Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century

by Robert A. Heinlein

  It snowed again during the parade march to Soldier Field, and the temperature stuck at ten degrees Fahrenheit. The mids were exultant, their esprit at peak. Just before 2:30 P.M., they marched onto the field for the dedication ceremonies, in columns of companies. Many of them had lost their rubber overshoes in the slush, but they continued to march in place as the Corps of Cadets marched onto the field and took charge of the opposite side of the stadium.

  The dedication ceremonies consisted of speeches—speech after speech. Vice President Dawes spoke for three minutes and sat down with the Army side. The governor of Illinois spoke for seven minutes. The temperature dropped below zero, and it began to sleet.

  The mayor of Chicago spoke for ten minutes, and then the chairman of the South Park Board, in whose jurisdiction Soldier Field was, spoke for an hour and a half.

  The midshipmen stood at parade rest throughout the ceremony. Several of them fainted and were propped up in place. They would not allow themselves to sit until the South Park Board chairman finished his oration .23

  The Army-Navy game that year was “the greatest of its time and … a national spectacle,” in the words of James Harrison, a sportswriter who had been reporting the event for The New York Times for three days.24 Going into the game, Army was favored 6 to 5, but at the halftime, Navy led 14–0.

  The halftime show was a mock battle between a tank and a twenty-foot dreadnaught (models built much like parade floats). Navy won that, too, driving the “mutilated tank” off the field. The Army representatives solemnly escorted Vice President Dawes to the center of the field, and the Navy representatives just as solemnly escorted the vice president to the Navy side of the field, where he remained for the rest of the game.

  In the second half, Army rallied to tie 21–21, but the judges named Navy the national champion.25

  The midshipmen were jubilant, but also determined to display their superior discipline: at dusk Assembly sounded, and the midshipmen formed up into companies and silently marched away.

  Christmas leave was less than a month away.

  Heinlein did not go home that year; nor, apparently, did he leave Annapolis. He may have stayed over in Bancroft Hall, though he might equally have spent the holiday with some of the Annapolis civilian locals. But Heinlein, like so many people raised in poverty, never came to enjoy Christmas. This year, he had the minor dilemma of two girlfriends who would each expect time and attention—and, of course, the expense of two Christmas presents. He resolved his dilemma by writing each an intimate letter, then switching the envelopes, so that each girl got the letter intended for the other—and that was the end of his dilemma.26 There was always another potential drag around the corner—particularly when the rest of the class was away, home, and he was so available.

  Alice McBee sent him a portrait with one of her calling cards: “With lots of love and wishing you were here this Christmas time.” They had, apparently, progressed to a relationship of some sort, though no letters or comments bearing on the subject survive.

  Some of his time that holiday season was spent “babysitting” Buddy Scoles, at Ivar’s request, keeping him out of trouble27 (though Robert liked Scoles and would have helped out in any case). Scoles was a brilliant scholar and would have stood number one in his class if demerits were not factored into his class standing. But he had somehow managed to accumulate 149 demerits for the academic year, which was just three months old. He had six months to go before graduation, but the cutoff point was 150 demerits. If he accumulated even one more demerit, he would be expelled from the Academy and could not graduate.

  Demerits were inevitable and unavoidable, and everybody accumulated them by ones and twos for technical infractions of the Academy rules: dust found on the top of a door at inspection; the bed found unmade, even minutes after reveille—that sort of thing. For more serious offenses, demerits were handed out in much larger chunks. “Frenching out”—academy slang for going AWOL (from the Revolutionary War slang of “French leave” for deserting under fire)—would earn thirty demerits. Being caught with a forbidden radio would earn about the same. Dereliction of duty might merit a hundred or more. Being caught drunk on the Academy grounds might get you more than demerits; you might be expelled. Whatever Scoles had done to earn 149 demerits has not been recorded.

  It was next to impossible to get no demerits for six months.

  But Scoles was very popular with his classmates—and he was also one of the aviators, which made him a member of an elite within the elite of the midshipmen. The Class of ’27 decided jointly they would protect him.

  This, too, was a technical infraction of the Academy’s honor system, but it was done—one of those matters sanctioned by custom. The midshipmen often found it expedient (or sometimes necessary) to get married, and it was customary for their classmates to turn their collective heads about that sort of thing. In this case, their intervention had to be a bit more active. Scoles pledged to be on his best behavior, and the others positioned themselves so they could take on themselves any demerits that came his way.

  Ivar’s relationship with Scoles was a stroke of good fortune for Robert. They were compatible personalities, Heinlein’s steadiness complementing Scoles’s more outgoing nature. Possibly it was Scoles who jollied Heinlein into the Gymkhana skits and acting with the Maskeraders. They both shared the unusual passion for rocketry and spaceflight, and Heinlein wanted to strike for the aviation squad. He had been mad for the romance of flying as long as he could remember:28 he yearned to be a pilot—and probably had since he first read H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes a few years earlier.

  He was able to help babysit Scoles without taking any demerits himself, though he was probably spending a little too much time talking aviation and aeronautical engineering with someone who was on the inside of it, long before the course work would bring him into anything more than fleeting contact with naval aviation. In his pocket notebook, he exhorted himself: “I. Keep fit for Aviation” and worried about increasing his Stoop Falls.

