Today, John L. Collyer, president of the B. F. Goodrich Company, admits that he went to college, and on to success in industry, because of encouragement found in reading Frank Merriwell. James Knott founded his chain of hotels, Jed Harris became a renowned Broadway producer, and Eddie Eagen gave up professional pugilism for Yale and fame, all because of the early inspiration derived from Gilbert Patten’s hero. It was Frank Merriwell “who shaped my ambitions for clean living and athletic supremacy,” Eagen confessed in his autobiography. “Merriwell’s superhuman virtues were to me precedents far more impressive than the Ten Commandments.” In much the same vein, Jess Willard, Jack Dempsey, Rudy Vallee, Franklin P. Adams, Fredric March, and even a congressman from Maine publicly admitted their debt to the paragon of the paperbacks.
In the fifty-five years of his make-believe life, Frank Merriwell has served the citizenry tirelessly and well in an entertainment decathlon of dime novels, magazines, syndicated columns, comic strips and radio. Today, in Hollywood, a major producing company, the Frank Merriwell Enterprises, assisted by Patten’s surviving son, will soon project the perpetual Frank on television—and a whole new generation of red-blooded Americans, who no longer read his books, will derive from him the same inspiration their fathers did and will in turn strive ever Onward and Upward.
Clearly, Frank Merriwell has become as much a part of our national heritage as Huck Finn, Paul Bunyan, Tarzan, and Mickey Mouse. But even as his fame is renewed, the name of his creator recedes with passing years. Yet, to know Merriwell, one must know his genesis, must know the long-neglected, colorful hack who conceived and developed him under fantastic pressure.
William Gilbert Patten was born in Maine, during 1866, the son of ardent pacifists. His father, who was six feet four and had met Lincoln, hoped Gilbert would become a carpenter; his mother hoped he would become a minister. In a literary sense, Gilbert became both. He hated school, where his teachers regarded him as somewhat retarded, but he read omnivorously at home, especially Dickens and Hawthorne. He wanted to write a novel as great as The Scarlet Letter, and, at sixteen, started a baseball novel which he soon laid aside. Actually, he was led into this early sedentary life by his stature and his parents’ pacifistic convictions. A gangling six-footer, he was not permitted to fight the other boys. His sole diversion, beyond pushing a pencil, was managing the Camden baseball team, a member of the Knox County League, to a pennant. In wet-nursing these bush-leaguers, Patten incubated at least a half-dozen players for the major leagues—as well as the peerless Merriwell.
While still in his adolescence, Patten started a weekly newspaper. The Corinna Owl, and within a year had acquired $900 in debts. Fortunately, his weekly had cut into the circulation of a rival paper, and when they offered to buy him out, he grabbed. Still eager to write, he talked about freelancing. His father gave him a month to put up or shut up. Challenged, young Patten, in four frenzied days, wrote two short stories—“A Bad Man” and “The Pride of Sandy Flat”—and sold them to a New York weekly for three dollars each. Elated, he finished his old baseball novel, sold it for fifty dollars, and followed it with another which brought seventy-five dollars. After that, he forgot about college, married a Corinna girl friend who had helped him with his grammar, and was soon earning $2,700 a year grinding out dime-novel detective and western stories.
Raising his sights, he went to Broadway to become a playwright. He wrote a drama about a nagging wife, Men of Millions, which opened and closed in New Haven, hissed into oblivion by Yale students. This catastrophe invited others. After being evicted from his walk-up for nonpayment of rent, and finding himself suddenly burdened by an invalided father and mother, in addition to a wife. Patten reluctantly returned to dime novels. He did not mean to stay in the field; he just wanted a few easy dollars to tide him over. He scribbled western after western for Beadle and Adams, under the name of Wyoming Will, at $150 an epic. Quitting the Beadle firm over an argument involving a ten-dollar advance, be turned to doing boys’ adventures for Street & Smith.
Patten’s new publishers liked his work and suggested a juvenile series built around a single character who “should have a catchy name, such as Dick Lightheart, Jack Hark-away, Gay Dashleigh.” The publishers suggested that the hero become involved in escapades while attending a military academy, then inherit a “considerable sum of money” and temporarily leave school. “A little love element would also not be amiss,” the publishers wrote Patten. “When the hero is once projected on his travels, there is an infinite variety of incident to choose from. After we run through twenty or thirty numbers of this, we would bring the hero back and have him go to college—say, Yale University, thence we could take him on his travels again to the South Seas or anywhere.”
