Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir

by Tony Hillerman

  The goal now was to maintain the “Gentlemanly C” and get that degree fast. (The C gave two grade points per credit hour, compared to three for a B and four for an A. If you made nothing but C’s you had the 2.0 average needed for a bachelor’s degree. If your average was higher than that you were “pushing up the curve” and making it tougher for your comrades.)

  Two practices grew out of this attitude. The university prohibition against taking more than sixteen or eighteen credit hours per semester was commonly bypassed by enrolling in “correspondence courses” either at OU or at another university, with the credits earned transferred to your record. This could cut a semester or two off the 124 hours needed to get a degree. Those who had surplus grad points often enrolled in appealing courses for which they lacked the required prerequisites learning what they could and not worrying about flunking.

  This was how I became acquainted with Morry, secretary-treasurer of the Communist Party of Oklahoma at the time, a former Navy yeoman and the son of a sharecropper in Oklahoma’s most impoverished county. We enrolled in an upper-level philosophy course, skipping both the prerequisite courses and the exams. Morry wanted to get a better handle on the 1946 version of Marxism as seen by academia, and on Hegel, the other apostle of socialist statism. I hoped to get my own thinking sorted out on the subject of young men killing one another to the applause of their elders. But we weren’t interested in credit hours.

  I learned more from Morry in that course than I did from the professor. He droned through the roll call, seeming totally unaware that many students were answering to multiple names and never noticing that half the chairs were empty. No harm in that, but he also droned through his memorized lectures. From Morry’s I learned something of pure pragmatism and political motivation.

  Morry considered Hegel and Marx no brighter than our professor. However, the men who ran the party used their language and their slogans as the official jargon. These fellows had reached the top by knowing the theory and the buzzwords. Morry had joined the party while in the Navy, impressed with the Red Army’s skill at killing Nazis. He said he thought communism had about one chance in eight to triumph in the United States. If it did, he would be an important person—the first one in his family as far back as he could trace it who had been more than an impoverished serf. If the Communists didn’t make it, so what? He’d be no worse off than he would have been otherwise.

  Aside from his frankness, he had other good qualities. He was remarkably good at auction bridge in the endless tournament underway in the Student Union basement and he had an unflappable sense of humor. When one of his party members was arrested for carrying two pistols into an English Lit class a reporter called Morry for a comment. Morry said the fellow had been granted party membership on the strength of being an Eagle Scout. “Tell the public that I said this undermines our confidence in the Boy Scouts.”

  After Morry’s public emergence as the university’s most prominent Red we persuaded him to write a short story for The Covered Wagon, the campus humor magazine, of which I had become assistant editor. He did a funny piece about a depth charge exploding prematurely under the fantail of his destroyer just as the watch officer was relieving himself in the head. We outlined the story with American flags as a political decontaminant, nobody complained, and the last I heard of Morry he was being kept busy flying back and forth between Oklahoma and Washington to take the Fifth Amendment before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  The Covered Wagon was my only emergence to any prominence in an undistinguished academic career. It was a moribund monthly—a repository of off-color jokes and “cheesecake” art. It had been taken over by Lew Thompson, who had survived the bloody Pacific battles from Guadalcanal all the way to the recapture of Manila and came out as an artillery captain. (Lew’s best contribution to campus war stories told how General MacArthur sent out maps to artillery units prohibiting shelling of his famous Manila brewery or his various other business buildings in Manila.) As his staff, Lew recruited fellow journalism students in whom he sensed potential and got the Wagon rolling again. No pay for the staff except seeing your credit line under photos or your byline on what you wrote. However, whoever was willing to be assistant editor and do the office work could be editor when Thompson’s one-year term expired. That made you a “Big Man On Campus,” if only in your own imagination. The editor received $50 per month, which Thompson used down at Red’s and Ed’s buying the beer for our post-publication celebrations. In theory, the editor also received a slice of the profits. There had never been any.

