TRUMBO Page 5

  But success was the goal, and in pursuit of it they moved to Grand Junction, a city better than twice the size of Montrose, in 1908. There, Orus Trumbo worked for the Mesa County Credit Association. He also served as constable, running unopposed for several terms. Constable was a largely honorary position, one that paid nothing except for the fees he collected in performing his duties. This consisted of such thankless tasks as serving writs, judgments, attachments, and foreclosures. He was a poor credit collection man and an even poorer constable. Both jobs required a man of a flintier nature than Orus Trumbo possessed. Because of that, he eventually went to work as a clerk in Benge’s Shoe Store in Grand Junction, a job that he held until just before he moved the family to Los Angeles in 1924.

  When you fly over the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Grand Junction, it is worth taking a window seat just to watch the peaks and humps of the Continental Divide straining up to meet you. It is a fascinating sight—various and seemingly limitless—which may well hold you for the better part of the time it takes to make the flight. But then, toward the end of the journey, pay attention, for the mountains suddenly stop, falling away sharply to the flatter, arid-looking country that leads into the real desert of eastern Utah that lies just a little beyond. This is high plains country, the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. Grand Junction, with a population listed at 20,170 when I arrive there, is the only town of any size out here, a kind of regional capital.

  Down on ground level it isn’t as barren as it looks from above. There are farms and orchards in the surrounding countryside, and though the climate is harsh, heavy irrigation and a long growing season make it a fairly rich agricultural area. The town of Grand Junction itself seems curiously indistinct—one of a thousand, or even ten thousand, others like it in roadside America. It seems to exist only in the present. Driving through it, I wonder just what it might have looked like when Dalton Trumbo was here, but it is useless trying to imagine it so. Could any of this have been here even as long ago as 1924? Grand Junction, like so many towns in the West, looks like a place utterly without history.

  It has one, though. Mesa County and the rest of the region referred to as the Western Slope was the last part of Colorado to be settled. The Ute Indians were there until 1881, when they were driven westward, out into the desert. The lines were drawn for counties then. Grand Junction was founded that same year and incorporated the next. They settled on that name for the town because it was located at the junction of the Gunnison River and the Colorado River, which was then known as the Grand. The town prospered from the start, becoming a kind of sub-capital of the state—a railhead for the produce and cattle raised there in the beginning; a center for prospecting of one kind or another which culminated, just after the war, in a rich uranium strike in the country just to the south of the town; and when I visit, with petroleum growing scarce, it seems it might at last soon be economically profitable to process the vast deposits of oil shale in the area. The trend there is still up.

  That’s the way it looks downtown, too. Main Street has been bricked and landscaped into a mall area which permits auto traffic but gives the advantage to pedestrians. This, at least, lends some slight distinction to the physical aspect of the town. It is a pleasant enough area, and I am so busy taking it all in that I nearly overlook the particular store on Main Street that I have come hunting for. But there it is now—Benge’s Shoe Store. It has been on Main Street for more than sixty years. George Benge, on whose head Dalton Trumbo places the blame for his father’s death, died just a few years before at the age of ninety-eight. His son, Harry, runs the store now.

  Harry Benge is a quick, nervous, black-haired man, exactly the sort I had pictured his father to be. When I tell him why I have come, he takes that in stride and remarks of Trumbo, “His father worked for my dad, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. I thought you might have some memories of him here.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose. We were kids, just kids, and Dalton was quite a bit older than me. He taught me how to hand wrassle, and I got pretty good at it, and I flipped him on that grillwork right over there.” He points to a corner in the back of the store, as though to substantiate the claim. “I’ll tell you, though,” he continues, “I haven’t seen Dalton Trumbo in a lot of years. I remember when I was in the army during the war he wrote me two V-mail letters when I was in Belgium. I was glad to get them, even…”

  “Even though what?”

  “Well, you know, he had a couple of derogatory things to say about my mother in that book of his, that first one, Eclipse. I just figure that he—” He breaks off suddenly. “Oh, excuse me.”

  Harry Benge turns away from me as a customer enters and approaches. He is quite suddenly more at ease than he has been since I came in. This is a role he knows well: he is once again the friendly merchant, the man whose job it is to please. “Hi,” he says pleasantly to the woman. “I’ve got a little gray shoe for you like you were asking about.” He moves off swiftly to the rear of the store, finds the right shoebox, and is occupied for the next few minutes with the customer, gray-haired and in her fifties, and the sale of the shoes.

  But he is soon back. Ready to conclude the business we have begun and clearly anxious to be done with it as quickly as possible.

  “Well, I just want to say this about Dalton. He had some ornery things to say about people around here who helped him, who did things for him. I didn’t have much personal animosity worked up toward him. I read that book myself. I was of an age where I read it and chuckled at some of the things in it because they were satirical, you know, and funny. But he caused some bad feeling around here, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Well, do you—”

  “No. That’s about all I’ve got to say. There are a lot around this town who knew him a lot better than I did. You’d better talk to them.”

  He turned and walked away from me. That was all I was going to get that day, or any other, out of Harry Benge.

