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  Persecution of German-Americans began early there. Well before war was declared, boys in Dalton’s school—including Dalton himself—began baiting a boy named John Wolf because his father was German and had, in fact, served in the German army years before in peacetime. Dalton recalled that on the day that war was declared, “We gathered and followed [John] to school and finally had a dog pile on top of him, taunting him all the time as a pro-German. He was thrown up against the curb and we broke his arm in the dog pile.” There was a scene afterward with Dalton’s father, and Dalton had to explain his part in the business.

  Orus Trumbo’s attitude toward the war, once America was in it, was rather ambivalent. On the one hand, he was staunchly patriotic: he owned a flag, which he put out on all holidays; and he had taught Dalton and his sisters the civilian salute (they were the only kids in town who knew it). But on the other hand, he deplored the excesses of war propaganda and the blind zeal they inspired. For example, when the scurrilous propaganda film The Kaiser, Beast of Berlin made its appearance in Grand Junction, Dalton’s father absolutely refused to let him see it. Dalton sulked, and Orus presented him with fifty cents, more than the price of admission to the film, telling him that it was not a question of the money but the principle involved, forbidding him still to see the film. He believes he and his sisters were probably the only kids in town who missed it, for he reckons his father was the only man in town who was able to see through its crude hate-mongering.

  The specter of sabotage by German-Americans was raised in official propaganda, and the Justice Department encouraged vigilante groups of private citizens to keep track of the German-born and other suspicious characters. In Grand Junction, it was the Loyalty League, a secret organization which Orus Trumbo was invited to join. He accepted and was made secretary. Dalton had no idea of this, for the Loyalty League was a semi-secret organization, until one day (“being a snoop by nature”) he came across the minutes of a meeting which his father had recorded. Eventually, however, Orus Trumbo broke with the Loyalty League—resigned as secretary and quit it altogether. There were two cases that convinced him that the organization was doing harm in the community, and only harm. In one of them a German tailor was suspected of disloyalty and had his shop broken into and ransacked—presumably in a search for instructions from the Kaiser; even the cloth from his ironing board was stripped off as they looked for letters and documents. Another case involved a German farmer who lived outside Grand Junction; he was tarred and feathered simply because he was German. The Loyalty League did not participate directly in this, but Orus Trumbo felt—probably quite rightly—that the organization had helped establish the climate in which such acts might be committed by the self-righteous and the super-patriotic.

  Orus Trumbo’s resignation from the Loyalty League did him no good whatever within that tight little community; and the League altered none of its policies or practices. Germans were still investigated and persecuted. The war continued. Boys from Grand Junction could not wait for the draft and volunteered for the chance to see Europe and have a fling at a great adventure.

  Then the war ended, and one by one, the boys came back. A gradual disenchantment set in as the townspeople saw the wound scars and heard the stories. Dalton himself recalls working at Roy Chapman’s bookstore in Grand Junction for the owner, a young veteran who returned blind from France. As janitor, sweeper, and part-time clerk, it was one of his tasks to call for young Chapman each morning and walk with him to the store. Together they would open it up for the day. This was the routine through one characteristically bitter Colorado winter. That whole season Dalton’s companion met him every morning in dark glasses. When they arrived, Dalton would heat a pan of water and drop in the blind veteran’s glass eyes; the winter cold there was so intense that if they had been put in without first being warmed, they would have frozen against the eyelids. Once the glass eyes were heated to body temperature, the young man would put them in, and he and Dalton would be ready to begin the business day. All this made a profound impression on Dalton. He suspected that the experience, repeated every morning, was the earliest from which he drew in the creation of Joe Bonham in Johnny Got His Gun.