  However, Thompson hadn’t gone from grunt to captain and to editorship of this humor mag on the basis of wealth or social position. Why not promote this new campus environment—and the Wagon? Get this swarm of vets to read it and make it attractive to advertisers. We made the Oklahoma Daily (two doors down the hall from our office in the grimy old Journalism Building) aware we were changing the magazine. I drove up to Oklahoma City and did a cover article feature on a social breakthrough—the opening of Oklahoma’s first strip joint night club. Under another of his several hats, Thompson was the campus “stringer” for The Daily Oklahoman, which made it easy for him to give the state editor of that terrible old Oklahoma City paper a hint that scandalous things were about to happen at OU, which was already sort of politically and socially suspect. OU’s famous president George Cross thus received an inquiry from a reporter asking what was going on at the campus magazine. I got a call from the president’s secretary asking me to come over and talk. This was leaked to both the Oklahoma Daily and the Oklahoman. I don’t recall the OD headline but the Daily Oklahoman’s said OU PRESIDENT CALLS EDITOR ON CARPET The interview with the president was mild. He asked what this was all about. I told him we were dumping the dirty jokes and aiming at the older audience. He had no objections. Mild or not, the edition featuring “Culture Comes to Okie City” sold out, the Wagon was rolling again, and I had observed firsthand an example of how easily the press can be manipulated. (In years to come as reporter, editor, etc., I often saw it practiced with myself in the role of victim.)

  My memories of those campus days are an oddly mixed bag of new friendships and loneliness. The loneliness was rooted in part, I suspect, in missing those dirty, disheveled brothers from the frozen foxholes. You come to love those who shared that great adventure and you never stop missing them. But part of it came from the natural urge of young humans to find their mate. I had been making no progress on this front. One of the tiny minority of girls in my “Speech and Rhetoric” class attracted my attention by being pretty and sounding smart. Her midterm speech concerned flying a Piper Cub, a happy change from the lectures we were getting from male students about techniques for maintaining torpedoes, how to clear jams caused in your machine gun by wet canvas ammunition belts, proper treatment of frostbitten feet, and so forth. She took me for a ride in her Piper Cub, I became airsick, and that ended that. I dated a young lady with glossy black hair, a dazzling smile, and a sardonic wit, whom I had recruited as a model while taking a photography course. We were friends, nothing romantic was developing, and our terminal date involved her meeting me at the Covered Wagon office. There I introduced her to Thompson and the next thing I knew they were scheduling their marriage.

  While all this was afoot, there was also the business of learning to write—and the star character in that was a woman named Gracie Ray. Professor Ray taught us to organize. Good writing was not just a matter of blurting out the right words. It required deciding precisely what we wanted to tell, to whom we wanted to tell it, and how to arrange this message to get it told without wasting the receivers’ time or testing their patience. The course was News Writing and Professor Ray used the time-tested journalistic formula. We were handed facts and sorted through them for the What, Who, Where, When, and Why (or How)—the famous “five W’s and the H.” Which one (or ones) should we lead with as the most important, the most interesting, etc.

  A drunk jumps to his death. That’s
a What. He takes his dry dive off the top of the Washington Monument. Clearly a Where. But he is J. Edgar Hoover!!! A Who—but wait. The Why now struggles for the lead and the How clamors for attention. Learning such elements was the beginning and anyone can teach that. Professor Ray’s great contribution was her skill at inoculating us with her passion for precision.

  Every word in a sentence we wrote for her must be a necessary element in the message. It had a job do and it must be the right word to do it. Often she suggested a better one, but such failures she treated gently. She was less tolerant of “useless verbiage,” of those words that could be deleted with no effect on the meaning. “Cornstarch” words, she called them—with the same contempt a five-star chef would apply to such a filler dumped into his recipe. “Like barnacles on a boat’s bottom,” she said. “They slow down the sentence, reduce its force, make you sound like an English major.”

