The episode of the ketchup bottle and Heinlein’s reaction is recounted in Virginia Heinlein’s e-mail to the author, 01/05/2002.
The Black N is the flip side of the Navy’s Gold N given for athletic achievement. Since 1912 it has been given out for serious offenses against military discipline, meriting a week in the Academy’s brig, then the captured Spanish-American War ship Reina Mercedes (the Reina has since been removed). For each additional Black N offense, an asterisk would accompany the N. Gurney’s five asterisks meant a total of six weeks spent “in hack” (naval slang for “under arrest”).
Virginia Heinlein, e-mail to author, 05/27/2002.
RAH’s inscription to Marsh Gurney on the 1960 list of inscribed copies of Starship Troopers to be sent out. See n. 22, infra.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 06/14/1999; see also Virginia Heinlein, e-mail to author, 05/27/2002.
RAH’s 1960 list of inscribed copies of Starship Troopers to be sent out: “To Marsh Gurney, ’26 who made me memorize log tables, the Mary Gloster & beat my tail—and thereby shaped my character for the rest of my life.”
RAH, Time Enough for Love, 78.
Admiral Gallantin interview.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Second Series, Tape C, Side B (September 10–12, 2000).
RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 12/25/63.
Lawrence Lyle Heinlein to RAH, 01/01/26, in Heinlein’s scrapbook, RAH Archive, UCSC.
RAH, letter to Bam Heinlein, dated “Tuesday” (probably dating from about April 1926, as it is before the Gymkhana that year).
RAH, letter to his mother, dated “Tuesday” (possibly February or March 1926).
“Dark Days” is U.S. Naval Academy slang usually applied to the months of February and March, when the winter has been unrelieved too long.
Academy slang for dating.
Draft undated but probably about May 1926.
Dorothy Martin Heinlein, “Relatively Speaking” (unpublished paper written ca. March 2006).
RAH, letter to Jerry Pournelle, 03/31/63.
6. Youngster Year (pages 74–86)
RAH, letter to Alice Dalgliesh, 02/17/59.
Admiral Gallantin interview.
“Youngster Cruise” entry, The Lucky Bag (1929), 79.
Memorialized in the 1927 Lucky Bag, 92.
The Lucky Bag (1927), 96.
RAH, letter to Stephen King, 08/08/84.
“Youngster Cruise” entry, The Lucky Bag (1929), 82.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 7, Side A (February [27?,] 2000).
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 7, Side A (February [27?,] 2000).
Although this recounting is taken from Virginia Heinlein’s recollections of the incident told her directly by her husband, Heinlein also recalled this incident in I Will Fear No Evil (1970), slightly adapting it to the fictional recollections of the much older protagonist, Johann Sebastian Bach Smith.
Mrs. Heinlein’s various e-mail recollections of Heinlein’s factual recounting of this incident vary in small details; in one recounting, they purchased the car for $75 and sold it in Kansas City for $50 (06/14/2002); in another, they purchased the car for $50 and sold it for $75 (06/10/2001). In the first taped interview— the first series (which runs from late February to the first few days of March 2000)—she says, “When they got to Kansas City, they sold it for $45, which was more than they paid for it.”
There are in Heinlein’s letters several approving references to the “adult” entertainments offered by Kansas City under the Pendergasts, which must include this period as well as his later (1934) trip home. See, for example, RAH’s letter to Earl Kemp, 01/20/57.
There are many informal recountings of this part of the Pendergast machine’s history. See, for example, David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 207.
RAH, letter to Lois Lavendar, 02/17/68.
RAH, letter to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, 06/20/73.
Admiral Gallantin interview; Virginia Heinlein, in an e-mail to the author dated 01/05/2002, says this was the case with the first-ranked scholar in Heinlein’s class.
Bill Mullins, “Biographical Notes on Robert Heinlein and His Family and Associates,” The Heinlein Journal, No. 20 (January 2007), 8.
Dr. Eric Picholle, the foremost French authority on Heinlein, suggests Heinlein probably meant avec des points d’arête.
RAH, letter to Jerry Pournelle, 03/14/63.
The 1929 Lucky Bag has a very extensive discussion of this trip, and the details of this telling are drawn substantially from the Lucky Bag class history.
Preserved in Heinlein’s personal scrapbook at the RAH Archive, UCSC.
RAH, handwritten letter; no addressee, in scrapbook.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 12/12/2000.
James R. Harrison’s reports had been running near the middle of the daily paper from the arrival of the midshipmen on Thursday through Saturday; the full report on the game was the lead article in the Sunday New York Times: “110,000 See Army and Navy Battle to a 21 to 21 Tie in First Game in the West.” The quotation is on the page 28 continuation of the story.
“Youngster Year” entry, The Lucky Bag (1929), 87–88.
Virginia Heinlein, IM with author, 12/16/01.
RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74, p. 62.
RAH, letter to Ruth Clement Hoyer, 05/22/46.
