Hillsdale — Little ditty about John and Priscilla, two American kids growing up in the heartland.
Rock fans have always known about John Cougar Mellencamp’s first wife, a 21-year-old named Priscilla Esterline who he married as an 18-year-old kid barely out of high school. Priscilla was pregnant with their first child, a little girl named Michelle born six months later.
What’s not commonly known, though, is that Priscilla was a Michigan girl. She grew up in Hillsdale in a house on South Street, right across the street from Hillsdale High School, where she graduated in 1966 as an honor-roll student.
Mellencamp has always been an Indiana boy through and through, but his first wife was pure Michigan. Just two American kids growing up in the heartland.
With a big tour coming up this summer (including stops at Pine Knob in Clarkston and the new Acrisure Arena in Grand Rapids), and with his status as one of the top celebrity superfans of his beloved national-champion Indiana University football team, Mellencamp has been everywhere these days. So it’s a good time for the Michigan “Mellenheads” to know about this cool connection to our state.
Priscilla Esterline grew up in Hillsdale, and when she graduated from the local high school, her dad was transferred to a new job as the plant manager at Sparton Industries in Brownstown, Indiana. Priscilla and her brother moved there with their parents, and a couple years later, she met a high school kid from nearby Seymour named John Mellencamp.
The future rock star fell fast in love with the older girl from Michigan.
“She was three, four years older than me. She had a car and driver’s license, cute girl,” Mellencamp told CMT years later in an interview.
John was just finishing up high school in 1970 when Priscilla got pregnant, and they decided to get married. John was just 18 and Priscilla 21.
“I walked out of high school at 3:30 in the afternoon, got in the car with Priscilla. We drove down to Louisville. We got married and drove home. She went to her parents’ house. I went to my parents’ house. We didn’t tell anybody,” he told VH1 for a “Behind the Music” documentary.
After their daughter Michelle was born the young family settled down in a trailer in Brownstown. He enrolled at Vincennes University in 1972 and finally started to get serious about fulfilling his dream of being a rock star.
He also made numerous trips with Priscilla back to her old hometown in Michigan. People who were around Hillsdale in the early 1970s said he would occasionally play his guitar at a local bar and at some of the houses around Hillsdale College.
He started to hit it big in 1976, and his management company changed his name to “Johnny Cougar” (which he hated). Through the years, he’s performed as John Cougar, Johnny Cougar, John Cougar Mellencamp and just plain old John Mellencamp. He’s back to John Mellencamp now.
In the late 1970s, John and Priscilla started to grow apart, as he was off being a rock star and she was home taking care of Michelle and tending to her own career, working first in a shoe store and later as a real-estate agent. In 1981, after years of separation, John and Priscilla officially called it quits.
“The truth of the matter is that we had long grown apart and were more like brother and sister than husband and wife,” he told CMT. “We had a daughter together and we had business to take care of and that was pretty much the long and short of it. One of the saddest moments of my life was telling Michelle that me and her mom were gonna get a divorce.”
They remained good friends, though, and Priscilla even helped John’s second wife, Victoria Granucci, pick out her wedding dress in 1982. (Mellencamp has been married and divorced three times.)
For her part, Priscilla has always been an intensely private person. She’s never given an interview and has seemingly been content just being a mother and grandmother (Michelle has four kids). There was an Internet rumor a few years ago that she had passed away, but that’s not the case. She’s alive and well and we hear from people in Hillsdale that she’s still very connected to her hometown.
In 1982, the year after they got divorced, Mellencamp released the record that would become the biggest hit ever in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career. “Jack and Diane” told the tale of “two American kids growing up in the heartland,” and it reached the top of the charts that summer.
There’s a case to be made that there might be a Michigan connection to the song.
One of the lines in the song talks about Jack and Diane “sucking on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freeze.” Mellencamp has never said which real-life Tastee Freeze was the inspiration for that lyric, and the Mellenhead detectives have been trying to figure it out for the last 44 years.
It’s interesting to note that back when he wrote that song, there wasn’t a single Tastee Freeze in the entire state of Indiana.
Ah, but there was one back in his wife’s old hometown! The Tastee Freeze was located on Hillsdale Street, where an Edward Jones investment office is located now, and back in the 1970s, it was the hot spot for kids in Hillsdale.
Could that be the famous Tastee Freeze from “Jack and Diane”? Until he says otherwise, we’ll assume the answer is yes. Oh yeah, life goes on!
And maybe when he’s back in Michigan this summer for his shows in Grand Rapids and Clarkston, John will take a drive back to Hillsdale and visit some of his old haunts. The Tastee Freeze is long gone, but I’m sure the people at the Edward Jones office would be happy to get some ice cream out of the freezer for him.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
