His only other publication during our years in Sonoma County was a limited edition book published by the Press Democrat, also in 1952. Entitled Survival and the Atom, it was a collection of Dad’s articles on nuclear energy, with a press run of 750 copies. This formed an early link in the chain that would ultimately make him an anti-nuclear, anti-war activist.
Chapter 7
The Newsman and Captain Video
MY FATHER met many famous people by doing newspaper stories on them, and a number would become lifelong friends. One was the political artist Bernard Zakheim, and later it would be the world-renowned Zen master Alan Watts. Another was the noted science fiction and fantasy author Jack Vance. Dad knew Vance’s work, and late in 1952 he learned that the writer was living on a small farm not far from us, just outside of Kenwood, California. The reporter was on his way.
Vance, while the same age as Frank Herbert, was much farther along in his career at the time. He had sold many short stories to the science fiction pulps, including his well-known Magnus Ridolph tales. He was also making good money writing scripts for the Captain Video television show, a popular half-hour program that ran five days a week. It was sponsored by Post Toasties cereal. In the show, the hero wore a silver helmet, and whenever he flew through the air it was possible to see the wire that held him up.
Jack lived on a small farm with his wife, Norma, and drove a bright yellow Jeepster convertible. A large, scholarly man with thinning hair, Jack wore eyeglasses that had thick, round lenses. He was intense and could be gruff. But his coarse outer shell was frequently employed as a shield, preventing prying eyes from peering into his private world. The real Jack Vance, if he permitted anyone to see that far, was generous and effusive, an exceedingly nice man.
Soon the men were talking of living together in Mexico, and of joint writing projects. This was the opportunity of a lifetime for my father—to work and study with a successful writer. Jack Vance was far better off financially than we were. To save for the trip, Dad scrambled even more to augment his income. In ensuing weeks, he took every extra photography assignment he could get. He increased his hours at KSRO Radio. And, whenever he could fit it in, he worked as an assistant to Irene Slattery in her private psychiatry practice.
But his ex-wife Flora sued him, and a stipulation was entered by the court under which the plaintiff and defendant agreed to compromise the amount of past-due support payments. The required payments and attorney fees added to our financial pressures.
We had a 1950 Hillman in those days, a little four-door sedan that got excellent gas mileage. In an era of big cars and low-cost fuel, Dad predicted that most people in the world would drive economy cars one day, forced to do so by petroleum shortages and high fuel prices. “Petroleum is a finite resource,” he said.
He put the Hillman up for sale to raise funds, to apply toward purchase of a Jeep station wagon with the Vances for the Mexico trip. One evening while I was riding in the backseat of the Hillman, our car was hit by another, knocking us into a ditch. The other car, a big sedan, kept going, a hit and run. I remember Dad shouting out the window and swearing, and kicking our car when it lay damaged in the ditch. The other vehicle had administered a glancing blow against the side of our car, denting the doors on that side. Fortunately, none of us were injured.
But the accident created big problems for us. Our auto insurance had lapsed for non-payment, and, since the guilty driver had disappeared, we had no hope of receiving payment from him or his insurance company. Dad didn’t want to spend his Mexico money repairing the car, and now, in its damaged condition, the vehicle couldn’t be sold. It ran, but rattled badly. The damaged doors didn’t open, and one of the windows on that side was broken away, letting air in all the time.
Mom and Dad had taken out a loan on the Hillman from a Santa Rosa bank, but because of our credit problems, the bank had required additional guarantees. Dad had the Press Democrat as a co-signer on the car. After the accident he and Mom stopped sending in car payments, and instead applied all available money to their other bills and to their Mexico fund. About the time we were on the way to Mexico with the Vances in a new Jeep station wagon (paid for by the Vances), the Press Democrat was discovering that they owed money on a badly dented 1950 Hillman.
Several years later, when Dad got back on his feet financially, he telephoned the Press Democrat and, in a long, jovial conversation, made arrangements to pay them back with interest.
