When he was sixteen, he took the family Buick out on a date, with permission from his father. He had a girlfriend and two other couples in the car, and roared along Highway 99 outside Tacoma at more than eighty miles an hour. Presently, a state motorcycle cop pulled him over, got off his bike and walked to the driver’s side.
“You!” the patrolman exclaimed, looking in the window. It was Bernie Rausch, a good friend of the family. Rausch often visited the Herbert household at Dash Point, just north of Tacoma. He told Dad to follow him, and with his motorcycle led the offender straight home. While Frank waited in the car for what seemed like an eternity, Rausch spoke at the doorway with F. H. Presently, the old man took the car keys and told Frank to wait in the house. F. H. drove the friends home, while Frank suffered, wondering what his punishment would be.
He didn’t get a beating that time, but was grounded for two months and prohibited from using the car. Extra chores were assigned too, and the young man had to chop several cords of firewood.
Frank Herbert’s sister, Patricia Lou, almost thirteen years his junior, became an increasing source of concern for him. Their parents were on the brink of divorce, arguing constantly and drinking more than ever. Too often she was neglected. The boy took care of her when he could. On many occasions he bought baby food and other necessities with his own odd-job earnings. He also purchased toys for her, or made them of wood and whatever else he could find.
The family was living in South Tacoma at the time. He went to nearby Stewart Intermediate School, graduating in June 1935, with a grade point average of only 1.93. The following September, he enrolled at Lincoln High School, only a few blocks from his home. He failed Latin in his first semester, but on retaking the class in the spring of 1936 earned a B. Then in a subsequent attempt to take more advanced Latin, during the spring of 1937, he dropped out of the class, receiving no grade. The only other class he failed, also in the Spring 1937 semester, was Geometry. In other Geometry classes he received Cs each time. In English, where he would one day write prose read by millions, he had two Bs, a C, and a D. He received his only A in the Fall 1936 semester, in World History. His grade point average for the first two and a half years was a meager 2.05.
When he began his senior year in the fall of 1937, he was behind in the credits needed for graduation, so he took one extra class, and passed everything, with slightly better than a C average. He took a journalism class that semester, receiving a B. As part of this class, he was on the staff of The Lincoln News, a high school newspaper that was run according to professional standards by Homer Post, an ex-reporter and educational legend. The paper was a perennial national award winner.
Frank Herbert, who would later spend many years in the newspaper profession, was sixteen when he began the journalism class, and turned seventeen during it—an impressionable time of life in which to fall under the influence of a master. Earlier my father had been influenced by an ex-newspaperman living in Burley, Henry W. Stein, who regaled him with tales of life on a big-city newspaper.
Working out of the school news shack under Post’s tutelage, Frank became a “general assignment news chaser,” a reporter doing school and community stories. It was like a real newspaper, and he learned the importance of deadlines, how to copy-edit and how to find the most interesting angle on a story.
He often wore a blue serge suit, a light tan shirt and a tie to his classes—rather neat, though inexpensive, attire for high school. By all accounts Frank Herbert was well-liked on campus, a young man with a buoyant attitude and boundless energy. Another student remembered how blond he was, and his pink and white “peaches and cream” complexion. One day he burst in the door of the news shack and shouted, “Stop the presses! I’ve got a scoop!”
In the spring of 1938, Dad took two extra classes, still trying to catch up on the credits he was behind. This workload, combined with problems he was experiencing at home, proved too much for him. In May 1938, he dropped all of the classes, earning no credits for that semester. Among the classes he dropped were Journalism and Public Speaking—areas in which he would excel in later years.
In the summer, he earned extra money working for a newspaper, The Tacoma Ledger. He performed copyboy and other office duties, and was sent on some reporting assignments when the regular reporters were on vacation.
