But trick questions called for trick answers; [he] found that an acceptable answer to that one was: “Yes sir!—in my left ear.” Or possibly his belly button.
But most trick questions were intended to trap a plebe into giving a meek answer—and meekness was a mortal sin. Say a first classman said, “Mister, would you say I was handsome?”—an acceptable answer would be, “Perhaps your mother would say so, sir—but not me.” Or, “Sir, you are the handsomest man I ever saw who was intended to be an ape.”
Such answers were chancy—they might flick a first classman on the raw—but they were safer than meek answers.10
When the Plebe gave the wrong answer—“wrong” defined by the First Classman in his sole discretion—he would be told: “Mister, report to my room after dinner!” and often, “Bring your own broom!” When the hapless Plebe arrived in the First Classman’s room he would be told to “bend over and assume the attitude,” and then a variable number of whacks would be administered. Physical abuse of the Plebes was expressly forbidden—though, again, unofficially tolerated so long as kept within recognized and traditional bounds.
As this recollection suggests, the Plebes were not expected to be entirely passive: Heinlein brought down the wrath of one of the school’s graduating star football players, Royce Flippin (Class of 1926), on himself with one act of defiance. Years later, Heinlein’s close friend Cal Laning called the incident to mind in a letter to Virginia Heinlein:
Re the little sketch in my last letter, suggesting you show it to Bob and see if he remembers it. Can’t blame for forgetting. He has risen high since chalking that on his plebe or youngster year room door in the Fourth Battalion wing. Ask again, if he remembers his penaltude under Royce Flippin, our Batt. Commander. Bob expressed his revolting mood in that secret hieroglyph—two balls suspended with prick rampant over four horizontal stripes, latter stripes symbolizing Flippin’s rank. “Fagin, youse is a prick.”11
Beating with a broom handle was the traditional limit of physical punishment, though if the First Classman did not feel inclined for the salutary exercise of administering the beating, the Plebe could be required to do push-ups or some other form of exercise until he amusingly gave out. For most of the upperclassmen it was a mild and sublimated but publicly acceptable form of sadism. Sometimes the invisible and undefined line would be crossed:
But no matter how carefully a plebe tried to meet impossible standards, about once a week some first classman would decide that he needed punishment—arbitrary punishment without trial. This could run from mild, such as exercises repeated to physical collapse … up to paddling on the buttocks … . I’m not speaking of paddling children sometimes receive. These beatings were delivered with the flat of a sword or with a worn-out broom that amounted to a long, heavy club. Three blows delivered by a grown man in perfect health would leave the victim’s bottom a mass of purple bruises and blood blisters, accompanied by excruciating pain.12
That was under the best of circumstances—the dark side of institutionalized “good clean fun.” The fact that it was institutionalized, and that there were therefore unwritten but understood limits, was the only slender protection the Plebes enjoyed.
For some midshipmen, the sadism was not so sublimated. Heinlein attracted the attention of one of these, First Classman “Marsh”—Marshall Barton—Gurney, Class of ’26.13
Heinlein had undoubtedly called attention to himself during Plebe Summer with the kind of mental arithmetic tricks he outlined for David Lamb in Time Enough for Love.14 Perhaps also he slipped and let out the kind of indiscreet remarks found in his letters home about the “insufficiencies” he encountered that he never expected to see at the Academy (certainly there are admonitions to himself about keeping his mouth shut in his personal notes).15 This would have made him a smart-ass Plebe likely to be targeted for taking down a peg—or several pegs—by the First Classmen returning from September leave.