Patten gave the assignment some thought. Then, in four days, he whipped out his first 20,000-word novel under the pseudonym of Burt L. Standish. The hero, introduced on the very first page—“His face was frank, open and winning, but the merry light that usually dwelt in his eyes was now banished by a look of scorn”—was none other than the one and only Frank Merriwell. The date was April 18, 1896.
“I took the three qualities I most wanted him to represent—frank and merry in nature, and well in body and mind—and made the name Frank Merriwell,” recalled Patten later. While the character was fictional, some of Merriwell’s more spectacular talents were carefully fashioned after the fabulous Indian athlete, Louie Sockalexis, who had played baseball under Patten in Maine and could dash one hundred yards in ten seconds in full uniform. Sockalexis, educated at Holy Cross, was signed by the big-league Cleveland Spiders, who thereafter became the Indians. Persuaded by well-wishers to forsake his milk diet for bourbon, the prototype of Merriwell was finally dropped by the major leagues for his extended bouts with alcohol. He wound up as a street beggar in Hartford.
Patten gave Frank Merriwell the Indian’s prowess, but none of his personal problems. Merriwell neither smoked nor drank. “I wanted,” said Patten, “a boy who had no vices, but who didn’t act as if he had no vices.” And again, “When I conceived Frank, I think I hit on approximately the boy that every kid would like to be. Not, mind you, the boy that every kid ought to be. That was the Horatio Alger idea—a moral in every story. But my boy pointed no moral; he was just every boy’s ideal picture of himself.”
Frank Merriwell was introduced to America as he stepped down from the train bringing him to Fardale, his prep school. In the opening paragraph, he saw a bully, Bart Hodge, kick a dog and cuff a young popcorn vendor. Promptly, Frank spoke his first of a million words to follow: “That was a cowardly blow!” The battle was under way. Merriwell floored the bully with a smashing right to the jaw. With that electric punch, all young America took Merriwell to its heart.
Like Byron, Merriwell woke up to find himself famous. The first nickel Tip Top Weekly, with its colored cover, featuring “Frank Merriwell; or, First Days at Fardale,” was a complete sellout. No sooner had young readers had a taste of Merriwell overcoming the heavy’s efforts to keep him out of Fardale, Merriwell rescuing the wealthy, brunette Inza Burrage from a mad dog, Merriwell escaping from a locked cemetery vault, than they loudly clamored for more. Within three months, Tip Top Weekly soared to a circulation of 75,000, then 100,000, and Patten estimated that actually over 500,000 boys were reading the stories every week. Hundreds of adults, after glimpsing the stories, hopefully named their newest offspring Frank Merriwell Smith or Inza Jones. Thousands of Rand McNally geography texts camouflaged Merriwell paperbacks in the country’s classrooms, causing one educator to remark wryly, “We’re now teaching readin’, writin’, ‘rithmetic, and Merriwell.”
Gilbert Patten, when he started the series, had hoped to devote no more than four or five days a week to the Merriwell potboilers, and give the rest of his time to more mature creative efforts. But the sudden popularity of the character, the public’s insatiable demand for more plots, characters, variety, overwhelmed him. Merriwell became a triple-threat Frankenstein’s monster, c
onsuming all his waking hours and energy.
Patten was contracted, at $50 a week, to deliver a complete 20,000-word adventure every seven days. Seventeen years and twenty million words later, he was still delivering his weekly quota, though his salary had been upped to only $150. His pen name, his hero, his stories belonged solely to the publishers. Patten never collected a royalty during this literary marathon.
After two years of Merriwell, his fingers became calloused and cramped from the unceasing physical labor of writing, and Patten switched to dictating. During mornings and through lunch periods, he paced the equivalent of five miles as he dictated four hours daily to a stenographer; during afternoons he revised, researched, and jotted notes on new backgrounds. He plotted thirteen different Merriwell stories at a time. He had so many characters entering and exiting that he kept an index file of them. “Now and then I did forget a character and made a slip,” he once recalled, “and a thousand youngsters immediately jumped on me. Once I killed Inza Burrage’s father in Africa. I forgot to cross out his name in the card index. A year later, I brought him to life. Indignant letters flooded me. Luckily, I hadn’t described the scene in which her father was killed, so in my next story I was able to explain that it was all a mistake and he wasn’t dead after all.”
