, “I suddenly became physically ill, sick to my stomach.” Genora and Kermit carried on the charade for several weeks. They continued in school just as though nothing had happened. One day at home, Kermit’s mother said something derogatory about the Albro family, and Kermit exclaimed, “You can’t talk like that about my wife.”21 The secret was out.

As could be expected, all hell broke loose in the Albro household. Raymond locked Genora in her room; she climbed out a window and contacted Kermit. Her father wanted to put Kermit in jail for what he considered to be a violation of the Mann Act, a federal law that forbade a man from taking a woman across state lines for sexual purposes. But Genora and Kermit had not yet consummated their marriage. Raymond talked with an attorney, who said he could get the marriage annulled. When Genora heard of this plan, she got word to Kermit that he and she had to get to a hotel right away. “And that’s the first time that I had sex.” Things finally settled down, primarily thanks to Lora, the peacemaker of the family. Raymond resigned himself to having a son-in-law, so much so that he brought the couple to his studio and had a “beautiful” photograph made of them, which he then had printed in the society column of the Flint Journal.22

The pair soon moved to Ypsilanti, where Kermit worked as a general laborer. When Genora became pregnant, they came back to Flint, and both Kermit and Genora returned to high school. He graduated, and Genora stayed for a half-semester of her senior year and then dropped out, largely because of the pregnancy. In later years, Genora expressed pent up bitterness about these turns of events. She had intended to go to the University of Michigan, but her marriage and subsequent pregnancy scotched these plans. Her later statement that she might have gotten an abortion had she known such a thing existed may have been colored by sadness over the loss of her firstborn son, Dennis, who died of multiple sclerosis. Even before Dennis, she lost her younger son, Jarvis, to a motorbike accident. He had been riding the handle bars, with Dennis steering, when they were hit by a speeding taxicab. Maybe her later talk of abortion was a way of coping with these tragedies. She told a friend that the deaths of her two sons was a dark time in her life, and she made every effort to block it out of her mind. Of course, she could not do this, at least not entirely; her lost sons were always with her in her thoughts, showing that one’s personal life is always indelibly intertwined with one’s professional activities.

Kermit Johnson’s father, Carl, originally from South Dakota, had been a “prairie populist” before he found work at the Chevrolet division of GM.23 In time he became an activist in Socialist movements and deemed Flint an excellent location to put his political, economic, and social philosophies into action. Although a longtime member of the American Federation of