  Students of News Writing quickly learned to use modifiers sparingly if at all. “The adverb is the enemy of the verb,” she said. “If you need one, you used the wrong verb. You put ‘slowly’ after ‘walked,’ when you should have said ‘trudged’ or ‘strolled’ or ‘ambled.’” Professor Ray thus produced a swarm of men and women who “wrote tight,” who fit neatly into the format of the Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service. They were rarely accused of being flowery.

  My other life-altering prof at OU was H. H. Herbert, a former newspaper editor. He taught Journalistic Ethics, the lack of which being Herbert’s primary interest. Whether or not it’s legal, constitutional, or fair, a career in journalism carries power, Herbert told us. If you are preempting the advertising revenues and the readers you have an ethical duty to use that power to serve their community. The newspaper has the power, so does the reporter. That power is used whether you like or not. When you decide to cover a marginal story, or skip past it to the next one. Whether you use a name or skip it. If you use the power irresponsibly you’ll hurt a lot of people.

  I had reason to remember that oft-repeated homily too often. Once, covering state government, I learned a tax stamp shipment had gone missing and traced it from printer, trucker, revenue bureau, to warehouse. I used the names of those who signed receipts. The story ran December 21. On December 24 my phone rang. The voice said: “Merry Christmas. You just cost me my job.” His boss had seen his name in the paper, told him the auditing firm couldn’t stand even a hint of suspicion, told him to find another job. Not easy, my victim said, when you’ve been fired under a cloud of suspicion.

  I can’t recall who taught us the skills and duties of a newspaper slot man—the person who takes the raw material turned in by reporters and photographers, prunes it to fit, deletes libel (and colorful writing), and lays out the pages. I do remember that he must share part of the blame for the most humiliating moment of my journalism studenthood.

  This instructor stressed his formula for writing the ideal headline to describe the story below it—a job in which every letter in every word counts (and W’s and M’s, being fat, count double, and take up twice as much room as skinny little i’s and l’s). You look for the specific word first. Use the specific “pistol” and switch to the general “gun” only if “pistol” is too long for the line.

  I took this dogma with me to the newsroom of the Daily Oklahoman, where we were sent to get practical experience under fire. The slot man handed trivial stories destined to be buried on about page 27 to interns, with a note on the type of headline he wanted. One handed to me reported a woman filing suit against a doctor who had operated on her eleven years earlier. A subsequent surgery had revealed that the first surgeon hadn’t extracted one of his forceps before stitching up the abdomen.

  I wrote:

  SURGEON’S FORCEPS

  LEFT IN WOMAN

  ELEVEN YEARS

  The slot man told me the top line was too long and tossed it back to me to revise. Forceps is specific of what? It’s a tool, right? The first line became Surgeon’s Tool. That fit. Hours pass with more headlines written. The bulldog edition comes up from the printing plant. The night city editor scans it. Reaches page 27. Shouts: Stop the press, glowers at the slot man, and says, “Who wrote this!!” I am identified as the culprit, but a night city editor would no more waste words on a student intern than a general would on a private first class. He studied me a moment, deciding whether stupidity or mischief was involved, picked up the phone, got the Journalism Department chairman (H. H. Herbert himself ) out of bed, and chewed him out.

  That Stop the press shout is often heard in old movies, but that was the only time I ever heard it in real life. Professor Herbert called me in, asked what happened. I told him and Herbert seemed perfectly satisfied that I could be blamed only for innocence in a world full of night city editors with dirty minds. I got a “B” in the course.

  End of the semester also brought my twenty-first birthday, the day of being old enough to vote, of full legal citizenship, and looking back. I took a walk that evening, stopped in a coffee shop beside the highway, and drank a cup or two while assessing my situation. Barney was off on a date with his girl of the moment, Larry had married his high school flame and was living in married student housing, my various other male associates were otherwise occupied and of female associates that May I had none. One of the fellows who sometimes took the walk with us down the hill from the Third General Hospital to sun ourselves in Aix-en-Provence was from Sharps Chapel, Tennessee. He’d entertain himself with a Civil War ballad.

  Oh, I’ll never be married;

  I’ll never have wife.