  The Trumbos were a close-knit family, and the birth of his sister Catherine when Dalton was seven, and Elizabeth when he was ten, made them no less so. Maud Trumbo was perhaps a little overprotective of him (after all, she must have supposed, a boy with such prospects as his!), and when they moved to the little three-room, unpainted house at 1124 Gunnison in Grand Junction, she scrutinized his playmates very carefully to make sure they measured up. In the immediate neighborhood only girls his age, and a much younger boy down the block, seemed to her gentle enough to play with Dalton.

  Dalton was at the younger boy’s house once and broke a toy belonging to him. These were the first keen feelings of guilt he experienced, Dalton said, and he was in torment—not just for having broken the toy but also for having lied about it afterward. In the end, though, he got away with it, and he felt it was probably not good that he did. He successfully evaded responsibility for a misdoing, and that set a pattern (he said) in his later life. He was emphatic: “My original habit of lying to avoid blame stuck with me all through my life. I can think of no incident wherein I lied if it would throw the blame on anyone else. But if it were simply a means that the criminal would remain anonymous I would always lie in order to protect myself.” The virture of truth-telling was exemplified to him by his father, who refused to lie under any circumstances. Dalton, however, was inclined to look at it as a virtue of limited utility: Orus Trumbo’s refusal to lie frequently brought him trouble—as it later did his son.

  If Dalton’s father wielded considerable influence within the family through his great moral force, his mother did perhaps even more to fix the spiritual side of their lives. About the time Dalton passed into fourth grade, she attended a Christian Science lecture and passionately embraced the religion. And although Orus Trumbo never actually joined the church, he attended services every Sunday with Maud and the children, and in general accepted its tenets. As for Dalton: “Christian Science, for me… was fact.” He was never sick as a boy. Nobody in the family knew illness at that time. When the 1918 inf
luenza epidemic came, and the bodies piled up in the Grand Junction mortuaries faster than they could be prepared for burial, the Trumbos spent all their time caring for their neighbors. Orus Trumbo nursed his employer, George Benge, and his employer’s wife and child, back to health after all three had fallen ill at the same time. “I was never touched by a doctor until well into my twenties,” said Trumbo. “But I never had an absolute faith in Christian Science because, never having been ill, I had no reason to doubt it.”

  His sister Catherine, on the other hand, remembered the family’s adherence to Christian Science chiefly as a social embarrassment: “If you were a good Christian Scientist you had to get an excuse slip whenever the doctor came to school. That was humiliating as a child—not to be able to stand in line and get vaccinated with the rest of the kids in your class.”

  Neither Dalton, nor Catherine, nor Elizabeth remained practicing Christian Scientists as adults. “But it was an excellent religion in which to be raised,” he said, “because you were taught that fear was the cause of human ills. Have you noted that Haldeman and Ehrlichman are both Christian Scientists? And that John Dean is not only a Christian Scientist, but a graduate of Principia, which is the Christian Science college? Now, my point is that these men were acting without a sense of guilt. They were pursuing a righteous cause, apparently without fear at any time. Now, one can safely say this is not a comment on Christian Science as a religion. For one can say the same thing in a comparable matter of Methodists, Baptists, and anybody. But the one thing it says is that [these men] had fearlessness. It’s really lack of a sense of fear that Christian Science gives many people. And this is a very healthy thing to have.” Especially for a boy growing up with a world of prospects before him.

  However, his parents must have felt some fear for him, because much was forbidden him. Growing up in Colorado, he never went horseback riding once—as other boys did. He was not allowed to swim in the Gunnison River, which ran through Grand Junction, and for a long while he was not even permitted to splash in the shallow waters of the irrigation ditches outside town. His father tried to interest him in baseball. Orus Trumbo loved the game so much that he would often be late home for lunch in the summertime because he had stopped off to play an inning or two with the boys along the way. But in spite of the equipment he bought Dalton, and the time he spent coaching him, there was no exciting the boy about baseball. Nor, in turn, about tennis, bike-racing, or track. Dalton was simply not athletically inclined.

  Although not athletic, he was not what you would call sedate. In fact, an incident early in the fifth grade transformed him rather suddenly into one of the unruliest boys in the school. At the beginning of the semester, among strangers and dressed in his new fall suit, he was called a “sissy.” The hateful epithet, hissed after him by boys who did not even know him, shamed him so that he couldn’t even tell his parents of it. It would have been better if he had. They never lacked confidence in him: they could have bolstered his own in himself. His solution to the problem was to become such a wild prankster that he would stun those who had jeered at him into silence, and finally, into admiration. It worked, more or less, just that way. He clogged a water fountain with sawdust, tossed books out the window, and worked out an elaborate arrangement by which cans of rocks were tied to window shades so they would spill whenever the shades were raised. Nobody else in his class thought of doing such things. Nobody else had the nerve to try them.

