DAVID LAURANCE CHAMBERS DIALED the familiar Memphis phone number. Each unanswered ring meant one more moment in Wesley and Nelle Halliburton’s world where their oldest son still lived.
Nelle went inside from where she was sitting with her husband and picked up the phone. She wilted upon hearing the news. In the minutes and hours following, the grief slashed its way through every fiber of their being. It was as though their life had been sliced into three. In part one, there were four Halliburtons: Wesley Sr., Nelle, Richard, and Wesley Jr. In part two, Wesley Jr. died and Richard traveled the world, writing his way into fame. Now came part three, where though their two sons were gone, they remained parents all the same.
Editors and reporters across America stared in disbelief as the first reports of the author’s disappearance came across the wire. AUTHOR LOST; RICHARD HALLIBURTON MISSING 5 DAYS, read the headline across the front page of the Nevada State Journal. In the New York Times: “No Trace of Halliburton: Writer and Crew of Ten on Chinese Junk Still Unreported.”1 The news triggered coast-to-coast media coverage in papers large and small.
Halliburton’s fans gasped. One librarian became so overcome when she heard the news that she went home for the rest of the day. A devoted fan, she was proud of her autographed collection of his books.2 Others hoped their boyishly handsome hero might turn up alive. Perhaps he had staged another Hellespont-style publicity stunt and was at this moment waiting outside to make a triumphant arrival at Treasure Island. Author and playwright Tennessee Williams, a fellow Laguna Beach resident, thought it possible: “Incidentally he has apparently met a tragic end in crossing the Pacific…. People around here say that Paul Mooney, mentioned as his collaborator, actually did most of his writing for him. They both went down in the junk—unless it all turns out to be a big publicity stunt.”3
Perhaps the nine words of the New York Journal’s headline best captured America’s mood: BUT RICHARD HALLIBURTON LOST? IT’S AN INCREDIBLE IDEA.4 An incredible idea indeed. Eighteen years ago Halliburton sailed forth from New Orleans determined to wring as much from life as possible. It was incomprehensible to his admirers, to the reporters who covered his every move, to his friends and family, that the man who swam the Panama Canal, flew around the world in an open cockpit airplane, and interviewed an assassin had simply vanished. Marilyn Fais, who had met the author in Mentor, Ohio, just two years before, had been one of the many children who had signed up to receive the Sea Dragon letters, “but sadly he disappeared and no more letters were sent. I was devastated.”5
The news also stunned his colleagues. The Golden Gate Exposition fair organizers, including Walter Gaines Swanson, could not believe there would be no grand arrival in San Francisco, no queuing up for tickets to hear the author speak about his adventures on the high seas.
Putting aside their grief, his editors at the Bobbs-Merrill Company worked to keep ahead of the story. The publishing house sent a press release to newspaper and radio editors from Boston to San Diego and all points in between. They implored editors to resist speculating over their beloved author’s fate. The release offered the barest outline of what Bobbs-Merrill knew to be true.6 In time, dispatches from various ships operating in the vicinity, transcripts of last radio contacts, and telegrams between Halliburton and his parents would provide some semblance of a timeline of the events leading up to the tragedy.
The Sea Dragon last made contact with the SS President Coolidge on March 23 when it reported its location to be about 2,480 miles from Midway Island, so named because it lies about halfway between Asia and America.7
This headshot of Richard Halliburton accompanied many of the articles announcing the author’s disappearance at sea. Author’s collection
S. W. Fenton, the marine superintendent of the Mackay Radio Company, reported the station last made contact with the junk at 5:00 AM on March 24.8 Halliburton’s voice was unmistakable. Fenton recognized it from having previously spoken with the author. When the station failed to hear from the Sea Dragon at the next appointed time, Fenton started broadcasting two messages every half hour on the dot. One message tried to raise the junk; the other message requested all ships at sea to remain vigilant. “Lookouts on ships cruising west of Honolulu and radio operators on ships and at shore stations in the Hawaiian Islands and on the mainland searched unavailingly Thursday for Richard Halliburton and his junk the Sea Dragon,” the Mackay radio station’s Fenton reported.9
Back in San Francisco, Wilfred Crowell, the manager of the Richard Halliburton Expedition, immediately notified the US Navy, the US Coast Guard, and Pan American Airways. Thus began the search.