  Yes, by the end of the war, Dalton was working regularly at a series of part-time jobs he held to help pay his own expenses and to provide pocket money for himself. He began, as many boys do, as a newspaper delivery boy—and at that he succeeded all too well. He greedily added route after route, and soon he was delivering the Grand Junction morning and evening papers, as well as the morning and evening papers from Denver. “During that awful period,” he said, “I was actually making more money than my father was at the shoe store.” But in the end he worked himself sick, his father had to take over the delivery of the papers in addition to his own job, and Dalton was finally convinced that he had taken on too much.

  The one job that mattered most to him, however, was the one he held through most of high school. He became a cub reporter on the Grand Junction Sentinel, the going afternoon daily of the town. It was owned and edited by Walter Walker, who more than any other man except Dalton’s father had a strong and lasting influence on him as a boy. Walker was a good small-town editor, the kind who was willing to crusade when a cause arose that was worth crusading for—or against. When, just after the war, he took after the Ku Klux Klan in the columns of the Sentinel, Klansmen trapped Walker’s son one night and tarred and feathered him. Walker attacked them in the columns of his newspaper all the harder then, and eventually he saw the Klan driven out of the town.* Dalton respected Walter Walker, and Walker liked him. In the usual course of things, the boy began by reporting school activities and athletic events, which in a town the size of Grand Junction were important news. But soon, Dalton was covering the sort of beat that any cub reporter might, making a daily round of the police station, the courts, the funeral parlors, and the hospitals in search of news.

  He did well at his job. You can tell that from the notes sent by Walker in response to certain stories done by him:

  Dalton:

  Your rotary story yesterday was excellent, well written and everything well covered. Be sure your name is over it each week.

  W.W.

  In another, Walker informed him that he would be getting a larger check than usual, and he went on to say: “I do this in recognition of the splendid work you did this month.… Your stories were exceptionally good. Your football stories and the murder trial stories were also excellent.” Walter Walker’s approval meant a great deal to Trumbo.

  Look at some of those stories that appeared in the Grand Junction Sentinel under Dalton Trumbo’s byline, and what do you find? What he was writing then was straightforward, fact-filled newspaper journalism. Of its kind, it was good, representative work, but not at all distinctive in style; it covers the ground. His work for the Sentinel was apprentice work for the career he had ahead of him as a writer—and that was how he looked upon it, too. It seems that even in high school, and perhaps earlier, he knew what he wanted to do. He would be a writer—and not just a writer of newspaper pieces, but a real writer, one who produced books, novels, stories.

  The only serious challenge to that ambition came from Walter Walker, of all people. For once the editor had taken the measure of his cub reporter, he decided that the boy was cut out for big things. He took Dalton aside one day and advised him to go on to law school and come back to western Colorado to practice. He told him quite seriously that he thought Dalton had the makings of a United States senator.

  What had caught Walker’s attention, just as it had the attention of most of the town of Grand Junction, was the oratorical ability which Dalton Trumbo suddenly manifested in high school. Talk to his classmates, as I did, and you would find that through the period of fifty years that had elapsed, the memory most retained was that of Trumbo the fiery and eloquent orator. It was what he was best known for then. Grand Junction High School’s debating team won the Western Slope Rhetorical Meet two years running, 1923 and 1924, wit
h Dalton Trumbo as team captain. And he himself took a first place in 1924 with his original oration, “Service.” Trumbo regarded this entire episode of his youth with a certain wry distaste: “You’ll find no hint of the radical in the sentiments I spewed forth so solemnly then. Vomit is what it was!” he declared. “Utter vomit!”

  He really was the boy most likely to succeed. In his high school annual for his senior year he was listed as the president of the Boosters’ Club, the president of the J-R Club (“high school boys who have proven themselves leaders of the student body”), captain of the Rhetorical Team and the Debating Team. And so on. He was even a 130-pound substitute tackle on Grand Junction High’s undefeated football team his senior year, although at least one schoolmate remembered him as “the worst football player ever to come out of the school.”

