RAH, letter to Leon Stover, 06/08/86.
RAH, letter to Alfred Bester, 04/039; in a letter to Joanna Russ, 04/10/79, he implies the books were borrowed from the Kansas City Public Library.
RAH, letter to Judy Lynn Benjamin, 12/12/73.
RAH, draft (unsent) letter to George “McC” (the only identification), 02/13/58.
RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 03/04/63.
RAH’s official biography for More Junior Classics, 04/10/57.
RAH, letter to Ruth Clement Hoyer, 05/22/46.
Wells was already having disagreements with the Marxist, class-warfare strains of socialism in England, grown popular since the takeover by the Bolshevik communists of the moderate, Menshevik revolution in Russia. Marxism was the Zionism of socialism, and Russia was its homeland. Wells thought Marxist socialism—communism—intellectually and morally defective.
RAH, letter to Leon Stover, 06/08/86.
3. A Jazz Age Teenager (pages 33–47)
RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 02/17/59.
RAH, letter to Ted Carnell, 02/22/65.
Feruling: striking (a student), usually on the hand, with a rod usually of wood or iron.
Bam Heinlein, quoted in a letter from RAH to Rick Lawler, 11/21/73.
Bam Heinlein, quoted in a letter from RAH to Rick Lawler, 11/21/73.
RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 02/17/59.
See The Centralian for the years 1920–1924, but particularly a list of his activities in his 1924 (graduating) yearbook, p. 76.
RAH, letter to Richard Pope, 09/25/74; no copies of the ads or pictures have been preserved.
RAH, telephone interview by Ben Bova, 06/29/79.
Heinlein’s Guest-of-Honor Speech for MidAmeriCon, 1976, published in Requiem , ed. Yoji Kondo, 209.
RAH, letter to Harlan Ellison, 09/09/61.
RAH, letter to Leon Stover, 06/08/86.
Virginia Heinlein’s recollections, recounted in correspondence with Ron Harrison, memorialized in Harrison’s letter to Virginia Heinlein, 09/02/92.
RAH, letter to Harlan Ellison, 09/09/61; see also RAH, letter to Poul Anderson, 10/02/61.
Wells recounted his sense of inspiration (and then disappointment) with Wilson in The World of William Clissold at pages 294–325, but his sense of America as the country of the future had been a continuing trope in Wells’s journalistic works since his first trip to the United States in 1906.
RAH, letter to Poul Anderson, 10/02/61.
RAH, unpublished telephone interview by Ben Bova, 06/29/79.
RAH, letter to Tom Eaton, 12/12/73.
RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 04/06/63.
RAH, letter to Marian Zimmer Bradley, 04/06/63.
Several scrapbooks are preserved in “The Robert A. Heinlein Archive” of Special Collections and Archives of the University Library, University of California, Santa Cruz. The oldest, its binding now disintegrated, covers Heinlein’s youth through his Naval career.
Don Johnstone, quoted in Dorothy Martin Heinlein, “Relatively Speaking” (unpublished paper written ca. March 2006).
RAH, letter to Chris Moskowitz, 09/06/61. The timing of the loan of his brother to the FBI’s predecessor is not fixed in the correspondence, except that Lawrence Heinlein was a major at the time, which places it in the 1920s and most probably during Heinlein’s high school days.
RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 02/17/59.
RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 02/17/59; see also Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Second Series, Tape B, Side B (September 12–14, 2000).
John Fiske was an American evolutionist, very popular in the last decades of the nineteenth century, who defended Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Huxley. His own contribution to Darwinian thinking was to point out the evolutionary significance of humans’ prolonged gestation and infancy.
RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 02/17/59.
J. Neil Schulman, The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana (Culver City, Calif.: Pulpless.com, 1990), 146–47. The interview was conducted in 1973.
Self-help and self-improvement movements flourished in the United States during the late nineteenth century, nourished by circuits of lecturers and entertainers. The Chautauqua circuit was the best known of these “lyceum bureaus”—“the most American thing in America,” as Theodore Roosevelt called it—and lasted well into the 1930s. Lecturers were the backbone of the Chautauqua, but also musical revues and classical and contemporary Broadway plays.
Schulman, The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana, 146–47.
RAH, letter to Mr. Josselyn, 08/28/53.
RAH, letter to Robert Bloch, 10/11/71.
RAH, letter to Sheri Harris, 03/19/83.
R. S. Leigh, Bureau of Navigation (BuNav), letter to RAH, 09/19/23.
The Pendergast machine evolved and deteriorated over the years as control passed from brother to brother to son. Until the 1930s, it was rather more benign, based in Jim Pendergast’s saloon: city graft to a concrete-and-paving business owned by Tom Pendergast, illegal gambling, and wholesale liquor sales during Prohibition. The line between political machine and crime organization blurred further in 1926, when a Chicago-style mobster was ceded control of part of the machine and expanded illegal activities to prostitution and protection.
By 1933, the scandal over the Union Station Massacre (which also affected Heinlein—see chapter 14) focused attention on Tom Pendergast, who was losing enormous amounts of money on horse racing and consequently demanding more and more money from his machine/crime organization. Eventually (1939) Pendergast was jailed for income tax evasion—by the same prosecution that sent Chicago’s Al Capone to jail. An attempt to revive the Pendergast machine in the 1940s had only limited and temporary success. The age of the machine was over.
President Warren G. Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, Albert B. Fall, granted oil leases in Wyoming (the “Teapot Dome” oil field) and California in exchange for personal loans at low and no interest—a bribery scandal that erupted in 1922, two years into the Harding administration.
President Harding’s slogan for his Republican administration had been “less government in business; more business in government.” But the business turned out to be the machine politics of Tammany Hall and Kansas City, on a national scale.
President Harding died of a heart attack in 1923, but the Teapot Dome scandal tainted his administration’s historical reputation. It was not completely resolved until 1929, in an anomalous decision Heinlein noted elsewhere: Secretary Fall was convicted of receiving a bribe that Doheny (of California) was acquitted of giving.
By coincidence, that same Doheny was the founder of the family fortune that established the trust fund that supported Larry Niven while he was learning to write science fiction.
RAH, “The Happy Days Ahead,” Expanded Universe, 537.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 11/05/46.
Undated clipping from The Kansas City Star preserved in Heinlein’s scrapbook.
The clipping, the anonymous letter of complaint, and the petition are all preserved in Heinlein’s scrapbook.
The Centralian (1924), 76.
The Centralian (1924), 78.
Alice Marie Evans, Christmas card to Robert and Virginia Heinlein, 1973.
RAH, letter to Poul Anderson, 12/13/61.
The relevant clippings in Heinlein’s personal scrapbook were pasted in without dates but must have been before graduation in June 1924.
Deleted text from “The Happy Days Ahead,” Ms. in 181b of Expanded Universe, RAH Archive, UCSC, page 595 of ms.
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/20/42.
RAH, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, 02/25/49.
RAH, letter to Christopher B. Timmers, 01/31/72.
Capt. C. Marchant, Company C, 110th Engineers, letter to RAH, 08/28/24. The letter is part of RAH’s “Naval Jacket,” that is, the dossier of the Navy’s records. RAH’s Naval Jacket is in the RAH Archive, UCSC.
RAH, letter to P
oul Anderson, 09/06/61.
The formation of this junior college is mentioned briefly in the Will and Ariel Durant joint autobiography; Robert’s sister-in-law Dorothy Martin Heinlein remembers that the Kansas City Superintendent of Schools had renovated the downtown facility of the first high school in Kansas City, which had since been abandoned, and offered two years of college for a tuition of $8 per semester, with classes provided from 8 A.M. to 4 P.M. five days per week. The tuition was apparently first-rate, as when she transferred to another college she was told to sit out her French classes for the first semester. “Relatively Speaking” (unpublished paper written ca. March 2006).