When my father decided to do something, he didn’t allow anything to get in his way. And, while he had his lapses in paying money he owed, be it to the Press Democrat, his ex-wife or a variety of bill collectors, he invariably made amends later and repaid every cent.
We received a battery of typhus, typhoid, and cholera shots for the Mexico trip, and shopped for necessities we didn’t expect to find in Mexico. Most of our possessions were left in storage with the Slatterys. By September, 1953, we were on the road. Eleven-year-old Penny, since she lived most of each year with her mother, did not accompany us.
The Vance’s Jeep wagon was blue, with a top rack, and the men alternated driving duties. Mom kept a close accounting of our expenditures, in a ledger book. Initially I couldn’t utter a word of Spanish, but I practiced on the way, and soon—at the age of six—I was speaking the language fluently.
When we arrived in Mexico, I was assailed with tropical colors and rich, earthy odors such as I had never before experienced. Tropical downpours were new to me, too. Sometimes the rain came down so hard that we had to pull the car over and wait for it to stop. I recall winding roads, green, terraced hillsides of crops rising steeply beside the highway, and a treacherous river crossing we made on a one-car ferry, where the bridge had been washed out in a flood. Once, after several hot hours of driving in the interior of the country, we came to a promontory on top of a hill, where our eyes were suddenly filled with the breathtaking blue of the Gulf of California.
Just north of Mazatlán in the State of Sinaloa, we stopped for a break at a roadside monument that marked the Tropic of Cancer. Norma placed her purse on the front fender of the car, and forgot it was there. A few miles down the road, with Jack driving, she suddenly missed it, and we made a quick “U” turn. When we arrived back at the monument, we saw the purse on the ground. It had been run over. Inside, Jack’s favorite writing instrument, a fountain pen, was ruined. Since Jack did his writing by longhand, this was a serious matter, indeed. His favorite writing instrument felt right in his grip and disseminated ink perfectly. With it he had written a number of excellent stories. The pen, silver and black, now lay crushed beside a Mexican highway.
A short while later we arrived in the seaside resort city of Mazatlán, and checked into an old hotel on the southern end of the great crescent forming the bay. A massive sea wall stood across the street from our hotel, with a wonderful sandy beach there. The insects, large and black, were either flying in my face or lying dead on the beach and sea wall. I paid them little heed while Mom took care to avoid them. As Bruce and I played in the sand, she drew in her sketchbook. Later, as we sat together on the sea wall, she taught me how to draw a house in perspective, as her artistic mother Marguerite had instructed her.
The following day we set off for points farther south. Near Guadalajara in the State of Jalisco, we rented a large house in the village of Chapala, on the shore of beautiful Lake Chapala. Famous for its fishing, pleasant climate and scenery, it was the largest lake in Mexico, approximately fifty miles long and fifteen miles wide. At an elevation of five thousand feet, it had a number of small islands in its midst and four villages around the rim, including Chapala. The region had numerous farms, growing subsistence crops such as alfalfa, beans, corn and maguey.
A fishing village and artists’ colony, Chapala was much favored by tourists, especially Americans. The town, while small, boasted one of the world’s great beer gardens—a large tavern by the lake that had outdoor seating under a shady, striped canvas roof. On hot days, my parents and the Vances
could be found there, cooling themselves in the shade. Sunsets on the lake were spectacular.
Small fishing skiffs, some with butterfly nets extended, crossed the water from early morning to late evening. Just outside town, alongside the shore, rose a massive dirt mound that locals said concealed a mysterious ancient structure. They theorized this because during heavy rains little clay figurines and pieces of pottery washed down the hillside. Recently, archaeologists had been made aware of the mound, and an excavation was planned.
Chapala was an idyllic spot in which to relax, almost too pleasant for the disciplines required of writing, too sleepy. Jack and my father would immerse themselves in their writing nonetheless.
Our two-story adobe and white stucco house, which had been converted to a duplex, stood on a hillside a block above the shores of the lake. Whenever the men were writing, usually from mid-morning to late afternoon, they enforced strict silence throughout the premises. The house had a long outside corridor where I played with my toys. Especially a little army tank.