  In January 1927, Captain William F. Halsey was assigned to the Academy to take charge of the Academy’s flight squadron and turn it into a permanent aviation detail, flying and servicing seaplanes on the Severn River. His headquarters for the aviation squad were to be in the Academy’s brig, the captured Spanish-American War ship Reina Mercedes. Halsey would be at the Academy for less than three years, but this assignment changed his career and also changed history, for he went on to become Fleet Admiral “Bull” Halsey in charge of the Third Fleet (Pacific) during World War II as a result of his role in developing naval aviation.

  Halsey’s stint at the Academy could only have made naval aviation more desirable to Heinlein. Halsey was a crusty old salt who said he didn’t trust a man who didn’t smoke and drink.

  “Admiral Halsey’s strongest point,” wrote a staff officer, “was his superb leadership. While always the true professional and exacting professional performance from all subordinates, he had a charismatic effect on them which was like being touched by a magic wand. Anyone so touched was determined to excel.”29

  This was exactly what resonated with Heinlein and what he wanted for himself: a demanding, exciting specialization and a truly superior officer to work with.30 There was another factor he probably wasn’t yet fully aware of: Heinlein had begun to collect special friendships with older, seasoned, professional men—a kind of hero worship within the bounds of friendship that would go with him for the rest of his life.

  He had already built some similar relationships—in his childhood with J. U. Young, an older man (probably in his twenties at the time) in Kansas City, with Hap Gay at the Civilian Military Training Camp, and with his swordmaster, M. Deladrier—and if things had gone the way he wanted, he might have had the same kind of relationship with Captain Halsey.

  When he came to take the qualifying examinations for the flight squad, his reflexes were fast enough, but the test involved a long gadget operated by strings, which he had to bring
together in the middle of a lot of disorienting noise and distractions, and he couldn’t get them together. His stereoscopic vision just wasn’t good enough. He took the test over again, whenever they would allow him to, but he always failed on depth perception and, as time went on, visual acuity.31

  This was more than frustrating for Heinlein: he had been able to approach the physical problems of being underweight when he matriculated, and of being deficient in swimming, with the attitude that hard work would overcome those defects—and in any case, neither deficiency was important to his self-image. But flying was important to him. And you cannot work hard to overcome a defect in depth perception.

  Flying would remain an unfulfilled longing for the rest of his life. It forced him to confront his own limitations in a way that is generally foreign to nineteen-year-olds.

  There are two ways you can take such a confrontation: you can shrug it off and go on, trying to think about it as little as possible. After a while you have it covered over with emotional scar tissue, and you can pretend it never happened, it wasn’t important in the first place. Or you can acknowledge the pain and make the experience part of your character. Heinlein chose the second way: “I compensated somewhat by putting in most of my service in the non-flying end of aviation. But every pilot remains to me the symbol of what I wanted to be and never could be.”32 The Navy gained an aeronautical engineer at a time when aviation engineering was in its infancy—and science fiction eventually gained a number of highly evocative stories based on that unfulfilled longing.

  As early as 1926 and 1927, visual acuity was becoming a concern for Heinlein, as well. The most arbitrary hurdle the midshipmen had to jump was the Navy’s requirement for uncorrected 20/20 vision in the entire officer corps. Eye examinations became a regular part of the school year. Robert was still passing those exams, thanks to the Bates exercises he had done in 1924 and 1925, though Ivar must have been having trouble already. It was becoming unlikely that he would be commissioned after graduation because of his eyesight.33

  Heinlein’s immediate problem, though, was to get through the school year. His graduating yearbook shows him participating in the 1927 Gymkhana in April. No role is recorded for him, but he is included in the Gymkhana portrait of the fencing team, with a fake moustache that makes him look, as he wrote in another context, “made up for amateur theatricals.”34 The fencing page in the 1927 Lucky Bag lists him as a “promising substitute” on the épée team. He always taped a small ivory elephant to his wrist when he competed. “No, I don’t believe in sympathetic magic but it doesn’t hurt to be Kosher about such things.”35

  The class began the first steps in putting together its own yearbook, traditionally called Lucky Bag—the locker on board a ship for storing any miscellaneous stray property found on deck. Heinlein worked as art editor that year,36 though he did not stay with it long enough to be included in the final staff listing.

  And the rough edges continued to be polished. Heinlein learned to dance the customary dances—fox-trot and waltz and box step and a few others—and to conduct himself as a gentleman. Everybody got this kind of quickand-dirty social polish, because the midshipmen came from all manner of social and economic backgrounds, but they must all come out of the process as Officers and Gentlemen, by decree of the United States Congress.

  Certainly he was also working hard at his academics, consistently ranking in the top 8 to 10 percent of his class in every subject except modern languages (still French), though his grade point average, ranging from 3.46 to 3.58, kept him comfortably in the “Distinction” category of an A student. He had a little trouble with “Juice” that spring—electrical engineering and physics. He swotted and by the end of the academic year pulled his class standing up to fifth in the class, comfortably in the “Distinction” range of grade point average.

