by Thomas Hager
In letters to Herman while he was on the road, Belle let him know that she wasn't happy with the burdens of caring for the children alone in a strange town. His letters back to her were full of reassurance and love. "And the kidlets: bless their angel hearts. I miss them so much— tell them their papa loves them dearly and longs for you all—tell them to be good—and they will be always happy," he wrote, signing his letters, "Your own true love, Herman." He tried to cheer her by calling up visions of the future they were building, inevitably one in which she and the children would have plenty of money and few cares. In one of his letters, written when Linus was four, his reassurances turned uncannily prescient: They had met for some higher purpose, he wrote Belle. "We cannot imagine what it is but I feel that either ourselves or our children will someday stand before the world as a specimen of a high standard of intelligence."
And he reminded her that he was traveling for one reason—to save enough money to open his own drugstore, this time without fickle backers. He knew the business well enough to realize that he would need considerable funding to compete with the well-established drug houses in Portland. So he thought again of Condon, where there was little competition, the bankers were friendly, and his wife's family could provide support. In March 1905 he went there alone to see if he could get something started and within days was writing excitedly to Belle. Herbert Stephenson, the husband of Belle's sister Goldie and a leading dry goods merchant in town, "gave me one side of the front of his store and also gave me money with which to buy goods. I will have no rent to pay—no water—no wood—no light—no phones—in fact every cent I make will be clear profit as I will have not a cent of expense. . . . I just know that I will make boodles of money. . . . Be sure to send all those advertising books. . . . You will be glad to get back to Condon. I know because it is so different now, and when you see me making money, you will be so pleased. I will have a good location and will spend some money on advertising and it won't be long before I will have the business. So come up old girl—pack up and come up."
Cowboys and Indians
Linus Pauling's earliest and fondest memories would center around Condon. He arrived there with his mother and sisters on a stagecoach in 1905, when he was four years old. His parents may have disliked the town, but it was a dream for a boy. Through Linus's eyes, Condon was still a piece of the Wild West. The population numbered only a few hundred. Cowboys, mule skinners, and hired hands from nearby ranches rode their horses in and drank up their pay at one of several saloons, along with a number of Scottish sheepherders, renowned for their toughness, stubbornness, hard work, and frugality, who had settled in the area. Cougars, wildcats, bears, and coyotes still outnumbered the farmers outside of town. The last remnants of the area's ancient migratory Indian tribes appeared every year out of the hills and camped at the end of Main Street, hunting, collecting native plants for food and medicine, and gathering the wool that snagged on barbed-wire fences. Grain wagons, pulled by teams of sixteen mules in belled harnesses, jangled through town all summer and fall, kicking up a perpetual haze of dust.
Within a few years the cowboys and Indians would be gone, but these links to another time were part of Linus's life. As he grew older, he sometimes played with Indian children, who taught him how to find and dig for the root of the camas plant, a staple of their diet. He remembered cowboys lounging outside his father's drugstore and teasing him as a little boy. Once, one impressed him by taking time to show the young town boy how to properly sharpen a pencil with a pocket knife. Many of the area's first settlers were still alive, and the pioneer ethos of independence, self-reliance, fortitude, and sheer stubbornness was preached at every civic gathering. New settlers were arriving every week to try their hand at homesteading the 320 acres the federal government said they could have gratis.
In order to bring out the wheat, a spur of the Northern Pacific Railroad was built to the town just months after the Paulings arrived, opening the area to a flood of farm workers, businesspeople, and their families. Within a few years the town's population burgeoned to more than a thousand. There was a frenzy of construction, bringing Condon dozens of new houses, a confectionery and a bowling alley, a theater and a skating rink.
Young Linus spent a lot of time with an older cousin, Mervyn Stephenson. The two boys haunted the town's streets, went rabbit hunting up the deep, silent gullies near town, explored the windswept hills, and swam in the streams near his home. Linus remembered sleigh rides and the shimmering northern lights in the winter, fields of wildflowers and the hatching of hosts of insects in the spring. He and Mervyn watched the wheat being harvested in summer and sometimes brought water to the farmhands. They found arrowheads in the dust and shining rocks sparkling in the creeks.
Even though he would spend more years of his childhood in Portland than in Condon, Linus would always consider the smaller town on the hillside his spiritual birthplace.
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His parents, however, hated Condon. Herman never became acclimated to the summer heat and dust storms, the tedium of the freezing winters, the primitive sanitary conditions, the recurring epidemics of diphtheria and whooping cough that killed small children. Then there was the gossipy closed-mindedness of small-town life. He tried at first to fit in—"Instead of the theater we'll attend church, thereby setting a good example for the children. Besides, I think it's good business policy here," he wrote Belle as he was setting up his shop—but from the beginning, his plan was to quickly make enough money to finance his own store back in Portland. He worked himself hard to do it, putting in twelve- and fifteen-hour days, enlarging his store, joining businessmen's associations. To please Belle and provide a good life for his children, he continued driving himself too hard.
Belle's life was hard, too. She was back in the small town from which she had only recently escaped and was left alone much of the time to care for three small children—Linus was four; Pauline, two; and Lucile, just a baby, when they returned to Condon—while Herman worked. It was no wonder she complained about the lack of money, the drudgery of motherhood, and the women she imagined Herman was seeing when they were apart.
Each year during August and September, Herman would send Belle and the children to live with his parents in Oswego to spare them the ovenlike heat of late summer in Condon. During one of these separations Belle wrote him another litany of laments, and Herman, in a rare display of temper, let his feelings rush out in a reply: "I have quite enough to worry me without asking you to peck, peck, peck at me. But I guess you cannot help it, as that blessing is a characteristic of the Darling family," he wrote. "Were it not for trying to get a start financially so you and the little ones may live in an abbreviated form of luxury in later years, I would not stay in this God for saken [sic] hole a moment. You have discouraged me so often in my efforts that I would think you would eventually come to a conclusion to encourage me a little by discontinuing your nonsensical jealousy."
A good father, Herman shielded his children from the strain on the family. But the combination of business and domestic pressures began to affect his health. Soon after returning to Condon, he started having trouble sleeping and suffered from a string of illnesses that kept him in bed for days at a time. On one occasion, a doctor's orders sent him for weeks to the seashore to recover. Herman began to complain about what he called "the tummick ake"—likely an ulcer—an ailment that was to plague him for years, and he began to think about his mortality. He wrote Belle, "We know not what day that grim monster death may pay us a visit and do what naught else could do, break that bond that binds us so closely made doubly strong by an undying love, which I know exists between us, tho' not always apparent, therefore we should strive each day to live for each other as if that day was to be the last." Herman was thirty-one years old.
But all his work and dedication were beginning to pay off. The Pauling drug business, founded on the motto No Cure, No Pay, grew as fast as the town. In 1907, Herman went into partnership with a young jeweler and opened
an expanded store in one of the town's best locations, a former bank building across from the livery stable on Main Street. The new emporium was lavishly outfitted with mahogany and marble and sported the largest plate-glass display window in the county. Stock was expanded to include everything from cut crystal and corsets to flypaper and phonographs.
The core of the business was drugs, and while Herman prided himself on the accuracy and efficacy of his medicines, he didn't shy away from the advertising and marketing techniques that he had seen work for patent-medicine hawkers. Reputable pharmacists of the day still made many of their own "cures," and Condon was soon deluged with flyers, billboards, and painted benches touting the benefits of Pauling's Pink Pills for Pain, Pauling's Improved Blood Purifier, and Pauling's Barb Wire Cure. The company's unceasing newspaper advertisements were mixtures of testimonials, announcements of new stock, even occasional poetry: "When sweet Marie was sweet sixteen / She used Pauling's Almond and Cucumber Cream. / Tho' many winters since she's seen, / She still remains just sweet sixteen."
When his partner suddenly died from pneumonia in 1908, Herman, on top of everything else, took on the management of the profitable jewelry business. He imported an optician from Portland and started another moneymaking side venture in eyeglasses. A new partner was brought in to fund expansion, and the business incorporated under the name Red Cross Drug Company. Herman became active in the Foresters of America, the Woodmen of the World, and the Odd Fellows, using the fraternal organizations to make business contacts and raise his profile in the community. Belle, pleased with the respect she was given as the wife of one of the town's leading businessmen, was installed as a noble grand of the Minnehaha Lodge of the Rebekahs.
That year, Herman was put in charge of Condon's Fourth of July festivities, which he managed to make into the biggest celebration in the town's history. In the center of the day's long, noisy parade, Herman and Belle Pauling rode in the grand marshal's coach of honor.
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These were among the happiest days of Linus's life. He began to emulate his busy father. Herman wanted each of his children to become, as he termed it, "an asset to the human race," and he believed that the process required proper role models. He did his best to be that model for Linus: sober, hardworking, civic-minded, concerned about others, loving. Despite his unremitting work schedule, Herman took pains to try to make the family happy, hiring a buggy to go on picnics in the country, slipping Linus sips of beer at the dinner table, keeping Belle's fretfulness under control.
And he showed his son the business, bringing him into the sanctum of the drugstore's back room, where Linus played with the Indian skulls stored there as he watched his father making extracts of roots and leaves, making salves by working chemicals into lard, or carefully measuring, mixing, and packaging powdered herbs on a marble slab. Much of what Linus watched his father do was straightforward, if somewhat primitive, chemistry, including the careful preparation of reagents, gauging reactions with acids and alkalis, making litmus paper and test solutions. There was mystery in that room—poisons and cures in old glass bottles carefully organized and labeled with Latin names, the huge, leather-bound Pharmacopoeia and Dispensatory, with their lists of strange chemicals—and there was the imposing figure of his father making medicine.
An anecdote Linus told much later cast some light on his feelings for his father—and the nature of life in a western town. When he was about seven years old, Linus remembered, he and his cousin were caught while exploring a half-finished building by a burly workman. Linus tried to wriggle out a window, but the workman caught him by his pants, dragged him back inside, and beat him with a piece of lath. Linus ran home sobbing. He tearfully told his story to Herman, who listened carefully, then led his son by the hand through Condon's streets in search of the workman. They found the fellow eating lunch in the crowded dining room of the town's largest hotel. Herman asked him if he had beaten his son. When the man answered yes, Linus recalled, Herman knocked the fellow to the floor—and was subsequently arrested and tried for assault.
Linus's recollection of the event is both affectionate and mistaken. His father was arrested and put on trial around this time, but the charge was not assault; he was accused of bootlegging whiskey through his drugstore during a time of local prohibition. Herman Pauling was quickly found innocent of the charge. But his son's fond mixing of memories reveals his image of his father: a sympathetic protector who suffered because of loyalty to his son.
Herman's interest in Linus grew as the boy began to show signs of unusual intelligence. When Linus was five, Herman commented on the boy's talkativeness and "earnest manner" when he prattled to his elders. By age six he had already been advanced to the second grade of the little school in Condon and had learned how to express himself clearly through the written word, as his mother found out when she was emptying his overall pockets one day. She found a letter Linus had written to a girl in his class: "Dear Dorthy: I love you much better than I did saterday, why dont you right too me. I would like for you to kiss me and hug me would you. I will send you a pretty card if you will right to me. will you. I like you. do you like me. How do you like me. I love you Dorthy Dear, good by kisses love Linus Pauling"
His earnestness extended to his studies. He remembered always wanting to learn, and to learn thoroughly. In the third grade, after working furiously on one of the few mathematics problems he couldn't solve, he remembered bursting into tears from frustration. By age eight he had developed an interest in ancient civilizations, and Herman began teaching him a few words of Latin. And he showed some early interest in science. When the projector lens from Condon's one nickelodeon broke, Linus salvaged a piece and played for days focusing sunlight into a burning point. At age nine he was already reading Darwin and delighting his little sisters with miniature volcanoes he made by pushing together some sweepings in the backyard, adding some calcium carbide from a bicycle lamp, pouring water, and lighting the acetylene gas that was given off. The reaction was a common one used to provide light for bicyclists; Linus's variation on the theme was original.
From early on, Linus developed a voracious appetite for reading, racing through everything in print in the Pauling household and demanding more. Herman, whose own formal education had been cut short, was both proud and perplexed. In 1910 he wrote to the editor of the state's largest newspaper for advice:
I am a father and have an only son who is aged 9 years, in the fifth grade, a great reader and is deeply interested in ancient history.
In my desire to encourage and assist him in his prematurely developed inclinations, I ask some of the Oregonian's interested readers to advise me regarding the proper or at least the most comprehensive works to procure for him.
I have obtained both public and high school books used in our schools, besides numerous other publications relating to this subject, but they all seem more or less incomplete. In order to avoid the possibility, or probability rather, of having some one advise me to have him read the Bible, I will state that it was through reading this and Darwin's theory of evolution that my son became so interested in both history and natural sciences.
The editor of the renownedly stuffy Republican paper replied: "There is nothing premature, or precocious, in a boy of nine years liking to read ancient history. The subject is fascinating, and any bright boy would naturally be fond of it had he not been spoiled by bad teaching." He then recommended Plutarch's Lives, Arnold's History of Rome, and a sampling of Herodotus. "Very likely after the boy has read these books he will not need any more advice," the editor wrote. "He can then go alone on his delightful way through the paradise of literature."
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As Herman was attempting to strengthen his son's intellect and moral character, his own came under attack.
Plainspokenness was common in Condon: It was hard country, and there was no profit in talking around a problem. Soon after Herman's triumphant management of the Fourth of July celebration, a competing jeweler in town attacked
him in a letter to the editor of one of the newspapers. The charges were minor—something to do with the handling of advertising in a baseball-game program—but Herman, stung by the letter and feeling defensive, did what his son would often do in later years: He took an immediate, strong, public stand in order to set the record straight. The next edition of the paper contained a rambling defense of Pauling's honor titled "The Truth Will Out."
"I came to Condon just a little over three years ago, practically without funds, and embarked upon my business, and have made it a success far beyond my expectations, and I attribute my success to the fact that I have never tried to fool any of the people any of the time," Herman wrote in editorial space he paid for. "In spite of this I have made some enemies. Well, all of us have. We need them in our business. In fact I like them, providing they fight me fair and square." However, he pointed out, his competitor, "Sorehead Charlie," was not fighting fair. "Perhaps you wonder why he should try to injure my reputation for honesty and square dealing: let me tell you why; its [sic] because I am his competitor, and he knows that my reputation for honesty in the drug business is building up my jewelry business, and he realizes that something must be done to check this inroad on his business, so he attacks my veracity on a point absolutely insignificant. . . ."