I was in the habit of simulating war noises, and as I immersed myself in fantasy and made too much commotion Jack or Dad would bellow from one of the rooms, “Silencio!” (“Silence!”) Or “Callate, niño!” (“Shut up, boy!”) Dad was at his typewriter in one room clacking away, while Jack labored in another room, writing longhand passages that would subsequently be transcribed into typewritten form by Norma.
In Mexico, Jack and Dad plotted several stories together, but for a variety of reasons never completed them. Jack did go on to write and sell a solo novel based upon an idea the men developed together. The men, while fast friends, were perhaps too individualistic to write in concert. They were, each of them, assertive and dominant. Alpha males. And at the time they had divergent writing styles. Jack’s imagery and skill with words were ahead of Frank Herbert’s choppier abilities, although Dad was fast developing in those realms and was also learning characterization and plotting. Of key importance, he was beginning to understand the importance of “getting inside a character’s head,” as he liked to say later. Once a writer got sufficiently inside a character’s head, my father discovered, the character behaved in a manner that was consistent with his personality. Motivations were no longer muddled, and his actions made sense to the reader. Plots fell into place.
In Chapala, Frank Herbert was hard at work on Under Pressure, his submarine thriller. The unfolding novel described, with great psychological insight, a submarine crew in wartime, a plot constructed with building blocks that the author had learned about human motivation. Of equal interest, the story described a world of the future where oil supplies were limited. This was not easy to envision at the time, since petroleum products were plentiful and inexpensive. For the concept, Dad recalled that oil had been of strategic importance in World War II, and he extrapolated this to another war, under much more severe conditions.
But the novel was progressing slowly, and to pay immediate bills, Dad worked primarily on short stories. They could be finished and mailed in a much shorter period of time, and if they sold, checks would appear.
The kitchen of our house was permeated with diffused tropical light, making it a cheerful room. A wooden table sat by one window, and a large basket of fruit was always on the table. I made daily trips to the outdoor market stalls with Mom or our maid, Paulina. A fine cook, the maid regularly made a seafood stew that my parents and the Vances liked.
There were flies everywhere, and, with the exception of Mom, we grew somewhat accustomed to them, even if they crawled across our plates as we were eating. We always examined our food carefully before lifting it mouthward with a fork.
Cockroaches were a great concern to us as well, and especially to my mother. Each morning we developed the habit of shaking out our clothes and shoes before putting them on. Many roaches entered through the drain in the bathtub, and if Mom or Norma saw them when they wanted to take a bath, they came out and waggled two fingers (like cockroach antennae) at one of the men. Then Dad or Jack went in and flushed the filthy creatures down the drain with hot water. Sometimes there were as many as twenty roaches at a time.
Dad wrote of this and other adventures with Mexican insects in a humorous thousand-word piece, “Life with Animalitos.” (In Mexico, insects of all kinds are called “animalitos”—“little animals.”) It was a first-person story, written with Reader’s Digest in mind, since they paid well for such material. Unfortunately this yarn, like a number of others from the pen of Frank Herbert, did not find a receptive editor.
I was tutored by my mother, using schoolbooks brought from the United States. She taught me Spanish as well, and what she didn’t teach me I learned from children in the streets.
By Mexican standards, the cost of living was high in Chapala, and money was running low. Short story sales weren’t coming through for my father, and Jack wasn’t doing much better. Jack also lost one of his steadiest sources of income, the Captain Video TV show. It was decided that we could get by on less in a non-tourist environment.
After two months in Chapala, we moved to another town in the state of Jalisco a few miles south, Ciudad Guzman. With a population of twenty-four thousand, it was considerably larger than Chapala. In Ciudad Guzman we rented a smaller, two-story adobe and white stucco house. It was in the midst of town, on a level street where the houses were lined up side-by-side, with small yards. Dad, recalling his farm upbringing, wanted to raise his own food and become as self-sufficient as he could. So he purchased a number of baby chickens, which he kept in an adobe-walled outdoor compound on the street side of the house.