  The academic year ended in May, and June Week came on and Ivar’s graduation—a gargantuan affair. Even with a high nongraduation rate as Midshipmen went into business or married or otherwise disqualified themselves, the Class of ’27 was, at 574, the largest class in the Academy’s history.

  The Kansas City Star was able to list both Rex Ivar Heinlein and Buddy Scoles among six Kansas City graduates that year. Scoles had been on his best behavior for six excruciating months, and the heroic efforts of the entire class paid off: on graduation day, his pap sheet stood at 149—he had (they had) performed the minor miracle of accumulating no further demerits.

  The traditional Farewell Ball held in Dahlgren Hall drew fifteen thousand, including Rex Ivar and Bam, who traveled to Annapolis to see their favorite graduate, even though it was definite by now that Ivar would not be commissioned, despite a “brilliant” performance,37 because of his eyesight.

  Rex Ivar and Bam had some reason to cheer Robert, too: the Secretary of the Navy presented the athletic awards at the graduation, and Robert received the 1927 Epée Medal for dueling sword championship—which made him, ipso facto, a champion fencer.

  Under ordinary circumstances, Heinlein would have stayed in the Yard for the summer of 1927. Normally, a class will have two summer practice cruises, one at the end of the Plebe year (Fourth Class) and another at the end of the Second Class year. The summer between the cruises the class stayed on the Yard and took the incoming Plebe class in hand.38 Heinlein was spared taking part in the routine hazing of Plebe Summer: in 1927, for reasons not recorded, there was an extra practice cruise. That year he would be going through the Panama Canal and to the West Coast.39 The midshipmen’s Practice Squadron consisted of two ships that year, USS Oklahoma and USS Nevada. He packed up his cruise box and boarded the Okie the day after graduation.

  Ivar went back to Kansas City.

  7

  SECOND CLASS YEAR

  The USS Oklahoma (BB-37) was fifteen years old and had already converted to oil from coal (for which Heinlein and all the midshipmen must have been profoundly grateful). Okie was due for further modernization in the fall and would be out of commission for practice cruises until the summer of 1929, so this cruise to the West Coast was her last voyage before refitting. She was larger than the Utah and had a ship’s complement of 864. What with attrition in the class, things were a lot less crowded this year. She had a larger battery, too—ten 14-inch guns and twenty 5-inch guns—but only four 21-inch torpedo tubes, compared to Utah’s twenty-one.

  Okie’s top speed was 20.5 knots, so she “lackadaisically lumbered,” as the class history has it,1 from the Severn to Colón in Panama, skirting Guantánamo Bay and dropping south to the Canal Zone in eight days. In addition to the teaching drill, which was essentially the same as last year’s (crowding into compartments and hearing the Chief lecture for the departments), there was a new twist this year: this was their “engineering” cruise, and the really important part of the tuition this year was their sketchbooks. They clambered throughout the ship, tracing each of the ship’s systems from stem to stern, and then produced sketches of every element from hatch covers to the most complicated reducing valves. Their sketchbooks were then graded by the officers. Some of the engineering systems they had already encountered, but this year they had the fuel oil systems to deal with, which Utah had not been able to offer them.

  This was a form of teaching that would follow them long after they left Annapolis, since they would be expected to memorize the entire engineering apparatus of each ship they were stationed on, by the same procedure of tracing engineering systems and diagramming them in sketchbooks.

  The midshipmen were actually allowed and required to stand watches this year, in the overheated engine rooms, “gather[ing] many crum[b]s of black gang lore.”2 So they felt less like supercargo and more like something that might someday become a naval officer. “The Old Okie [is] … a person to me. I’ve sketched her fuel lines down in her bilges. I was turret captain of her number two turret. I have been in her main battery fire control party when her big guns were talking.”3

  Colón, at the foot of the San Blas range of mountains,
was the Atlantic terminus (as Panama City is the Pacific terminus) of the fifty-mile-long Panama Canal, a series of engineered canals connecting natural lakes and drowned valleys that had been completed only in 1914 and was known informally shipboard as the “Big Ditch.”

  After a few days in Colón, Okie headed into the Canal and the midshipmen had a chance to marvel at the gigantic and intricate engineering work of the locks. It was a passage Heinlein was to make many times later, but it never lost its fascination for him. He got badly sunburned leaning on the rail watching the waters boil up under the ship in the deep concrete box of the Gatun Lock. He was burning—bad enough to leave permanent scars—but could not tear himself away from the stupendous sight.4

  Three days in the canal, and twelve days after leaving Colón, they anchored at San Diego, a major naval installation, for a week. There they were greeted by tremendous crowds of people—some sightseers, to be sure, but mostly vendors local and from as far away as Tijuana.

  After four days in port, they went north and east up the Pacific Coast, retracing the route of the Spanish explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and just about as slow as the old sailing ships: they averaged about ten knots. After three days—on July 3, 1927—they rumbled through the still open Golden Gate (this was nearly ten years before the Golden Gate Bridge was built) and anchored in the Port of San Francisco for nine days. Heinlein was footloose and on his own in San Francisco for his twentieth birthday.