The following semester, in the fall of 1938, he took a normal class load, including Journalism. All that year, he excelled on the school newspaper. A number of feature stories appeared under his byline, and he wrote a regular column on page two called “Riding the Rail,” in which he discussed school events, often humorously. His columns were high in political content, reflecting his knowledge of world affairs—a knowledge that was enhanced by his participation in the school debating team, where he starred. The debating experience whetted his appetite for politics, an area of interest that would remain with him for the rest of his life. He was promoted to Associate Editor of the paper.
In the 1930s there was a great deal of interest in ESP (extrasensory perception), particularly in “Rhine consciousness,” the term for paranormal experiments with cards conducted by Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine of Duke University. He conducted experiments in which subjects were asked to guess what card another person was holding, when the backside was only visible to the subject. The results seemed to prove the existence of ESP.
One evening Dad was on a date with a girl named Patty, and they tried their own version of the Rhine experiments, using a standard deck of fifty-two playing cards. One by one, she held cards up, and my father guessed all of them correctly. Thinking he was tricking her, she obtained another deck of cards and took great care to mix them up and conceal them from him. Again, he guessed each card correctly. Later, under different circumstances, Dad found himself unable to repeat the astounding results.
This experience of my father’s became the basis of his short story, “Encounter in a Lonely Place,” published in 1973. A strong occult theme ran through a number of his most important works as well, including the Dune series and Soul Catcher.
When he was seventeen, Frank Herbert analyzed the Western fiction market by reading several boxes of books and magazines he had purchased at a used bookstore. A formula became apparent to him, and he used it to write a Western story under a pseudonym. It sold to Street and Smith for $27.50, and he was elated. Confident that he had discovered a path to instant success as a writer, he spent the money quickly. Then, in only a few weeks, he wrote two dozen more stories, all using the identical formula. Rejection letters poured in. He would not make another sale for eight years.
My father never revealed the title of that first story sale, or the pseudonym under which he wrote it. Not particularly proud of the writing, he said it was amateurish. Nonetheless, it was a sale, and he was still in high school at the time.
Displaying literary versatility and a curiosity about what lay before him on the uncharted course of life, he wrote a poem entitled “Your Life?”—published in the September 30, 1938, issue of The Lincoln News:
What is the meaning of your life?
If you live close to nature, is it hidden in—
A towering tree,
A busy worker bee,
A flower in bloom,
The sun piercing the morning’s gloom?
Or do you live in civilization?
Does fancy people your imagination with thoughts of—
Laborers, soot and grime,
Youths leading lives of crime,
Long hours and pay day,
Night life in its hey-day?
Are you but chaff from the Great Miller’s gleaning?
Or wherever you live does your life have a meaning?
Only two months later, his home life would fall apart entirely. He could no longer stand the suffering of his sister, now five, so again he dropped all of his classes, earning no credits toward graduation. With his parents drinking heavily and near divorce, he ran away from home, taking Patricia Lou with him. The pair caught a b
us to Salem, Oregon, and sought refuge with Frank’s favorite aunt, Peggy (Violet) Rowntree, and her husband, Ken Rowntree, Sr. (Peggy was one of Babe’s sisters.)
Within weeks the touchy family situation improved, and Patricia moved back home. But Frank—barely eighteen—remained with his aunt and uncle, and enrolled at Salem High. Peg and Ken had a son by Ken’s earlier marriage, Kenneth Jr., and they were also taking care of Jackie and Larry Sullivan, whose mother, Carmen Sullivan (one of Peggy and Babe’s sisters), had died in childbirth. The boys became close, particularly Frank and Jackie, who were around the same age. This was a much improved family situation for Frank, supported by an economically stable, loving marriage.
Dad graduated from Salem High School in 1939 with no immediate plans for college. Despite past problems the young man missed his parents and sister, and now that he was out of school he had a yearning to see new places. In the fall of that year he moved to San Pedro, California, near Los Angeles, where his parents were living. F. H. was chief of the Guard Force for Los Angeles Shipbuilding & Drydock Corporation, an important shipbuilder.
Shortly after arriving in California, “Junior” obtained a newspaper position at the Glendale Star as a copy editor, after lying about his age. He was just nineteen, but had a way of speaking and carrying himself that enabled him to pass himself off as a man five or six years older. He smoked a brier pipe, too, which made him look sophisticated.
At the Star there was an old, foul-tempered man who was also a copy editor, and the guy apparently thought that life had passed him by. He sat directly across the desk from an energetic upstart named Frank Herbert.
“I was young and he was old,” my father told me later.
The old curmudgeon accused Frank of messing up the copy-editing on a story that ran in a prior edition, and Frank responded, “You’re wrong. I didn’t do that. I wasn’t even here.”
Suddenly the old man grabbed a pair of scissors from the copy desk and went after his younger counterpart, trying to stab him. Thankfully, people jumped in and grabbed the assailant and hauled him away. The fellow continued working there after he calmed down, but my father told me, “Whenever he had scissors in his hands, I stayed well clear of him!”
Another copy editor on the paper had his own style of revolt. His tactic was to refuse to bathe for two months at a time. He would not change his underwear, socks, or anything. His teeth had green film on them. People really kept their distance.
My father would accumulate many more interesting characters and stories in more than three decades in the newspaper business, a profession that for him was a window on the world…fascinating but low-paying. Journalism kept him on the leading edge of events, filling his hunger for political information and arming him with political data he would use in his science fiction writing.
Always impulsive, in the summer of 1940 he moved back to Salem, Oregon. For a short while he lived with the Rowntrees again, while looking for a newspaper job. He approached The Oregon Statesman for a position, but was told by the personnel manager that no openings were available.
After finding out who the managing editor of the paper was, the would-be journalist went to the man’s house and accosted him in his front yard. The managing editor, Steve Mergler, was at first irritated, but the young man had a convincing way about him. Frank Herbert asked if he could fill in when other reporters, copy editors or photographers were on vacation. He had his own photographic equipment, and said he could even perform copyboy duties if necessary. “I can do a lot of things,” he told Mergler. “I can be like a utility man on a baseball team, playing whatever position you need.”
This sounded intriguing to Mergler, who had an eye for good people and appreciated an enterprising young man. So Frank, just shy of his twentieth birthday, went “on call” for the paper. He came in at all hours, did anything he was asked to do. He even worked in the advertising and subscription departments. He did everything so well, in fact, with such dedication and excellence, that it wasn’t long before he was working full-time. His principal responsibilities involved photography, and, since this was the state capital, many of his assignments involved political events. One of his photographs, at a charity fund-raiser called the Salem Chest, was of U.S. Senator Douglas McKay, who would later become Secretary of the Interior. McKay took a liking to the young man, which later proved beneficial to Frank.
In Salem, Frank Herbert became enamored with airplanes and flying. He worked every angle to get into the air as a passenger, both for pleasure and on news assignments. These were small planes, single engine two-seaters.
In nearly fourteen months on The Oregon Statesman, Dad also reported, worked as copy editor and night editor, and wrote feature stories. In feature-writing he learned the importance of characterization, of clearly defining a person and determining what makes him tick. This, he would come to realize one day, was a central feature in any good novel.
He spent as much time as he could in the outdoors, “recharging” himself, as he described it many years later. There were ski trips with friends to nearby slopes in the Oregon Cascades, and a number of fishing trips to Elk Lake in the Three Sisters Wilderness Area. He took a canoe to Elk Lake in 1941 with a young friend, Fram Morgan. Soon afterward, Morgan joined the U.S. Marines. He was killed in the first wave at Tarawa in 1943, fighting the Japanese in the Pacific.
When my father wanted something, be it a job or a relationship, he was not to be denied. An impatient, driven man, he always found a way to get from point A to point B. While working in Salem in the spring of 1941, he met and fell in love with Flora Parkinson, a teenager. In June, they wanted to get married, and Frank thought it would be nice if they held the ceremony in his hometown, Tacoma, Washington. On impulse, they drove three hundred miles north.