Almost all the Merriwell sagas were written under pressure. When he worked in Maine, Patten sometimes delivered his uncorrected manuscript, at a dead run, to the clerk aboard the passing mail train to New York. Once, to obtain a week’s vacation, he manufactured 50,000 words in seven days. But he liked to point out that he was painstaking when compared to several of his contemporaries. Ed Wheeler, to make a deadline, once did a 30,000-word Deadwood Dick novel in forty-eight hours, and Colonel Prentiss Ingraham once topped this mark by completing a 33,000-word Buffalo Bill story in twenty-four hours.
But if Patten was not the fastest, he was surely one of the most prolific scribes of all time. True, Alexandre Dumas, père, turned out 1,200 books, but he employed a factory of hired hands. Patten, single-handed, ripped out 208 of the 245 Frank Merriwell paperbacks (each book containing four of the Tip Top stories), 415 other nickel novels featuring characters like Lefty Locke and Bill Bruce of Harvard, and 25 hard-bound volumes—in all, about 40 million words, half of them devoted to Merriwell, and with an estimated total circulation of 137 million copies.
Patten’s publishers were constantly fearful that he might fall ill or for some other reason one day fail to meet his weekly deadline. To protect themselves, just as play producers hire understudies for their leading actors. Patten’s publishers kept a stand-in writer in the wings, with three pseudo-Merriwell stories written and ready to go. The stand-in, who was never needed, and who went on to create his own Merriwell in Lanny Budd, was Upton Sinclair.
The constant grind, the seventeen-year search for new situations, kept Patten in hot water. The prep school days at Fardale were relatively easy. Frank Merriwell, when he had time off from boxing, wrestling, track, football, and his outstanding sport, baseball, was busy converting enemies into friends. Bart Hodge, whom Merriwell had floored at the railway station and whose life he later saved, as well as Jack Diamond, who still recognized the Confederacy, and Bruce Browning, a tough Goliath, were all bullies who succumbed before Merriwell’s missionary tactics.
Early in the series, young America gradually learned of Merriwell’s past. His father had been a wealthy mine owner, addicted to gambling, who had disappeared in the wild West. Merriwell’s inheritance consisted of a school allowance, a ring bearing peculiar scratchings, and an eccentric guardian named Professor Scotch. In Fardale, a mysterious group of mobsters tried to abduct Merriwell and steal his ring. Needless to say, Frank outwitted the thugs.
In due time, Merriwell was matriculated in hallowed Yale. The Ivy League had seen nothing like him before. He played only in the last minutes of football games, and won them all, especially when pitted against Harvard. During track season, he was constantly being kidnapped, rendered unconscious, and tied down, only to appear miraculously in time to gallop off with a victory in the last lap of the critical relay. But baseball was his specialty. Great hurlers have come and gone since Merriwell—Matty with his fadeaway, Faber with his spitter, Hubbell with his screwball, Feller with his fast one—but none ever mastered, or came near mastering, Merriwell’s untouchable double-shoot (it curved in two directions on its way to the plate).
For game after game, though drugged by the blackest villains, Merriwell would escape some distant barn or dungeon to capture and foil the heavy and his henchmen, and to return to the diamond in time for the last of the ninth. Usually as he staggered on the field, to thunderous acclaim, Yale had the bases loaded, two outs, and trailed helplessly by three runs in the last of the ninth. Dark day for Old Eli, and then Merriwell strode to the plate. A pitch. A swing. A mighty home run. Merriwell!
Sometimes, though, to break the monotony, Patten would permit Merriwell only an ordinary single, as witness:
“Coulter tried to fool Frank with an outcurve on the next delivery. He believed Merriwell would bite at it, and he was right. But right there Coulter received a shock, for Merriwell leaned forward as he swung, assuming such a position that the ball must have hit him had it been a straight one. It had a sharp, wide curve, and passed at least ten inches beyond the plate. Passed? Not much! Merriwell hit it and sent a daisy-cutter down into right field, exactly where he wished to place it.”