RAH, letter to Poul Anderson, 07/21/61. In another letter (to Lt. Sandra Fulton, of the U.S. Navy, dated 08/07/65) Heinlein says the teacher of calculus was a Negro.
4. Plebe Summer (pages 48–60)
“The Class of Nineteen Twenty-nine,” The Lucky Bag (1928), 228. The Lucky Bag is the name of the United States Naval Academy’s annual yearbook.
Telegram preserved in RAH’s scrapbooks at RAH Archive, UCSC.
RAH, letter to Robert Louis Stevenson, 12/12/73.
RAH, letter to F. M. Busby, 07/22/61.
RAH, letter to Jerry Pournelle, 02/16/68.
RAH, Plebe Summer letter addressed to “Folks” on Carvel Hall stationery, dated only “Monday” (June 15, 1925).
Edward F. Hutchins, commenting on Novak’s portrait in the 1929 The Lucky Bag.
Class history for Plebe Summer, The Lucky Bag (1929), p 68. Heinlein captured a little of this excited confusion in the early chapters of his 1948 juvenile novel, Space Cadet.
Although in use for a very long time, the term middie for midshipman is considered insulting at the Naval Academy today; mid and mids is considered acceptable.
RAH, Plebe Summer letter addressed “Dear Dad,” dated “Saturday” (probably June 20, 1925).
RAH, letter to Ayako Hasegawa, 06/11/81.
“Rank” denotes a particular position in a particular table of organization; “rating” is the grade attained within the Navy as a whole.
“The pap sheet” is a conduct report. The Lighthouse: The Plebe’s Bible (1929), 23.
Most of the detailed information about discipline and circumstances at the U.S. Naval Academy at Heinlein’s time in these chapters is derived from an afternoon’s interview with Admiral Ignatius “Pete” Gallantin, Class of ’32, given the author on March 31, 2001, in the Admiral’s home in Atlantic Beach, Florida. Admiral Gallantin was sworn in in 1928.
RAH, letter to Robert D. Kephart, 11/08/73.
RAH, letter to Bam Lyle Heinlein, undated but sometime in July 1925 “I went out for track today in high jumps. The head coach thinks he is going to make a jumper out of me.”
RAH, letter to Alfred Bester, 04/03/59: “As for personal combat or even body-contact sports (other than those involving bedsprings), well, I never climbed into a boxing ring in my life without wishing to Christ that I were somewhere else! I disliked boxing and wrestling so much that, as soon as I had passed my first-class tests in each, I quit them permanently.”
RAH, Plebe Summer letter addressed “Dear Sis” (probably Louise Heinlein), dated “Friday” (possibly July 31, 1925).
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Second Series, Tape C, Side B (September 10–12, 2000).
Robb White (1909–1990), Class of ’31—author of Up Periscope! (1956) and Deathwatch (1972)—observed that Heinlein was “the world’s fastest rope climber” at Annapolis. Nathan Howe, e-mail to author, 11/04/2010.
RAH, letter to Alfred Bester, 04/03/59.
The pragmatic and utilitarian rationale Heinlein advanced in “The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail” (part of Time Enough for Love [1973])—namely, to avoid being tagged for the more dangerous sports—did not apply in his own case (for one thing, weighing in under 110 pounds, he was in little danger of being tagged for the football squad or, indeed, any of the body-contact sports). The basic story of “David Lamb” belongs to another Plebe, Delos Wait, whom Heinlein knew, filled out with some general autobiographical information about hazing and life at the Academy—plus, of course, his customary writerly distancing and “making strange,” a device for convincingly portraying a tale told by a 2,600-year-old man to people with no cultural context to understand the details.
See, for example, RAH’s letter to Jerry Pournelle, 03/14/63.
RAH, Expanded Universe, 452.