The SS President Pierce reported observing wreckage of some kind floating on the water. However, it could not confirm what the debris was or whether it came from the seventy-five-foot-long Sea Dragon. At twelve hundred miles west of Midway Island, both the President Taft and President Adams had been near Halliburton’s last known location. The two ships reported no signs of the ship. Neither did the Roger Taney, a 327-foot Coast Guard cutter sailing near Jarvis Island, an uninhabited coral island in the South Pacific.
For six days and nights, ships combed more than 160,000 square miles of ocean, an area slightly smaller than the whole of France. It was like looking for a white cat in a snowstorm. The ocean yielded no signs of Halliburton or his crew.
“‘No trace’ was the word flashed again today from ships at sea and Pan-American Clipper planes in the unofficial search for Richard Halliburton’s Chinese junk Sea Dragon.”10 On April 4, not two weeks after the Sea Dragon’s disappearance, the US Navy called off the search. It could no longer justify the dedication of resources to so vast an area; the likelihood of finding anything was remote.11 The ever-shifting winds and currents of the Pacific Ocean act like a giant conveyor belt, carrying away debris like suitcases on a baggage carousel.
The decision to end the search distressed Halliburton’s parents; not knowing their son’s fate was the worst kind of suffering. They pleaded with the navy to keep looking.12
“We just don’t know what to do or think,” Wesley Halliburton told a local paper. “Since the last message of March 24 we have heard nothing. Richard has been through dangers before where we had about given him up for lost, and all we can do now is to wait and hope. But it is a terrible suspense just waiting and not knowing what the next word may be.”13 Friends of the family joined the Halliburtons’ entreaty.
Feeling the pressure, Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Naval Operations, assured the Halliburtons the search would be reopened. It was now mid-May and in reality it was no longer a search but rather a recovery operation.
Captain Richmond Kelly Turner, the commander of the USS Astoria, a ten-thousand-ton cruiser, was in Guam on May 21, having taken part in a successful operation to refloat the US Grant, a US Army transport ship. When the orders came through to hunt for Halliburton, Turner headed north toward the author’s last known position. The Astoria combed the area until May 29.
“The result of my search was negative,” Turner said.14
Two months later, in May 1939, Gay Beaman, who represented Halliburton for the A. G. Beaman Agency Ltd., wrote to Hangover House architect William Alexander. A telegram had announced the incident weeks before; only it had taken time for Beaman to gather the energy to write. He refused to accept that neither his client nor Mooney (“whose last letter was quite cheery!”) were going to anchor at Treasure Island. After all, he wrote, maybe the Sea Dragon had reversed course and headed back to Hong Kong when the weather turned deadly. Or perhaps Halliburton and his crew were stranded on a deserted island. Beaman didn’t accept the US decision to stop looking and hoped to persuade the Japanese government to conduct its own independent search. Or, at the least, assist the Americans in their search.15
What Beaman couldn’t know was that Secretary of State Cordell Hull was already personally involved. The chief diplomat had reached out to the Japanese Foreign Office and asked them for assistance. Japan agreed to limited help. Japanese shipping companies requested their vessels to be on heightened alert for possible radio signals from the Sea Dragon. Several weeks later, the Japanese Foreign Office reported back to Hull: they had no information as to the fate of the missing vessel.16
With no firm answers, speculation flourished. Perhaps the typhoon blew the Sea Dragon just enough off course that it missed Midway Island, suggested Fenton, the Mackay Radio official. If that were true, the Sea Dragon might still be sailing toward San Francisco. Halliburton’s expedition manager Crowell likewise told the public he believed the Sea Dragon was afloat and drifting off course somewhere in the mid-Pacific. