“If you can pick it up, pick it up; if you can’t pick it up, paint it; if it moves, salute it.”
Or: “Keep your mouth shut, your bowels open, and never volunteer.”
And: “Fire at will.” This one particularly amused him, because he considered it unfair to treat anyone named Will in this manner.
Despite his rating as a photographer, he did more office work than anything else, and increased his typing speed. This skill would prove beneficial to him in journalism and in his creative writing career.
He also became quite a poker player in the service, which provided him with an additional source of income. Most of his money was sent home to San Pedro for his wife and baby.
One of the fellows in Dad’s outfit was going steady with a girl back home. The young man didn’t drink, gamble or carouse. He sent money back to his girl, and she was supposed to bank it for their future marriage. One day he received a “Dear John” letter from her, and she requested the return of her picture. My father, ever impish, came up with a method of retaliation for his buddy. He collected fifty or sixty pictures of girlfriends from the guys in the outfit, and then dictated a letter to her, from the jilted man:
I was disappointed to receive your letter. I’m all broken up by it. There is only one problem. I can’t remember which girl you are. From this stack of pictures will you please pick out the one of you and send the rest back? Money for return postage is enclosed.
In the winter of 1942, Dad received his own “Dear John” letter from Flora, in which she told him she wanted a divorce. Devastated, he was brought to tears, and felt frustrated at having to deal with the situation from three thousand miles away. One night while on bivouac, with his mind on personal problems, he tripped over a tent tie-down and fell, hitting his head. A soft, lumpy blood clot developed on top of his skull, and he was warned by the doctor not to hit that spot again, at risk of his life—and to let the clot dissolve.
With the assistance of his uncle Ken Rowntree, he was given an early honorable discharge from the service in March 1943, less than eight months after enlisting.* He caught a military transport home to the West Coast. With a bandage on his head, he returned home to San Pedro, but discovered that Flora had disappeared, taking the baby with her.
Driving north to Bandon, Oregon, he visited the home of Flora’s mother. In tears, he said to her, “All I want is my family back. Where are they?”
She wouldn’t tell him, and despondent, he left. Later she confided to my half-sister, Penny, “I almost told him, but I thought it would be a mistake for them to be together.”
Flora obtained custody of Penny.
Later my father would say that the letter from Flora was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to him, since it led ultimately to meeting my mother. But that remained several years off, and he would go through a painful period of adjustment.
He moved back to his roots in the Pacific Northwest. From August 1943 to August 1945, he worked as a copy editor for the Oregon Journal in Portland, Oregon. This region, with its familiar landscapes and outdoor way of life, soothed his troubled spirit.
The copy desk at the Oregon Journal was in the shape of a half-circle. Along the outer rim of the desk, called “the rim,” the copy editors sat, marking up stories that came in over the wires and stories written by staff reporters. On the other side of the desk, inside the curve, sat “the slot man,” sometimes referred to as “the dealer.” He dealt stories to the copy editors.
The United Press International office in the back had some tape punching machines which were in intermittent use. They were for transmitting stories to other UPI offices around the world. To send a story, it had to be typed on a special tape and held until the designated hours of transmission began. Then the tape was fed through the machine, printing the story on both the originating and receiving machines.
So, over a couple of days in odd moments, my impish father went back and cut the tape to print so that it would look like a standard UPI story. It was one of the wildest stories you ever heard.
There is an apocryphal tale about Dad, that the story he faked on the machine concerned a UFO attack on Europe in which the cities were destroyed with “green death rays.” It is not difficult to imagine how this tale came about, since it circulated decades later when my father was the most famous science fiction writer in the world.
The essence of the actual story he punched out on the UPI machine was that an American flying ace was revealed to have previously been an ace for the Nazi air force, the Luftwaffe. Supposedly when he was a German flyer he was shot down over North Africa, then brought to the United States as a prisoner of war. But he had been an Austrian professor before the war, and with the assistance of academic friends in the United States he secured false identity papers and escaped from the prisoner of war camp. Subsequently he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force under this false identity.
The last line of the story read, “Any resemblance between the foregoing and anything that may have actually happened is purely coincidental.”
The slot man at the time of the gag, Fred McNeil, was absolutely authoritarian, without a sense of humor. Behind him sat a copy spike—a sharp steel prong where copyboys impaled stories as they came in from the wire machines and reporters. The copyboy would come and spike a story on it—and without looking back McNeil would just grab the piece and start working on it.
Most of the people in the office knew about the gag, and Frank even had the UPI people in on it. One dull afternoon they had a machine free so that he could run his tape on it. The tape told the machine what to do, and it printed the story on standard UPI paper…an original and two carbons. It wasn’t transmitted.
It only took a minute or so—the tape went fairly fast. Then the prankster ripped the story off, walked back to the copy desk as though coming from the john, spiked it and slid back into his seat on the rim.
Meanwhile, McNeil grabbed the story and put it down in front of him. The staff members watched him out of the corners of their eyes. It was a slack time of day with very little copy, so Frank was betting that McNeil would copy-edit it himself and not deal it, as he often did at slow times. He behaved predictably.
He sat there with his copy pencil marking the story…marking it…and saying, “My God! For God sakes!” He glanced at the clock and shouted to the wire editor (who was in on the gag), “We’d better try for a page one remake!”
McNeil was editing fast to get down to the bottom, and then he read that line. The flush started at the back of his neck and went right up over his head. He rose to his feet, balled up the paper and heaved it across the room with an angry grunt.
“If I ever find the son-of-a-bitch who did that,” he shouted, “I’ll kill him!”
In 1943, Dad hadn’t been doing much fiction writing of any type, and it had been this way since 1938 when hubris had led him to believe incorrectly that he had developed a formula for writing Westerns. The war and his unsuccessful marriage further distracted him. But with the stability of the Oregon Journal job, he began writing again, before and after work. His efforts were rewarded, as he sold a clever two thousand word suspense yarn to Esquire, “Survival of the Cunning,” published in the March 1945 issue. They paid him two hundred dollars—a substantial sum for a short story in those days.
Set during World War II, it described a fictional U.S. Army sergeant sent to the Alaskan arctic wilderness to locate a Japanese radio and weather station. A bad situation developed, in which the sergeant and his Eskimo guide were captured by a Japanese soldier, who had an automatic pistol. The Japanese, however, had committed the error of letting his gun warm up in the moist atmosphere of a cabin before taking it outside. Wisely, the Eskimo knew the gun would freeze up in the subzero arctic air outside, and he was able to overcome the captor.
My father had a lifelong fascination with remote regions of the Earth, from frozen locales to tropics to deserts. Desolate beauty appealed to him…the serenity of the wilderness. He had not
journeyed to the arctic before writing the Esquire story, but wrote nonetheless in a convincing fashion from research, from stories that had come through newspaper offices, and from his imagination. He developed a knack for traveling in his mind, for transporting himself far away from the room in which he sat at a manual typewriter.
In August 1945, he left the Oregon Journal and took a position on the night rewrite desk of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This was a Hearst paper, one of a nationwide chain that maintained a steady drumbeat against Japanese Americans during the war. In large part the Hearst news organs were responsible for sentiment against American citizens of Japanese descent and their mistreatment. But now the war was ending, and more rational moods were setting in.
Frank Herbert’s boyhood buddy, Dan Lodholm, was in the U.S. Coast Guard during the war. When Dan returned to the Northwest after his stint in the service, my father gave him and a number of Coast Guard war heroes a first-class tour of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper plant in downtown Seattle. They were suitably impressed.
Using G-I Bill financial assistance, Frank enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle for the fall quarter of 1945. Without much regard to a major, he intended to take writing classes while still holding down his newspaper job. Soon he would fall head-over-heels for a brunette Scottish-American girl in the same creative writing class.
Chapter 4
“But He’s So Blond!”
WHEN FRANK Herbert worked at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1945 and 1946, he rented a room in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Hooper, near the Montlake Cut in Seattle. While Frank was at work one evening, the Hoopers held a piano recital at which Mr. Hooper played the piano and a well-known Russian-born artist, Jacob Elshin, sang baritone.
One of the guests was a red-haired teenager named Howard (Howie) Hansen, who was part Quileute Indian. Just before the recital began, Howie heard Hooper’s wife tell someone, “We have a nice young newspaperman renting a room in the basement. His name is Frank Herbert.”
The atmosphere at the recital was painfully formal, with much posturing and phony conversation. Many attendees sat with exaggerated erectness and chit-chatted, their little fingers sticking out as they held wine goblets.
Dad wandered in at around 11:00 P.M. For twenty minutes he listened to the singing (which seemed off-key to him) and noticed the hypocrisy and superficiality of the guests. I think my father must have been a little tired, or perhaps something didn’t go well at work, because suddenly he dispensed with civility and announced, rather loudly, “I’d like to show you what this reminds me of.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Hooper said, with a smile. “And what is it you do?”
“An ape act,” Frank said. Thereupon he jumped on the sofa and began hopping from one end to the other in street shoes, curling his arms like a chimpanzee and making simian sounds.
“Hoomph! Hoomph! Hoomph!”
Everyone looked at him in stunned disbelief, except Howie, who could barely contain his laughter. Presently, Frank left the room, saying, “That’s what I think of what I saw here tonight.”
The next day, he was invited to move out.
So, my father lost a place to live. But he gained a lifelong friend and kindred spirit in Howie Hansen. “I was just off the reservation and pretty wild,” Howie said to me later. “Maybe that’s why Frank liked me.” Howie, born in late 1931, was only fourteen years old when they met, but was intellectually quite mature. Frank developed the good-natured practice of calling him “H’ard” at times, and would later even autograph books to him that way.
With his stepfather’s approval Howie invited Frank to live with them on a houseboat, moored near the Ballard Locks in Seattle. A short time later their new tenant showed up with a pickup truck full of items, and began unloading. He had books, skis, a microscope, footlockers, clothes and articles of furniture, piled high in the back of the truck.
When Howie’s stepfather saw all of that, he exclaimed, “My God, he’ll sink us!”
So Frank lost another place to live, but with the assistance of Howie arrangements were made for substitute quarters at the home of John Gerke, Jr., in the Ballard district.
