sex symbol sensation that he would soon become. After the dance, Joan and George went to a diner for a burger and a Coke, and found themselves sitting at a table next to “Ol’ Blue Eyes.” When Sinatra heard that George was a licensed pilot, he was thrilled and asked if he could “go for a flight.” George said to meet them the next morning (Sunday) at the local air strip. The plane was a small two-seater, so someone would have to sit in someone else’s lap while George piloted. The men naturally thought that Joan would sit in Sinatra’s lap, but Joan, being rather tall, looked at Sinatra, who was 5’7”, and suggested that he sit in her lap. After the men stopped laughing, they realized, problem solved! And that’s how Joan had one of the soon-to-be biggest stars in the history of show business sitting on her lap as they flew through the air. She and Sinatra became lifelong friends after that. George was later killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor, and when Sinatra invited Joan to the recording session for “Come Fly With Me,” he told her he was dedicating it to George. Joan Kemper was born in Chicago. Her mother was a classically trained soprano and her father a railroad executive who often let his young daughter sit in on business meetings and take notes. His reliance on her built a sense of order in Joan, because her father would often ask her to summarize the points of the meeting. Joan’s love of theater started at an early age, as well. In Chicago she studied theater at Northwestern, and worked at the Goodman Theater. She also starred in the radio soap CEREMONY DESCRIPTION
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opera “A Guiding Light,” and taught dance at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. She’s lived in many places throughout her life, including Beverly Hills and Pasadena, California, and she’s owned an 1,800-acre horse ranch in Colorado, all while raising four children. While living in Pasadena she accompanied her son, Bob, to The Ojai, the country’s oldest amateur tennis tournament. Later, Joan chaperoned her daughter, Judith, to a dance at the Thacher School. During those trips she fell in love with “Shangri-La” and in 1986, picked up stakes and moved here, although rather circuitously because of one pesky problem: she had sold her ranch in Colorado before she had secured a place in Ojai. Undaunted, she packed her quarter horses and family, then headed south, stopping only once at the Las Vegas fairgrounds. Through a friend she found a stable for the horses in Santa Paula and a place to live in the Ventura Keys, before finding her beautiful home in Oak View. “I don’t know what I’d do without friends,” she says. Having an extensive background in public relations, working for airlines, hotels and the Cunard Shipping Line (for which she still lends her considerable expertise at her splendid age) gave her a solid background for making her mark in Ojai. “I didn’t know a single soul before I moved here,” she says. That changed by leaps and bounds, and she has since served on the boards of the Ojai Film Society, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, Help of Ojai, the Ojai Museum, the Thacher School, the Ojai Valley Community Hospital, (where she helped form its nonprofit status and developed its annual gala fundraiser) and for the Ojai Land Conservancy, which she also helped create in the mid ‘90s. CEREMONY DESCRIPTION
OM — October 2020