James M. Merrill, A Sailor’s Admiral: A Biography of William F. Halsey (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1976), 70. The staff officer is not further identified.
RAH, letter to T. B. Buell, 10/03/74.
RAH, letter to Fred Smith, 05/28/57.
RAH, letter to Fred Smith, 05/28/57.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Misc. Notes First Series, Tape A, Side A (September 4–8, 2001).
RAH, Starman Jones (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953; Pocket Books, 2005).
RAH, letter to Chris Moskowitz, 09/06/61.
RAH, letter to Luis E. Bejarano, 11/08/54.
Remarks of a classmate named Faigle, quoted in RAH’s letter to his mother, 07/11/61.
Admiral Gallantin interview.
The Navy Register itinerary of the 1927 practice cruise squadron, courtesy Special Collections of the Nimitz Library, U.S. Naval Academy.
7. Second Class Year (pages 87–96)
“Second Class Cruise” section of the class history in the 1929 Lucky Bag, 91.
Class history, The Lucky Bag (1929).
RAH, letter to John W. Campbell, Jr., 01/04/42.
RAH, Tramp Royale (New York: Ace Books, 1992), 41.
RAH, Foreword to “Cliff and the Calories,” Expanded Universe, 355:
When I was a freshman in college, the nearest connection for marijuana was a drug store a hundred yards off campus, for H or C it was necessary to walk another block. But bootleg liquor (tax free) would be delivered on or off campus at any hour.
Did I avail myself of any of these amenities? None of your business, Buster!
Virginia Heinlein, letter to Denis Paradis, 12/13/82.
RAH, letter to Alfred Bester, 04/03/59.
If, indeed, they had not already become engaged; there is no documentation for the timing of the engagement; years later, in a letter dated February 17, 1968, to Lois Lavendar, Heinlein says simply that he and Alice McBee were “engaged to be married,” without mentioning the timing of the engagement. His September leave in 1927 was simply the most likely time for such a proposal to have been made and accepted.
Heinlein’s graduating portrait in the 1929 Lucky Bag shows a Black N with two asterisks.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 06/23/99.
William F. Halsey and Lt. Comm J. Bryan III, Admiral Halsey’s Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947).
Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 06/23/99.
In a letter dated February 2, 1949, to Forrest J. Ackerman, Heinlein stated he “never indulged in [hazing] as an uppercl
assman,” which could be exactly, if only technically, true, as the Second Class year, his first year as an upperclassman, was not regarded as commencing until the October academic term started.
Oscar Allen Heinlein, Jr., letter to R AH, 10/02/72.
Frank E. Wigelius, letter to RAH, 09/24/84.
RAH, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, 02/25/49.
Stranger in a Strange Land, where Mike is watching the monkeys in a zoo and has his “anthropophany.”
Preserved in RAH’s personal scrapbook of his Annapolis years, transcribed in Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Second Series, Tape D, Side A.
“Second Class Year” section of the class history, The Lucky Bag (1929), 98.
RAH, letter to Larry Heinlein, 08/25/53.
Preserved in RAH’s first scrapbook; described in Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Second Series, Tape D, Side A.
Information preserved in RAH’s first scrapbook.
Virginia Heinlein, taped interview by author, Tape 1, Side B (February [28?,] 2000).
The telegram was not preserved and thus cannot be dated precisely. Heinlein says only that he received word and could not get emergency leave: with a three-day trip home he would have missed even the funeral.
The seemingly contradictory assertions that Alice McBee was in a car accident but that she died of “appendicitis” initially gave rise to suspicions that Alice McBee was pregnant and died in childbirth, or, possibly, of a botched abortion since appendicitis was a very common cover story given for pregnancy among unmarried women. However, the timing cannot be made to work for Heinlein to have impregnated her; he and she would have had to be in proximity sometime between March and May of 1927, and Heinlein was at Annapolis at that time. The best way of resolving the contradiction is to suppose that Alice was in a serious car accident and during her long recovery developed acute appendicitis and died from it.
RAH, letter to Lois Lavendar, 02/17/68. This is the only mention of this incident in all his correspondence.
“Second Class Year” entry, The Lucky Bag (1929), 99.
“Fencing,” The Lucky Bag (1928), 342.
Another event memorialized in Heinlein’s scrapbook is less odd than it appears: on May 4, 1928, Robert received a telegram from his oldest brother, Larry: “You are father to a fine boy born 11:00 last night weigh 8 lbs. 12 oz. Everything fine.” It is unlikely this was a practical joke, since Robert would have known Larry and Alice were expecting a child. It was probably a slip of the pen, and Lawrence meant to say Robert was now an “uncle” for the first time. There was now a “next generation” in his family: Lawrence Lewis (“Bud”) Heinlein.
In addition to the increased load of academic work, the Second Year men were expected to help with the preparation for the year’s graduation ceremonies. They took charge of organizing the Ring Dance, a social highlight of the June Week ceremonies—pictured in the 1928 Lucky Bag with couples of midshipmen and their drag entering through a giant, gilded representation of a class ring, where the dance instruction they had received year by year would pay off. But the Class of ’29 also had their own Ring work to do. Their Ring Committee had been formed in their Youngster year, and they had spent almost two years comparing designs and costs. They would put their rings on after the Class of ’28 graduated and they became First Class men.
