Dreamer of Dune (5 page)

“I was young and he was old,” my father told me later.

The old curmudgeon accused Frank of messing up the copy-editing on a story that ran in a prior edition, and Frank responded, “You're wrong. I didn't do that. I wasn't even here.”

Suddenly the old man grabbed a pair of scissors from the copy desk and went after his younger counterpart, trying to stab him. Thankfully, people jumped in and grabbed the assailant and hauled him away. The fellow continued working there after he calmed down, but my father told me, “Whenever he had scissors in his hands, I stayed well clear of him!”

Another copy editor on the paper had his own style of revolt. His tactic was to refuse to bathe for two months at a time. He would not change his underwear, socks, or anything. His teeth had green film on them. People really kept their distance.

My father would accumulate many more interesting characters and stories in more than three decades in the newspaper business, a profession that for him was a window on the world…fascinating but low-paying. Journalism kept him on the leading edge of events, filling his hunger for political information and arming him with political data he would use in his science fiction writing.

Always impulsive, in the summer of 1940 he moved back to Salem, Oregon. For a short while he lived with the Rowntrees again, while looking for a newspaper job. He approached
The Oregon Statesman
for a position, but was told by the personnel manager that no openings were available.

After finding out who the managing editor of the paper was, the would-be journalist went to the man's house and accosted him in his front yard. The managing editor, Steve Mergler, was at first irritated, but the young man had a convincing way about him. Frank Herbert asked if he could fill in when other reporters, copy editors or photographers were on vacation. He had his own photographic equipment, and said he could even perform copyboy duties if necessary. “I can do a lot of things,” he told Mergler. “I can be like a utility man on a baseball team, playing whatever position you need.”

This sounded intriguing to Mergler, who had an eye for good people and appreciated an enterprising young man. So Frank, just shy of his twentieth birthday, went “on call” for the paper. He came in at all hours, did anything he was asked to do. He even worked in the advertising and subscription departments. He did everything so well, in fact, with such dedication and excellence, that it wasn't long before he was working full-time. His principal responsibilities involved photography, and, since this was the state capital, many of his assignments involved political events. One of his photographs, at a charity fund-raiser called the Salem Chest, was of U.S. Senator Douglas McKay, who would later become Secretary of the Interior. McKay took a liking to the young man, which later proved beneficial to Frank.

In Salem, Frank Herbert became enamored with airplanes and flying. He worked every angle to get into the air as a passenger, both for pleasure and on news assignments. These were small planes, single engine two-seaters.

In nearly fourteen months on
The Oregon Statesman
, Dad also reported, worked as copy editor and night editor, and wrote feature stories. In feature-writing he learned the importance of characterization, of clearly defining a person and determining what makes him tick. This, he would come to realize one day, was a central feature in any good novel.

He spent as much time as he could in the outdoors, “recharging” himself, as he described it many years later. There were ski trips with friends to nearby slopes in the Oregon Cascades, and a number of fishing trips to Elk Lake in the Three Sisters Wilderness Area. He took a canoe to Elk Lake in 1941 with a young friend, Fram Morgan. Soon afterward, Morgan joined the U.S. Marines. He was killed in the first wave at Tarawa in 1943, fighting the Japanese in the Pacific.

When my father wanted something, be it a job or a relationship, he was not to be denied. An impatient, driven man, he always found a way to get from point A to point B. While working in Salem in the spring of 1941, he met and fell in love with Flora Parkinson, a teenager. In June, they wanted to get married, and Frank thought it would be nice if they held the ceremony in his hometown, Tacoma, Washington. On impulse, they drove three hundred miles north.

At the courthouse in Tacoma, the only judge available, Judge W. A. Richmond, was conducting police court, and a number of men who had been accused of public intoxication were waiting for their cases to be heard. Undeterred, Frank, with his bride-to-be in tow, marched up to the judge and asked him in a low tone if he would marry them.

Judge Richmond appeared surprised, but he smiled and told the couple to take seats and wait. Then he hurried through a number of cases, convicting every defendant. When these matters were disposed of, he performed the wedding in front of a courtroom packed with police court spectators!

That month, Nazi Germany attacked Russia. The war in Europe was escalating. The pages of
The Oregon Statesman
were filled with news of those events and speculation about whether the United States would enter the conflict.

Another move followed, and in October 1941, the Herbert newlyweds found themselves living in San Pedro, California, near my grandparents' apartment. Flora was pregnant. Dad went back to work for the
Glendale Star
, this time as a reporter and photographer. His love affair with flying continued, and he went on many aerial assignments and personal flights, as a passenger. He took at least five thousand aerial photographs.

With U.S. involvement in World War II in December 1941, my grandfather's position as Chief of the Guard Force for Los Angeles Shipbuilding & Drydock became even more important, as it was directly related to the war effort. The yard was building a number of big Navy ships.

All over the United States, young men and women rushed to recruiting offices. Dad obtained enlistment papers from a Navy recruiter, but delayed signing them because of his family responsibilities. Of all the military branches, the Navy appealed to him most, from his love of ships and the sea.

F. H., aside from his guard duties, got together with a fire department friend to invent and patent what they called the “Dura Bomb Shovel,” which was used by Los Angeles Shipbuilding & Drydock and by Douglas Aircraft. The shovel had a hollow handle (filled with sand to smother blazes) and a snow shovel–shaped bottom with a hinged lid. It was designed for fighting magnesium incendiary bomb fires, the sort expected to be used by the Japanese if they ever reached our coast. When an incendiary bomb hit, the theory went, a firefighter would rush to the scene, smother the flames with sand, scoop the bomb up and carry it away.

On February 15, 1942, Frank Herbert Jr. registered for the draft in Los Angeles County. According to his draft card, he was 5'10" and rather thin at 150 pounds. He still had the scar over his right eye and into his eyebrow, the half-inch-long mark from the malamute dog attack.

The following day, on February 16th, a baby girl, Penelope (Penny) Eileen, was born to the couple. Dad selected the mythological name Penelope from the faithful wife of Odysseus, who spurned numerous suitors during the hero's absence from Troy. The baby's middle name, Eileen, was my paternal grandmother's given name.

In July 1942, unable to wait any longer, Frank enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He gave the recruiting officer a letter of recommendation from the Supervisor of Shipbuilding at Los Angeles Shipbuilding & Drydock, a retired U.S. Navy officer.

During his physical examination for the Navy, the doctor kept looking out the window at another doctor and two pretty nurses who were waiting in a convertible, with golf clubs visible. Anxious to join them, the doctor rushed Dad through.

Frank Herbert was assigned to the huge Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, where he served as a Photographer Second Class V-6 in the U.S. Naval Reserve. His mother, Babe, was extremely worried about him, and spent many nights crying.

In boot camp, Dad first encountered
The Bluejackets' Manual
. One of the entries, on swimming, went like this: “Breathing may be accomplished by swimming with the head out of water.” Another entry, under the section on ships: “Q: What is the part (of the ship) known as midships? A: The middle part.” And this one: “It is most important that all appliances for securing water-tightness be kept in an efficient condition.” The foolishness of such passages in this bureaucratically produced manual later became the inspiration for his short story “By The Book” (1966).

He also picked up a number of mottoes on the base:

“If you can pick it up, pick it up; if you can't pick it up, paint it; if it moves, salute it.”

Or: “Keep your mouth shut, your bowels open, and never volunteer.”

And: “Fire at will.” This one particularly amused him, because he considered it unfair to treat anyone named Will in this manner.

Despite his rating as a photographer, he did more office work than anything else, and increased his typing speed. This skill would prove beneficial to him in journalism and in his creative writing career.

He also became quite a poker player in the service, which provided him with an additional source of income. Most of his money was sent home to San Pedro for his wife and baby.

One of the fellows in Dad's outfit was going steady with a girl back home. The young man didn't drink, gamble or carouse. He sent money back to his girl, and she was supposed to bank it for their future marriage. One day he received a “Dear John” letter from her, and she requested the return of her picture. My father, ever impish, came up with a method of retaliation for his buddy. He collected fifty or sixty pictures of girlfriends from the guys in the outfit, and then dictated a letter to her, from the jilted man:

In the winter of 1942, Dad received his own “Dear John” letter from Flora, in which she told him she wanted a divorce. Devastated, he was brought to tears, and felt frustrated at having to deal with the situation from three thousand miles away. One night while on bivouac, with his mind on personal problems, he tripped over a tent tie-down and fell, hitting his head. A soft, lumpy blood clot developed on top of his skull, and he was warned by the doctor not to hit that spot again, at risk of his life—and to let the clot dissolve.

With the assistance of his uncle Ken Rowntree, he was given an early honorable discharge from the service in March 1943, less than eight months after enlisting.
^*
He caught a military transport home to the West Coast. With a bandage on his head, he returned home to San Pedro, but discovered that Flora had disappeared, taking the baby with her.

Driving north to Bandon, Oregon, he visited the home of Flora's mother. In tears, he said to her, “All I want is my family back. Where are they?”

She wouldn't tell him, and despondent, he left. Later she confided to my half-sister, Penny, “I almost told him, but I thought it would be a mistake for them to be together.”

Flora obtained custody of Penny.

Later my father would say that the letter from Flora was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to him, since it led ultimately to meeting my mother. But that remained several years off, and he would go through a painful period of adjustment.

He moved back to his roots in the Pacific Northwest. From August 1943 to August 1945, he worked as a copy editor for the
Oregon Journal
in Portland, Oregon. This region, with its familiar landscapes and outdoor way of life, soothed his troubled spirit.

The copy desk at the
Oregon Journal
was in the shape of a half-circle. Along the outer rim of the desk, called “the rim,” the copy editors sat, marking up stories that came in over the wires and stories written by staff reporters. On the other side of the desk, inside the curve, sat “the slot man,” sometimes referred to as “the dealer.” He dealt stories to the copy editors.

The United Press International office in the back had some tape punching machines which were in intermittent use. They were for transmitting stories to other UPI offices around the world. To send a story, it had to be typed on a special tape and held until the designated hours of transmission began. Then the tape was fed through the machine, printing the story on both the originating and receiving machines.

So, over a couple of days in odd moments, my impish father went back and cut the tape to print so that it would look like a standard UPI story. It was one of the wildest stories you ever heard.

There is an apocryphal tale about Dad, that the story he faked on the machine concerned a UFO attack on Europe in which the cities were destroyed with “green death rays.” It is not difficult to imagine how this tale came about, since it circulated decades later when my father was the most famous science fiction writer in the world.

The essence of the actual story he punched out on the UPI machine was that an American flying ace was revealed to have previously been an ace for the Nazi air force, the Luftwaffe. Supposedly when he was a German flyer he was shot down over North Africa, then brought to the United States as a prisoner of war. But he had been an Austrian professor before the war, and with the assistance of academic friends in the United States he secured false identity papers and escaped from the prisoner of war camp. Subsequently he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force under this false identity.

The last line of the story read, “Any resemblance between the foregoing and anything that may have actually happened is purely coincidental.”

The slot man at the time of the gag, Fred McNeil, was absolutely authoritarian, without a sense of humor. Behind him sat a copy spike—a sharp steel prong where copyboys impaled stories as they came in from the wire machines and reporters. The copyboy would come and spike a story on it—and without looking back McNeil would just grab the piece and start working on it.