Some of the rooms in the house had earthen floors. I remember the loamy odors of earth there, and market smells, and donkeys in the streets swatting flies from their flanks with their tails. The outdoor markets bustled with activity.
By now I was proficient in Spanish, so my parents decided to place me in Mexican public school, in the first grade. I wore a thin white peasant outfit like local children and carried my school supplies in a small canvas bag. I traveled to and from school on a unique schoolbus, an old station wagon with some of its windows broken out, including the back one. This allowed motor exhaust into the passenger compartment. I sat in the rear, probably the worst seat from the standpoint of air quality, scrunched up next to other kids.
We had been in Ciudad Guzman for only a few days when the retired Mexican Army general who ran the town asked to see Frank Herbert, in order to evaluate his application for an extended stay in Mexico. One of the local merchants took Dad in a truck to the general’s beautiful three-story house, where flowers hung from wrought iron balconies. The general was very friendly. Several people were in attendance, and sweet cookies were served, which Dad liked. He ate two, realizing later that the others only took one apiece.
When Dad returned to the merchant’s truck, he began to feel drunk. He told the merchant to go get their wives; they were going out to have a party. The merchant wanted no part of this, for he knew they would get into trouble. He told Dad that the cookies had been laced with the most expensive North African hashish in the world, flown in by the Mexican Air Force for the general.
Dad recalled being taken into a beautiful building and guided up a long flight of stairs to a room with a table. There the merchant and a beautiful woman filled him with six or seven cups of strong Mexican coffee. Dad came down from his hallucination, and noticed the woman was an old hag, a whorehouse madame. He left as soon as he could, and while descending the stairs noticed now that they smelled of urine, and that there was a stench of burro dung outside.
Another time, a Mexican friend gave my father a cup of tea made with “semillas” (seeds), and Dad didn’t think to ask what sort of seeds they were. After consuming the delicious beverage, he learned they were morning glory seeds. Subsequently he passed out, falling into a pleasant sleep. He recalled my mother waking him up the next morning in a sunny room.
A few months later, upon returning to the United States, Dad would have a th
ird and final experience with a hallucinatory drug. While the first two experiences were inadvertent, the third, as I will explain later, was not. Through these experiences he was developing an awareness of the significance of drugs in human life, and would write about this one day in the Dune series. The fictional spice melange, the most important substance in the universe, was produced only on the planet Dune, and Paul Atreides’s experiences with that drug mirror the author’s personal experiences. Melange, in fact, would become the key to an entire political, economic, and religious structure in the Dune universe.
In Ciudad Guzman, with no money coming in, our funds soon ran dangerously low. We packed and left town for parts north. By the end of 1953 we were staying with the Vances at their farmhouse in Kenwood, California. On a small kitchen table at the rear of the house, Mom worked with me on a scrapbook about the Mexico trip. She located a stamp pad and large rubber letters, which we used with painstaking slowness to print a story on the pages. This was one of my first writing experiences, and it was in effect a journal, albeit a brief one.
These are some of the entries:
We and the Vances got the Jeep to go to Mexico, and we went to Colton (California) in the Jeep and we stayed there for 2 days.
We went to Nogales and we went swimming.
We stayed in Guaymas for 1 night.
We stayed in Los Mochis and slept in the Jeep. Bruce and I were sweating in the hot night.
Dad played a double-reed harmonica in those days, favoring sea chanteys, Irish songs and Western tunes. He played “Greensleeves,” too, which may have been written by one of our ancestors, King Henry VIII. My father’s harmonica tone was sweet, with excellent tremolo effect. He could play the guitar and piano as well, with more than passable skill, and he whistled beautifully. “Worried Man Blues” and “Rhapsody in Blue” were among his favorites. He had a natural ear and was self-taught. Above all, Frank Herbert was blessed with a wonderful baritone singing voice, rich and full. My mother commented often on how much she enjoyed hearing him sing.
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