Allan “Gus” Gray is mentioned only infrequently in Heinlein’s correspondence, and little is known of him. Cal Laning, however, became one of Heinlein’s closest and longest friends. They had not met in Kansas City, since Laning went to a different high school, and their social circles did not intersect.
8. First Classman (pages 97–109)
“First Class Cruise” section of The Lucky Bag (1929), 105.
As Heinlein later abandoned this wish to be self-made and also destroyed his correspondence from this period (for other reasons), there is only one surviving piece of evidence of his attitude at this time, a 1930 letter to “Barrett” Laning quoted later.
RAH, letter to Marion Zimmer Bradley, 03/04/63.
RAH, letter to William Rotsler, 08/23/74.
In the unpublished manuscript of Before the Writing Began, Leon Stover maintains that Heinlein and Rand had an ongoing sexual relationship, resumed each time they were in the same part of the country—not impossible; not even improbable. There is, however, no surviving documentary evidence to this effect, and I have elected not to include the assertion in this biography.
It is possible Stover received the information from Cal Laning or from Heinlein’s childhood friend Don Johnstone, but neither they nor Stover’s records were available, and it is therefore not possible to confirm or deny the assertion.
Curiously, the Land Trips listing in Heinlein’s scrapbook does not show a final leg of travel back to Annapolis. It’s not impossible that he boarded some vessel in New York Harbor for the last leg of his journey back to the Academy.
Admiral Gallantin interview.
Cal Laning, letter to Virginia Heinlein, 08/29/78.
L. H. Dentel (Robert’s high school principal), letter to RAH, 07/09/52.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 06/23/99.
Virginia Heinlein, letter to author, 06/23/99.
RAH, letter to Laura Haywood, undated but in 1973.
Virginia Heinlein, e-mail to author, 01/05/2002.
Frank Wigelius, letter to RAH, 09/24/84.
In a letter to Robert A. W. Lowndes, dated 08/15/41, Heinlein’s second wife, Leslyn, describes (rather than gives the names of) four close friends at the Academy, but while the list includes descriptions of Perreault, Laning, and Wait, it does not include John Arwine or Gus Gray, both of whom maintained friendship with Heinlein for the entirety of their remaining lives, or Elwood “Woody” Teague, another close friend from Academy days; another classmate, Robert N. S. Clark, he knew of but did not meet and befriend until they were both stationed on their first billet, USS Lexington.
The Lucky Bag (1929), 345.
After telling Wait’s story as a dinner-party anecdote for decades, Heinlein wrote it as “The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail” in Time Enough for Love (1973). In a taped interview with Leon Stover, Virginia Heinlein recalled that Wait wrote a letter to her after Robert Heinlein’s death in which he recognized and approved his fictional portrayal as David Lamb. Tape 3, Side 3, p. 23 of the transcript.
RAH, letter to Dr. Samuel Herrick, 07/16/52.
The Quest is mentioned but rarely in Heinlein’s correspondence, but Cal Laning talked freely about it with Leon Stover, and it is discussed in some detail in Stover’s unpublished manuscript, Before the Writing Began, especially on page 127. Stover thinks the name may have come from H. Rider Haggard.
The best short description of The Quest was provided in a letter by Cal Laning to Virginia Heinlein after Heinlein’s death: “Possibly the most interesting event in our relationship was the ‘Quest.’ When the three of us [Gus Gray being the third, though Laning does not mention the name here] decided to divide the fields of knowledge and find out what was the significance of the universe, the one which we thought the old folks were keeping from us.”
Laning goes on to suggest that they found the solution to their Quest in Universe: A Verifiable Solution to the “Riddle of the Universe,” a book published privately in 1921 (publication information is given only as “Westchester, NY”) by a retired naval officer, Scudder Klyce (a graduate of Annapolis, Class of 1902). However, except for the coincidence of the names—“Scudder” is a background figure in some of Heinlein’s Future History stories—and the title “Universe,” there are no references to this book in Heinlein’s oeuvre (whereas there are hundreds of primary and secondary references to books that dealt with related subjects: P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum and A New Model of the Universe—books probably recommended by Leslyn Heinlein).
Klyce’s Universe was for a very long time a rare and obscure book, despite an introduction by John Dewey, then very nearly at the peak of his
reputation as “America’s Philosopher.” However, Klyce and Universe attained a minor notoriety when the book was depicted in Alan Grant’s Anarky graphic-novel series in Detective Comics (the first incarnation of Anarky as a Batman antagonist ran from 1989 to 1999). In 2006, a facsimile reprint of the 1921 publication of Universe was issued by Sacred Science Institute.
Laning’s testimony as memorialized by Stover in Before the Writing Began, 138.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 65