Howie wanted to travel the world by ship, and tried to talk his new friend into joining the U.S. Merchant Marine with him. They would vagabond to distant, exotic parts of the world. This was tempting to my father, because he dearly loved the sea and wanted to learn everything he could about the world. But he enjoyed the newspaper business, and was planning to take writing classes soon at the University of Washington. He didn’t say no, and he didn’t say yes.
They often went on trips out into the countryside, and Dad always took a camera along, and a book. “He was always reading and showing me things in books,” Howie recalled. Upon hearing this I thought of a boyhood description of my father when he was some fifteen years younger, at a time when he was always seen in the company of a book. He hadn’t changed, and never would.
They talked about opening a camera supply store together. Frank went to Portland to contact suppliers but was delayed there when he met a girl he thought he liked. A few days later he returned to Seattle and told Howie she was a “dull-wit.”
In March 1946 the Post-Intelligencer laid Frank Herbert off, citing obligations to returning World War II combat veterans. He had not been in combat.
In a creative writing class, English 139, he sat next to an attractive, dark-haired girl, Beverly Forbes. She had a shy way of looking at him with dark blue, half-closed eyes, and she spoke in soft tones, selecting her words carefully. Her laugh was gentle, and sometimes she broke into a girlish, nervous giggle.
Smitten, Frank told Howie, “I’ve just met a Scottish girl with the most beautiful black hair.”
Actually she was Scottish-American, born Beverly Stuart prior to her mother’s remarriage to a man named David Forbes. Like Frank she read extensively. Her interest in literature went back to her early childhood, when her maternal grandfather, Cooper Landis, introduced her to classic books. (Cooper had once been the traveling secretary of Ralph Waldo Emerson.)
Beverly told her best friend, Frankie Goodwin, about the young man she had met in writing class, Frank Herbert. Coincidentally, she was struck by his hair, as he had been with hers. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “the color of molten gold.”
He dressed casually but neatly, typically in a black or dark turtleneck shirt, with a jacket zipped up to the center of his chest. His hair was long and neatly combed—straight back at the sides and across the top. He parted it on the left side, where my natural part is. The hair had a slight uplift on top, rising to his right.
He began a pattern of pursuit. He learned where Beverly Forbes ate lunch, and then just happened to wander by at the right moment with his own lunch. He found out where she studied in the library, and when. They discussed great books and writing, and found they shared an interest in the classics, history and poetry. They shared another interest as well, an important one: Each wanted to be a writer.
Both were working students, he at the newspaper and she as an ad writing trainee for the Clark Richards Advertising Agency in Tacoma.
They were also the only students in the class who had sold anything. Dad’s “Survival of the Cunning” had been published the year before by Esquire, and during the course he sold another story, “The Jonah and the Jap,” to Doc Savage magazine, published in the April 1946 issue. Like the Esquire story, it was set in World War II, involving characters who developed a clever means of outwitting the Japanese.
In 1946, Beverly sold a story entitled “Corner Movie Girl” to Modern Romances magazine, for which she received $145.00. The editor told her she liked the sincerity of the story, but thought the plot was a little weak. “Corner Movie Girl” was written as an assignment for the creative writing class she was taking, and it was read before the class and critiqued by her peers and by the instructor. Following a number of suggestions, including some from the blond young man who sat next to her, she rewrote
the story.
“Corner Movie Girl” described a plain young woman who was envious of her beautiful friend for the proposals her friend constantly received from men. The plain girl dreamed of falling in love with the heir to a fortune. Subsequently she dated a rich, handsome young fellow, and they went to a fancy place to dance. But the experience left her feeling emotionally unsatisfied, and she felt cheapened for having done it. She returned to her plain, ordinary, no-frills guy, the one she really loved.
My mother’s story was semi-autobiographical, as many first stories are. She had been overweight during most of her life before college, which made her feel unattractive. She never dreamed of getting a rich husband, though. Idealistic, she always intended to marry for love. Upon meeting Frank Herbert, an experienced man-about-town, she was nineteen, romantic, and somewhat naive concerning affairs of the heart.
She wrote true-confession stories of love. My father called them “sin, suffer, and repent stories.” He wrote pulp adventures. She was the romantic, very feminine, and he the adventurer, strong and rugged. Both were dreamers, but neither could have had any inkling of the remarkable life they would spend together.
Frank was having trouble with university officials. He was studying psychology, mathematics, and English (including creative writing), but wanted to select classes as if they were arrayed on a smorgasbord. He insisted upon taking a disproportionate number of psychology courses, and tried to skip introductory classes, going straight to advanced material. He already knew the preparatory stuff, he told the registrar, and didn’t want to waste his time. But the bureaucrats running the school said he couldn’t do as he pleased, despite straight-A grades. Besides, they said, he wasn’t taking the classes necessary to qualify for a major, and everyone had to have a major.
My mother had always thought she would marry a dark-haired man like her father, while her friend Frankie expected to marry a blond. One evening, Frankie and Beverly were talking alone. “Do you like him?” Beverly inquired. “Yes,” came the response. “But he’s so blond!”
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