While living in San Jose, Jeanne met teacher James D. Houston. Born November 10, 1933, in San Francisco, the son of Texas blacksmith and sharecropper Albert Dudley Houston (a distant kin of Texas hero Sam Houston) and Alice Loretta Wilson Houston, James grew up in a fundamentalist southern milieu. He graduated from Lowell High School in San Francisco, earned degrees from San Jose State College and Stanford University, and achieved the rank of lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force.
James courted Jeanne long distance from Hawaii with a valentine and proposal inscribed on a ti leaf, which withered to brown by the time it traversed the ocean in a mail pouch. She responded by flying to Hawaii to marry her Caucasian sweetheart. The flower-decked couple had a romantic barefoot wedding at sunset on Waikiki Beach.
Jeanne lived a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence — sometimes being engagingly subservient like her mother; at other times, being independent like American wives. That fall, James was transferred to an ROTC post in England and Jeanne got her first taste of bone-chilling English winters, living in a ten-room townhouse reminiscent of scenes from Dickens. In 1962, the year after the birth of daughter Corinne, nicknamed Cori, the family was back in the U.S., where James taught English at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California.
In 1967, James published Gig, earning the Joseph Henry Jackson award from the San Francisco Foundation, and accepted the Wallace Stegner creative writing fellowship at Stanford; that same year, Jeanne gave birth to twins, Joshua and Gabrielle. Following the publication of his novel Between Battles, James advanced to the University of California in 1969.