At the courthouse in Tacoma, the only judge available, Judge W. A. Richmond, was conducting police court, and a number of men who had been accused of public intoxication were waiting for their cases to be heard. Undeterred, Frank, with his bride-to-be in tow, marched up to the judge and asked him in a low tone if he would marry them.
Judge Richmond appeared surprised, but he smiled and told the couple to take seats and wait. Then he hurried through a number of cases, convicting every defendant. When these matters were disposed of, he performed the wedding in front of a courtroom packed with police court spectators!
That month, Nazi Germany attacked Russia. The war in Europe was escalating. The pages of The Oregon Statesman were filled with news of those events and speculation about whether the United States would enter the conflict.
Another move followed, and in October 1941, the Herbert newlyweds found themselves living in San Pedro, California, near my grandparents’ apartment. Flora was pregnant. Dad went back to work for the Glendale Star, this time as a reporter and photographer. His love affair with flying continued, and he went on many aerial assignments and personal flights, as a passenger. He took at least five thousand aerial photographs.
With U.S. involvement in World War II in December 1941, my grandfather’s position as Chief of the Guard Force for Los Angeles Shipbuilding & Drydock became even more important, as it was directly related to the war effort. The yard was building a number of big Navy ships.
All over the United States, young men and women rushed to recruiting offices. Dad obtained enlistment papers from a Navy recruiter, but delayed signing them because of his family responsibilities. Of all the military branches, the Navy appealed to him most, from his love of ships and the sea.
F. H., aside from his guard duties, got together with a fire department friend to invent and patent what they called the “Dura Bomb Shovel,” which was used by Los Angeles Shipbuilding & Drydock and by Douglas Aircraft. The shovel had a hollow handle (filled with sand to smother blazes) and a snow shovel–shaped bottom with a hinged lid. It was designed for fighting magnesium incendiary bomb fires, the sort expected to be used by the Japanese if they ever reached our coast. When an incendiary bomb hit, the theory went
, a firefighter would rush to the scene, smother the flames with sand, scoop the bomb up and carry it away.
On February 15, 1942, Frank Herbert Jr. registered for the draft in Los Angeles County. According to his draft card, he was 5'10" and rather thin at 150 pounds. He still had the scar over his right eye and into his eyebrow, the half-inch-long mark from the malamute dog attack.
The following day, on February 16th, a baby girl, Penelope (Penny) Eileen, was born to the couple. Dad selected the mythological name Penelope from the faithful wife of Odysseus, who spurned numerous suitors during the hero’s absence from Troy. The baby’s middle name, Eileen, was my paternal grandmother’s given name.
In July 1942, unable to wait any longer, Frank enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He gave the recruiting officer a letter of recommendation from the Supervisor of Shipbuilding at Los Angeles Shipbuilding & Drydock, a retired U.S. Navy officer.
During his physical examination for the Navy, the doctor kept looking out the window at another doctor and two pretty nurses who were waiting in a convertible, with golf clubs visible. Anxious to join them, the doctor rushed Dad through.
Frank Herbert was assigned to the huge Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, where he served as a Photographer Second Class V-6 in the U.S. Naval Reserve. His mother, Babe, was extremely worried about him, and spent many nights crying.
In boot camp, Dad first encountered The Bluejackets’ Manual. One of the entries, on swimming, went like this: “Breathing may be accomplished by swimming with the head out of water.” Another entry, under the section on ships: “Q: What is the part (of the ship) known as midships? A: The middle part.” And this one: “It is most important that all appliances for securing water-tightness be kept in an efficient condition.” The foolishness of such passages in this bureaucratically produced manual later became the inspiration for his short story “By The Book” (1966).
He also picked up a number of mottoes on the base:
Dreamer of Dune Page 4