Utahn's noted for great notes

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Feb 22, 2005 | by Doug Robinson Deseret Morning News

Yet that talent lay dormant for nearly four decades. It took a literal twist of fate (actually, her ankle) -- or divine intervention, she might say -- to turn her from her love of sports to songwriting.

It was a jump shot on the basketball court that marked the end of one thing and the beginning of another.

She was 38 years old and wondering if she should quit playing sports. She was old enough to be the mother of many of her softball teammates, and the injuries were taking their toll.

She had been a sports junkie since she was a tomboy growing up on an Oregon farm. She played backyard football with the boys and served as her brother's catcher when he practiced pitching a baseball.

"She was an athlete," says Lundberg. "She was fabulous. She was the first one chosen for games, even if boys were playing."

There were no school sports for girls at the time, but she made up for lost time after she married. For some 20 years she played church- and city-league volleyball, basketball, fast-pitch softball and coed slow pitch. She was a pitcher in fast-pitch and helped her team reach the state finals.

"In coed softball," says Doug, "she'd strike out fine male athletes."

She played hard and aggressively, and as she grew older she seemed to become more vulnerable to injury. She severely sprained an ankle in a volleyball tournament while attempting a spike. She took a hard line drive to the gut on the pitcher's mound. She suffered lower back spasms after sliding into second base in a regional tournament. She jammed fingers and broke her glasses in other competitions.

While playing a game of H-O-R-S-E one day, she shot a jump shot and landed on her nephew's foot. Her ankle was broken.

It was the best thing that ever happened to her. In the same week, both her ankle and the family TV broke. The ankle was placed in a cast for several weeks. The TV was put away for eight years. They couldn't afford to fix it and, later, when they could, they decided they were better off without it. That left Perry with nothing to do while she was laid up. Her bishop asked her to write music for a church road show.

Perry had grown up in a musical and religious family. Her parents, Jacob and Ruth, played drums and piano, respectively, in the Kapp Orchestra, which performed frequently at church and community dances. Ruth claimed Janice could pick out tunes on the piano when she was 2 years old.

Janice took piano lessons from her mother, played drums in the school band, sang in choirs, played piano for church services and formed a dance band. When a friend wondered aloud how anyone could write a song, Janice wrote one to show it could be done and performed it in church. It was well received, Perry had proven her point, and that was enough as far as she was concerned.

During the first seven years of marriage, the Perrys couldn't afford a piano, and sports took most of Perry's free time. If she wasn't playing ball games, she was watching them, at BYU and later the Jazz. She played the piano at church, but that was all until her bishop asked her to write the road show while her ankle was mending.