  That same schoolmate, Hubert Gallagher, described Dalton Trumbo in his senior year in high school as one “who always looked like a man in a hurry, churning along with that thin trench coat he wore flapping in the breeze behind him. He was always trying to make a deadline at the Sentinel, or rushing because he was late for school. Always in a hurry.” He was “an amazing guy,” Gallagher added. “He never did much homework—he never had the time—but he got by on pure genius.”

  Back in Grand Junction now it was a different story. I remember spending a frustrating afternoon in a motel room, phoning around, trying to find somebody with a good word for Dalton Trumbo. What is it about your old hometown? Why are the people who stay so much less generous than those who leave?

  Most of them just didn’t want to talk. I sat, looking up phone numbers to match the list of names I had copied down from Trumbo’s high school yearbook, dialing number after number. Wouldn’t anybody talk? I began to feel like a reporter in a movie—the kind of story where he comes into town, asks a few questions, and suddenly finds himself frozen out, met by a conspiracy of silence. Son of Bad Day at Black Rock or something.

  Jim Latimer, who said he hadn’t seen Trumbo since 1932 when he had visited him in Los Angeles, immediately mentioned the book, Eclipse, Trumbo’s first novel: “I think he should never have written it. I hear he admitted something to that effect in later days. He was bitter, that’s what it was. They were tough times then for him and his family, but they were tough times for all of us, and… I can’t talk to you too long. In fact, I don’t know how much I should really talk to you at all.” No, Mr. Latimer would not see me in person. No, he had nothing more to add. No, he had no other suggestions as to what other people I might talk to. No. No. No.

  And that was how it went with all of them—except for Ed Whalley.

  He greeted my call as an opportunity to talk about an old friend, but he said he thought the best thing for me to do was to come by early the next afternoon when his daughter, Terry, would be there. “She’ll have something to contribute,” he told me.

  Resentment at things said by Trumbo in his first novel, Eclipse, had been voiced again and again by those I talked with in Grand Junction. That he treated some in the town satirically and caricatured them—Mrs. George Benge, for one—there can be no doubt. But by and large, Eclipse is a good, honest, and realistic novel, with some serious things to say about human nature and the quality of middle-class life in a town like Grand Junction. What was remarkable, though, was the way the air of scandal still hung over a book that had been published forty years ago—and only in England. No American edition of the novel ever appeared—which is a pity—yet nearly all those I talked with in Grand Junction, and certainly all of Trumbo’s contemporaries, were intimately familiar with it. How to account for this? Before keeping my appointment with Ed Whalley and his daughter the next day, I dropped in at the Mesa County Library and asked about Eclipse.

  Ruby Millett, behind the desk, told me that yes, they had that novel by Dalton Trumbo there, along with two others, Johnny Got His Gun and The Remarkable Andrew. “But that one, Eclipse,” she assured me, “is by far the most popular. In fact, we have to have several copies here just to keep pace with demand.” She went to her files and showed me that there were six requests for it on hand at that very moment. About average.

  “What’s the attraction?” I asked. “Why such interest so long after publication?”

  She looked at me as though I must be kidding or something. “That’s the way people are,” she said. “Why, there was one woman who made up a list of all the characters in the book and their equivalents in real life here in town. She showed it to me afterward. She had certainly gone to a lot of trouble on it, I can tell you.”

  George Van Camp, the Mesa County librarian, added that a lot of the requests for Eclipse might well be coming from Mesa County Junior College students. “One of the teachers there made it a recommended book in a sociology course. Any way you look at it, though, it’s a phenomenally popular book. When I came here a few years ago there was only one copy of it left. There had been others, but they disappeared. I sent that one copy out and had a Duopage facsimile made by Bell and Howell. We’ve since acquired a third. We need all we can get.”

  Then on to Ed Whalley. His house, tucked away on a side street toward the edge of town, was a small and comfortable one, not much more than ten years old. Ed was there—a large, easygoing man in good physical shape for all his sixty-odd years. And also present was Mary Teresa Whalley, his daughter, Terry—a good-looking girl of about twenty—who was as frank in her manner as she was enthusiastic.