  Unfortunately, this set a pattern in his life for years to come. His grades began to suffer, too—since he’d decided it must be sissified to study—and it wasn’t until he was well into high school that he made a limited recovery. By that time, he was thinking of college and of life beyond it. But by then, he was such a confirmed hell-raiser—“son of Bacchus,” he was called in his high school yearbook—that he only did well in those subjects, such as English and Public Speaking, for which he had a marked aptitude.

  All this put an increasing strain on his relationship with his father, although it never seriously damaged it. They continued to be quite close. And while they never got together on baseball, nor shared any sort of athletic interest at all, the two did go camping together often out in the Colorado wilds. They would ride out in tandem on Orus’s single-cylinder Excelsior motorcycle. Dalton remembered one trip up to Kannah Creek to fish. They had six spills along the way on the rough roads, and appropriately, Dalton caught six fish. The story of the lost fishrod, so painful to read in Johnny Got His Gun, seems to be based on an incident that took place in Dalton’s life a little earlier than it did in Joe Bonham’s. He lost a prized hatchet of his father’s but then denied responsibility for it, not because he dreaded physical punishment but because he could not stand to see the expression of disappointment in him on his father’s face.

  He had no fear at all of physical punishment from his father. When Dalton was younger, his mother delivered disciplinary spanks and slaps when it was necessary. But when he was old enough to respond to reason and be made to feel guilty when he did not, Dalton found the moral force of his father far more devastating. Specific punishment, when it was meted out by his father, was most likely to come as a penance assigned, a condition of forgiveness for some moral offense.

  Because he was the oldest, Dalton was granted a voice in the family councils the Trumbos held every now and then. He came to exercise it a little too freely and, by his own admission, became insolent on several occasions. On one of these, in front of his father, he accused his mother of lying. Without a word, Orus Trumbo reached over and slapped his son across the face with the back of his hand, cutting the boy’s lip in the bargain. Vindictively, Dalton sat where he was, letting the lip bleed down onto his clothes and the chair he sat on—but the point had been made. This is, in Dalton’s memory, the only time that he was hit by his father.

  And finally, there was the gardening done by Orus Trumbo at that little house on Gunnison Avenue. It was a pretty dismal location when they moved in—a dirt yard and a lot next door overgrown with weeds—but Dalton remembered his father plowing up the yard and planting grass seed and plots of flowers. Then Orus looked at that lot next door and decided that would be his vegetable garden. He got permission to plant it and put in a whole truck garden of table vegetables, lettuce, carrots, turnips, watermelons, peas, cucumbers. They fed the Trumbos all year long, and eventually, Dalton even took to peddling them around town. How, along with everything else, did Orus Trumbo manage to do it? As he did most things: with care, with patience, and with abundant hard work given to it. He would get up early in the morning during the growing season, and work in the garden from five-thirty until he left for his job at the shoe store, then back again to do what needed to be done in the evening after work. To make things grow in the harsh semi-arid climate of Grand Junction, where the mountains meet the desert, it was necessary to lavish just such care—and Orus Trumbo was the most avid and productive amateur farmer in town. Later, years later when he wrote Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo reflected upon this and the paradox contained in it.

  It was hard to understand how his father could be such a big failure when you stopped to think about the thing. He was a good man and an honest man. He kept his children together and they ate good food fine food rich food better food than people ate in the cities. Even rich people in the cities couldn’t get vegetables as fresh or as crisp. They couldn’t get meat as well cured. No amount of money could buy that. Those things you had to raise for yourself. His father had managed to do it even to the honey they used on the hot biscuits his mother made. His father had managed to produce all these things on two city lots and yet his father was a failure.

  World War I had an immense, though delayed, effect on life in Grand Junction, Colorado. In the beginning, it was Europe’s war, and nothing more. Dalton learned “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” at school and responded to Allied propaganda stories of crucifixions by the hated Huns in no-man’s-land by donating his savings of two dollars to the Red Cross. However,
his father, like most of the adults in town, wanted no part of the war. In 1916, after years of voting Republican, Orus Trumbo crossed over and voted for Woodrow Wilson for president on the strength of the scholar-statesman’s promise to keep America out of it. The whole town went for Wilson that year.

  But after the election, the situation changed rapidly. On February 1, 1917, the Germans announced that they would wage unrestricted submarine warfare against all shipping in the Atlantic, whether under neutral flag or not, and the next day, as a result, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany. None of this had the direct, immediate impact on Grand Junction that the so-called Zimmermann Telegram had. This was the diplomatic communication between Germany and Mexico which was intercepted and decoded by the British and handed over by them to the government of the United States. The message invited Mexico into an alliance against the United States and promised, with the successful completion of the war, that the neighbor to the south would be rewarded with the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona—as well as a strip of western Colorado that included Grand Junction.

  A virulent epidemic of war fever suddenly broke out in the town. During the two months or so that preceded America’s actual entry into the war, there was great agitation there in favor of it. An airplane appeared one day in the sky, not an altogether unusual occurrence in 1917, flew once around Grand Junction, then headed off. Immediately the rumor was out that it was a German plane, presumably out on an aerial survey of the territories the Kaiser would be annexing on behalf of his prospective ally.