  I’ll always be lonely

  All the days of my life.

  Exactly the way I remember thinking that May evening. I was feeling way down and blue, rejected by young women, looking back at a wasted youth, looking forward into an infinite unknown of unpromising blankness. But Mama’s philosophy kicked in. Just a test, after all. Something to endure. Make the best of it. It doesn’t last forever. And then comes the Last Great Adventure.

  Later that week Dick Wharton, a fellow writer for the Wagon, joined me for lunch. Our moods matched. We decided to hell with summer school. Why be in such a rush to get to the future? We’d make up for the three monthly GI Bill paychecks we’d lose by hitchhiking down to Mexico City. There we could live cheap and perfect the Spanish we’d been studying.

  No problem getting down through Ardmore, Denton, Dallas, Waco, San Antonio, etc., to Laredo, because Americans were still conditioned by war and Depression to picking up hitchhikers. At the border, our policy came acropper. We walked across into Nuevo Laredo and bought a ticket to Monterrey on a Mexican bus. In Monterrey, we’d haunt the expensive hotels, meet American tourists, and bum a ride to Mexico City.

  It will surprise no one who entered Mexico via bus in those days (and perhaps since) to know that we ran into a little roadblock south of Nuevo Laredo and about twenty miles from nowhere. Two soldiers armed with carbines boarded and went down the aisle checking credentials. They missed Wharton, a Choctaw Indian who might have passed as a Mexican, but spotted me. The soldier examined the visa I had obtained at the customs office and found it faulty. I would have to get off the bus, go back to the border and have the fault corrected. “No es posible,” I said, in my Spanish II grammar, and tried to explain there was no way to get back. He insisted. I said: “Yo no tengo culpa,” hoping to communicate that it wasn’t my fault. Wharton, his Spanish a bit better, corrects me. He says: “You mean, La culpa no es mio.” While correct, that was a mistake. The soldiers now spot Wharton as another gringo, recheck his visa, and sure enough, find an error and the problem broadens. The driver has sat patiently through all this, having seen it happen whenever he has gringos aboard, but the Mexican passengers want to get on with their journey. They signal us, rubbing their fingers together, that the soldiers are extorting a bribe. They encourage us by laughter, jeers, and rude remarks aimed at the military. The soldiers finally decide we are invincibly stupid, climb off the bus, and we’re of
f to Monterrey.

  Off, although we didn’t know it for days, to the industrial side of town. Not a fancy resort in view of the bus station. We check into a grimy two-story hotel and hit the sack. With morning we venture out, stop a man on the sidewalk and tell him we seek hotels where the rich travelers with cars stayed. That was way, way, way down by the river, he said. His cousin would be coming along soon. He was a tourist guide. He would take us. Cousin arrives, dapper and about our age. He hails a cab (all taxis in Monterrey then were Model-A Ford sedans) and ushers us in. Our first stop was in an expensive-looking supper club—closed now of course. Cousin wants us to see it, wants us to sample a specialty cocktail mixed there. He leaves us at the door and departs to awaken the owner. The owner admits us, mixes us drinks. Wharton and I look at each other, remember the warnings our college friends had given us of perfidious Mexicans, of knockout drops, of murderous robbers. Will our fear of looking discourteous and unsophisticated overcome our common sense? Of course it does. We drink our cocktails unpoisoned. Our guide hurries us out, takes us to a magnificent old theater where a movie is now being shown. He leads us in, borrows a flashlight from the usher, and uses it for illumination while he explains the theater’s famous old murals. Not a murmur of protest comes from the audience.

  Back on the street Cousin tells us he must leave us to meet a customer, tells of a good place to have lunch. He will meet us there tomorrow and show us more of his city. Dick and I count our money while eating. We owe Cousin for cab fare, for cocktails, for his bribe of the usher, and for whatever he charges for his guiding time. We can’t afford this. We write him a thank-you note and fold it around our guess of a fair payment and leave it with the cashier to give to Cousin when he shows up tomorrow.