  Whalley told me that he had never lost contact with Dalton Trumbo, that he had seen him off and on over the years on various trips to the West Coast. The last had been in 1970, during the filming of Johnny Got His Gun, and Terry had been along on that one. She had written Trumbo earlier that year, when she was still a student at Grand Junction High, gathering information for a long article on him as a distinguished alumnus which she subsequently wrote for the school paper. He took time out and answered her questions at length—three pages of questions and fourteen pages of answers—in effect, a written interview.

  “He said I was the first person who had written from the high school since he had left town,” she told me. “He was so nice to me. Not everyone in his position would be. When we visited him there in Los Angeles, he took us down one day where they were shooting Johnny, and he let us watch the whole day. He escorted us to the best position to see it all, then just let us watch. It was really, well, sort of thrilling.” She broke off, as though suddenly embarrassed at her own extravagance.

  Ed Whalley recalled that his first recollections of Dalton dated back principally to their junior and senior years in high school. “That was when we formed the ‘Ain’t We Got Fun Club.’ I’ll tell you, they don’t party like they used to. We used to party from home to home every weekend. But you want to remember that with all this, Dalton was a very brilliant student, and in practically every kind of activity they had then in high school. He was really a remarkable young guy.”

  “Has he changed much over the years?” I asked him.

  “You know, that’s the remarkable thing. Except for his appearance, he hasn’t really changed very much at all.”

  “And he looks just great,” said Terry. “Very hip or mod or something. You know, long-haired and with a big mustache, and all. I think he looks terrific.”

  Ed Whalley continued: “No, personality-wise he hasn’t changed a bit. He always was a busy-assed guy, wound up like an eight-day clock—always noisy and talkative with that sort of outgoing personality. Generous to a fault—that’s the way he was in high school, and that’s the way he is today.”

  “It makes me mad the way some people feel around here,” said Terry. “They talk about him like he was a devil or something.”

  “Yeah,” Ed agreed, “it’s the nature of people, I guess. There was this House Un-American Activities Committee business and everything, Communism and all that. Going to prison itself is a crime to some people.” Whalley paused and smiled. “He’s proud of it, though, you know. He always brings up that year
he spent in jail. He wants to be sure everyone knows about it. But there’s a certain amount of hard feeling around here about that, I guess.

  “A lot of the strong feeling about Dalton Trumbo comes right down to jealousy, though. I really believe that. He’s the one of us that the whole country’s heard of. Now, there’s got to be a lot of jealousy because of that. But me, well, if he should show up at this fiftieth anniversary class reunion they’ve got planned for next year—and I don’t think for a minute he will—I’m not going to treat him any different than I always have. I’ve always respected him.”

  Although neither Ed Whalley nor any of the rest back in Grand Junction had mentioned her, Dalton had a girl in high school who was generally considered a suitable match for a living legend such as he. She was a year behind him in school, the daughter of the owner of the town’s ice cream factory. She was, by all reports, a beautiful girl who was immensely talented as a dancer—in fact, she was later to dance professionally and have quite a successful career on the stage—and Dalton, by his own admission, was enchanted by her. It may well have been she who inspired him to drive himself as he did through those last years in school. Sylvia, after all, was clearly marked for success. When Anna Pavlova came through Grand Junction and played the Avalon Theater there—all the great artists and entertainers did that, for it was the only town of any size between Denver and Salt Lake City—a number of local girls auditioned for the great Russian ballerina’s troupe. Sylvia Longshore was invited by Pavlova to join her company. “But she decided not to go,” Trumbo remembered. And he added, as though honestly baffled, “I never understood that.” Eventually, however, she did leave to begin her dancing career as “Sylvia Shore,” departing for Los Angeles before she had even quite finished high school. By then, though, Trumbo was gone from the town, too—away at the University of Colorado in Boulder.