Gurney may not have been quite stable to begin with: once, at mess, he had been offended by a remark made by one of the Plebes, and he sprayed the entire table with a handy bottle of ketchup. Heinlein found that particularly offensive, as he hated to be caught with less-than-perfect kit.16 Any display of irritation by a Plebe would, of course, be cause for swats—with wooden coat hangers in Gurney’s case—much more painful and potentially damaging. Gurney’s 1926 Lucky Bag portrait lists a Black N with five asterisks. Gurney seemed to have had an unusual degree of trouble with authority.17
Gurney had a wicked imagination, exercised to its fullest extent in inventing special torments for Heinlein—within the lines, mostly, but highly unusual nonetheless. During the summer, the Plebes had learned to eat at attention and field the upperclassmen’s trick questions. Gurney gave this a twist: Heinlein had to get under the table. He took his plate with him and managed to keep from starving.18 Barely. This went on for some time. Gurney was just getting warmed up.
Probably he figured out that some of Heinlein’s answers involved memorization, so he thought up memorization hazing schemes and made Heinlein learn the entirety of Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 poem “Mary Gloster,”19 a 380-line ballad of forty-seven eight-line stanzas, in a difficult meter combining iambic and anapestic feet, in a difficult rhyme scheme. The poem is about a bitter Victorian industrialist who wants to be buried at sea, where he buried his wife decades before, but does not trust his son to carry out his last wishes and decides to take the heir down with him—not one of Kipling’s more pleasant efforts. And then the twist: Gurney required Heinlein to recite it upside down, in the shower.20
When “Mary Gloster” palled, Gurney switched the game: Heinlein would have to memorize something even less appealing: fifty five-place logarithms each day.21 After a while, Gurney lost interest, but logarithms are very useful for engineers: Heinlein kept up the project for his own uses. He added this autobiographical flourish to his description of David Lamb’s hazing in Time Enough for Love:
The first classman grew tired of the matter when [he] had completed only the first six hundred figures—but [he] kept at it another three weeks through the first thousand—which gave him the first ten thousand figures by interpolation and made him independent of log tables, a skill that was of enormous use to him from then on, computers being effectively unknown in those days.22
The extracurricular hazing undoubtedly had an adverse impact on his schoolwork and may account for the drop in his grades during the last quarter of 1925. But as spring came on the First Classmen became preoccupied with their own pregraduation rituals, and things let up on him a bit.
Nor was that his only salvation: not all the upperclassmen entered into hazing so enthusiastically—and there was the traditional, if unacknowledged, relief valve of “spooning,” as well. Usually on the basis of some personal connection—family or friends of friends or perhaps a romantic interest in a sister or sometimes just coming from the same area of the country—an upperclassman would take one or more Plebes under his wing and “spoon on” them. Almost everybody was spooned on by someone for some reason,23 so the Plebes had a little relief from the strict discipline; they could go to the upperclassman’s room and gripe or otherwise let down their hair.
Although Heinlein never mentioned a spooner in letters home, there were a number of minor personal connections that would have made such spooning possible—a number of upperclassmen from Kansas City, for instance, or friends of Ivar’s two years ahead of the Plebes. By coincidence, there were five Kansas Citians each in the ’27 and ’29 classes. One of the ’27 boys, Albert Scoles, known at the Academy as “Buddy” (nearly everyone had a nickname at the Academy; Heinlein’s was the pedestrian “Bob”), was a friend to both Ivar and Robert for the rest of their lives, and it’s quite likely he and Ivar both spooned on Robert to some degree—probably Buddy Scoles more than Ivar, for Robert and he shared a fanatical belief in rocketry and spaceflight, so they had a great deal of common ground. Continuing from the family setting into the Academy, Robert’s relationship
with Ivar was one of rivalry, trying to catch up or recapitulate the achievements Ivar seemed to pull off without effort. Many of Ivar’s achievements Robert was able to duplicate, but it was a good many years before he could start being himself instead of a surrogate Ivar.
With the competitive season coming on, Heinlein was enjoying the fencing. It was a sport that relied on quickness and agility rather than strength and bulk, and it suited him well, as he had extraordinarily fast reflexes. 24 He might have gone in for gymnastics as well—he admired his roommate’s progress with rings and trapeze and tumbling (and later regretted not taking them up himself)25—but he would have had to give up sword, since they were both winter sports. He stayed with épée.