Merriwell won so many athletic contests for Yale that Hey-wood Broun was moved to recollect, years later: “After the first eight or ten years, some of the readers began to complain. They said that, even though he was a fictional character, Frank shouldn’t be allowed to stay in college so long. Eight years is a long time for a man to play on a varsity football team—even at Yale.” This criticism brought an immediate and indignant rebuttal from Patten, who insisted that Frank had never gone to Yale a day over four years and he could prove it. As a matter of fact, Broun’s memory was faulty.
But keeping Merriwell in college for the proper four years—yet busy for seventeen years—required literary juggling that eventually led Patten into a nervous breakdown. When the series was at its popularity peak, Merriwell was already a junior. Fearful of allowing Merriwell to graduate too soon, thereby making him ineligible for further college sports. Patten had racked his brain for a solution.
Suddenly inspired. Patten made his hero drop out of college. The scratchings on Merriwell’s inherited ring proved to be a map of a gold mine in the West. Transferred to paper, the map fell into the hands of Frank’s enemies. Merriwell left Yale, and raced his rivals toward the mine. After surviving an ambush, and other inconveniences, Frank staked out his rightful claim. Thereafter, he remained on the loose. He went to work on a railroad and settled a strike. He routed train robbers. He plunged into Darkest Africa to slay a lion and save blonde Elsie Bellwood, attractive daughter of a sea captain. He sought Inca treasure in the crags of Peru. He hurried to Europe to engage a depraved French adversary:
“Frank Merriwell’s movements had been equally as swift as his adversary’s. The instant the light went out, he swung his body far to one side and thus, it happened that Bruant’s hands grasped nothing when he made that savage clutch across the table. But the violence of his spring flung the table against Frank, who was unable to extricate himself, and over they went with a crash upon the floor. A curse escaped the lips of the strangler. He caught hold of Merry, and it was wonderful how swiftly his hands leaped up to the throat of the young American and fastened there. Frank felt that the supreme moment had come…Judging well where to hit, Frank Merriwell struck Bruant down in the dark. He found his way across the room to the door, flung his shoulder against it, and burst it open. The old man in the front shop stared at him open-mouthed. ‘Monsieur,’ said Frank quietly, ‘the man in the back room needs the services of a skilled surgeon.’”
Returning to Yale in time to clout another winning home rim against Harvard, Merriwell learned that his fath
er had remarried before dying, and left him a half brother somewhere in the Rockies. Merriwell’s college days were almost over, and the half brother, Dick, had been planted by Patten to perpetuate the paperback series. After a hair-raising odyssey, Frank finally located the wild, unruly Dick, a fifteen-year-old who could converse with animals and who was being raised by an Indian. After enrolling his half brother in Fardale, Merriwell graduated from Yale, barnstormed the country with his double-shoot, took over the , Bloomfield Home for Wayward Boys (the boys resented Frank at first, but learned to love him), and finally married and produced Frank, Jr.
The energy expended by Merriwell in these acrobatics would have required in any normal citizen the constitution of a Hercules supplemented by an ample supply of Benzedrine. Merriwell needed neither. Conditioning was the major factor in his success. For one thing, he avoided liquor. “Though, once I had him take a drink,” Patten has recorded, “just to prove to my millions of readers that he was not an insufferable goody-goody. A gasp of horror swept across the nation that week.”
Too, Merriwell despised cigarettes, and warned his half brother off coffin nails, thereby inspiring the impressionable Dick to sermonize to a roommate, “Tucker, you’re a jolly chap, and I like you, but I wish you’d cut those little paper-wrapped devils out of your list of friends supposed-to-be.” Merriwell also frowned on cursing. The strongest expletive ever to cross his lips was “Gosh hang it all.” His lone weakness, inherited from his father, was gambling, a vice which, happily, he finally conquered.
Patten always resented remarks that his brainchild was too much the Galahad. “They laugh about Frank’s bravery,” he once told an interviewer, “but, as a matter of fact, he wasn’t so brave. He was scared often. Much more important was his loyalty, something that boys esteem more than anything else. No matter how hard pressed Frank might be, he never played anybody a dirty trick. Of course, it was my business to see that he was hard pressed in every story. He was always getting into jams, so that if he would only turn against his friends he could make a million dollars. Of course, he never did it”
The Sunday Gentleman Page 17