RAH, letter to his mother, 07/07/25.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by Phillip Homer Owenby (1994), Tape 11, Side A.
“Youngster Year” section of the class history in The Lucky Bag (1929), 86–89.
RAH, Plebe Summer letter to his mother, dated “Thursday” (probably June 25, 1925).
RAH, Plebe Summer letter to his mother, dated “Friday” (probably July 3, 1925).
RAH, Plebe Summer letter to his mother, dated “Tuesday” (probably June 23, 1925).
The listing immediately follows “Worldly Wisdom” and consists of the names Tedder, Latimore (settled!), Jacobs, Anderson, Finnegan. Only Finnegan’s name recurs in Heinlein’s personal history.
RAH, Plebe Summer letter to his mother, Tuesday 07/07/25.
RAH, Plebe Summer birthday letter to his mother dated “Sunday” (probably July 12, 1925).
“Plebe Summer” section of the class history in The Lucky Bag (1929), 68.
RAH, Plebe Summer letter to his brother Larry, dated “Thursday” (probably August 20, 1925).
RAH, letter to Ayako Hasegawa, 06/11/81.
I have been unable to discover who “Bljdf” might be. After the initial publication of this biography, a number of people suggested this might be a shiftedsubstitution cipher, with the “l” unintentionally (?) left unshifted. That is, the letters in the cipher are substituted for the immediately preceding letter of the alphabet. Thus “b” substitutes for “a,” “j” for “i,” and so forth. “Bldjf” is thus “Alice [McBee]—which seems to fit the sentiment of the notation.
RAH, Plebe Summer letter to his father, dated “Saturday” (probably June 27, 1925).
RAH, Plebe Summer letter to his mother, dated “Wednesday” (August 26, 1925).
RAH, Plebe Summer letter to his father, dated “Monday” (probably July 6, 1925).
“Extra duty” is defined in the 1929 Lighthouse: The Plebe’s Bible as “a form of hazing practiced by the Executive Department.”
There is a photograph of the fire engine in the 1928 Lucky Bag; a photo captioned “Fire in Isherwood Hall” appears on page 70 of the 1929 Lucky Bag.
RAH, Plebe Summer letter addressed “Dear Folks,” dated “Sunday” (August 23, 1925).
RAH, letter to his parents, 08/25/25.
RAH, Plebe Summer letter addressed “Dear Folks,” dated “Sunday” (August 23, 1925).
5. Plebe Year (pages 61–73)
Jack Thornton, “J. Fish,” The Heinlein Journal, No. 10 (January 2002), 10.
RAH, letter to Dr. R. P. Boas, 06/21/79.
RAH, telephone interview by Ben Bova, 06/29/79. The old seawall along which Albert Abraham Michelson’s measurements were made was removed for the construction of new buildings; a brass line set into the concrete in the plaza east of the Nimitz Library preserves the location of the seawall, and therefore of Michelson’s experimental measurements of the speed of light when he taught at the Academy.
Admiral Ignatius “Pete” Gallantin, interview; 03/31/2001.
Admiral Gallantin interview.
Admiral Gallantin interview.
Admiral Gallantin interview.
Heinlein and Teague met up again and resumed their friendship when Heinlein settled in Los Angeles in 1934.
Admiral Gallantin (Class of 1932) confirmed the overall accuracy of the picture of hazing at the Naval Academy in Time Enough for Love in his taped oral interview with the author, 03/31/2001.
RAH, Time Enough for Love, 78–79.
Cal Laning, letter to Virginia Heinlein, 05/21/87.
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RAH, Time Enough for Love, 79.
Heinlein left no direct description of the hazing he received at Gurney’s hands, except for some of the details he memorialized in Time Enough for Love; all the other details here are recounted by Virginia Heinlein as recollections passed on to her by Robert Heinlein.
RAH, Time Enough for Love, 76–80.
Heinlein carried a personal notebook through his years at the Academy; it was given by Virginia Heinlein to the author.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 64