Fencing was doing all right for him. A local (Annapolis) newspaper clipping in his scrapbook, undated but apparently from December 1925, praises the Plebe fencing team and mentions him:
The Plebe fencers won their third straight meet by decisively defeating Forest Park High, of Baltimore … . The Plebes presented a strong aggressive team, from which the Forest Park aggregation could not take a single match … . Besides the full team of Wait, Heinlein and Stewart, the Plebes have two sabre men and one epee man, all of whom should furnish valuable reserve strength for next year’s varsity.
That December, he was able to make it home (though not in time for Christmas, as leave started on December 23 and ended on January 3, with three-day train trips on either end, leaving not much time to spend with family). His father gifted him with $100 he later confessed he could ill afford. But on the whole it was a happy occasion. His brother Larry, in a letter Robert found waiting for him when he got back to Annapolis, told him he had acquitted himself well: “[Y]ou did just fine on your leave and are about the finest brother a man could have.” Larry added words of support and encouragement that show Robert’s affection for him was reciprocated:
Keep ever before you a picture of the kind of a man your Mother thinks you will be and try hard to be like it … .
If [Alice and I] didn’t give you all the time and attention you felt we should please realize that we were kept busy by circumstances over which we had no control.26
In closing, Larry said his note was “Not much of a letter, but it means a lot.” It did mean a lot: Heinlein kept this letter among his personal papers for the rest of his life.
Back at Annapolis, Heinlein’s grades gradually pulled up, as did his class standing, which was recalculated afresh for each monthly report card. He maintained his first-in-class for deportment through spring, but he had other things to occupy his attention, as well. He mentioned having a “harem” of girls interested in him 27—a welcome change from high school.
He was also acting a bit: he had a role in that year’s Gymkhana, a kind of combined cabaret and exhibition presented in the spring each year until it was discontinued in 1928. “I am a Paris swell who gets in a duel over a girl in a café, and kill[s] the other guy.”28 At that, he was lucky—Plebes were usually assigned the “girl” roles in the Academy’s theatricals. He kept a studio photo of the production in his scrapbook, but he is also pictured in the 1927 The Lucky Bag in his “Paris swell” moustache.
He listed his activities in his pocket notebook:
1.Log
1.Lucky Bag [sic the numbering]
2.Masqueraders
3.Gymn-khana
4.Christmas Card [Committee]
5.Hop Com[mittee]
6.Class Ring
7.Juice [Electricity] gang
8.Reef Points [the Academy’s little blue guidebook to local customs and jargon]
He left numbered lines for three more activities, never filled in.
Spring was not all jollity, though: he had a second set of Dark Days29 that year as preparations—expensive preparations—for the upcoming summer practice cruise forced him to confront the fact that he was already running a permanent financial deficit (or close to it). In one page of his pocket notebook, he instructed himself:
VI
Live within my means
a. Don’t accumulate grad debts.
b. Don’t try to come home Christmas at all.
He had to do something to cope with the flood of expenses, major and minor, that were beyond his experience. He drafted a letter to his father:
Now about money matters. I hate to bring them up but I don’t know what to do. As it appears now I will only have enuf in Sept, to pay my fare both ways, clean up my authorized Sept. Debts (Lucky Bag, Log, etc.) and perhaps have $25 left. What am I to do? I am promised to pay you $50 and then I won’t have anything for Sept. leave expenses and I have to have shoes, hat, and a couple of shirts. My amt. available was knocked $40 this month when I had to order a new suit of service and that was something I wasn’t figuring on. Also you sent me $10 and I owe $5 around here (I had to buy a cruise suitcase, some other clothes I forgot to requisition, etc.). Also I am buying a raincoat from a 1st classman which takes another $5 as we are going back to the old style in raincoats and a new one would cost me $18 in Oct. Dad, what am I to do? I can’t ask you for money for I know you are doing all you can for me, but what else can I do? I am starting on a cruise of ten thousand miles broke and have the prospect of another broke leave ahead of me. Isn’t there some way I can borrow some money to make me able to enjoy life up here, so I can reciprocate when some of the fellows give me a treat, or so I don’t have to save for a month in order to go to a picture show? According to agreement I haven’t dragged30 since Xmas, but it won’t be any better next year for our monthly money is always used up for assessments, collections, etc. Sometimes I feel tempted to resign and come home and get a job and live decently in a way we can afford instead of trying to keep up a false position up here. I’m about thru. And if my eyes hurt me much more I know I am. Tell me what to do, Dad, for I am pretty far down in the dumps, but at the same time not low enuf to accept money when I know it means denial on your part. Can’t we work out some plan? Each time I figure to get by something else comes up. Like that telegram the other day. I wanted to send it but didn’t have the money. Young Hines was with me and suggested we telegraph. I told him I didn’t have the cash so he paid for it as he insisted I send. Naturally I’ll pay him back but you can see how it goes when I am with boys who have always had plenty of money.
When I hold back on acct. of funds they’ll treat and I’ll have to manage to repay it somehow.
Well, I’ve unburdened myself considerably but I know you’ll understand how I feel. My Dad always does.
Love, Bob
And a brave P.S.:
Remember I said I’d accept no more money like the “denial” $20 of last July and the $100 of Xmas.31
This was the last time he would unburden himself to his father. He got through his cruise, and Larry was able to help out with $8 a month, starting in July.
The last month of spring and the last graded month of the academic year was May; the term was to end on May 26 that year. After that came the rituals of June Week and the (welcomed) departure of the graduating First Class. By tradition, the Plebe class assumed command for one day, the “hundredth night” before graduation.
Heinlein was doing well: he had pulled all his grades back into the “Distinction” range, and his standing in all subjects was in the top 15 percent of the class.
A few days before the end of term, on May 22, Heinlein received devastating news: his sister Rose Elizabeth had fallen out of the family’s touring car and was crushed under its wheels.32 She was seven years old and Robert’s favorite among his brothers and sisters. He must have taken it very badly: he received five demerits. That same day, Robert and Ivar were granted emergency leave.
When they got to the hospital, Rose Betty was in critical condition. She recognized him and spoke to him. Soon after, she died. His “little girlfriend” was gone. Robert was devastated—but it was, if anything, harder on his father.
Rex Senior had been driving, and he was in a state of complete emotional collapse, beyond mere g
rief. Rose Elizabeth’s death struck him in his deepest beliefs, and he would never recover:
The emotional dilemma created in him by trying to reconcile this with the benevolent, personal God he prayed to and had served seven days a week for a lifetime was too much for him. He flipped and was never normal again … . A personal God is a pretty cozy thing to have around, and I sometimes miss no longer having Him—but any caring that He does cannot be translated into human values. So don’t stake your sanity on it.33
There was no time for mourning; both Robert and Ivar had to be back in Annapolis for their respective practice cruises. They hurried back to the Academy and packed their gear into the wooden crates called “cruise boxes.”
At the graduation ceremonies in June that year, Heinlein received the Award of the Fourth Class Fencing Team—though he would not officially become a Fourth Classman until the ceremonies concluded. Following the graduation ceremonies, the Plebes traditionally turned their jackets inside out and climbed the monuments on the campus to put a cap on the top. Over the years, this ritual has become restricted to the tallest, the Herndon Monument, and the ritual is known as “the Herndon.” Tradition had it that the Plebe who got his cap atop the Herndon Monument would be the class’s first to make Admiral. The incoming class would then lose their Plebe status (to the equally traditional shout “There are no more Plebes!”) and become 4/C—Fourth Classmen—for a few days, until the commissions began to arrive for the departing First Class. Then they would become Youngsters—though some hard-liners hold that the Youngster year actually began with the return from their first practice cruise.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 8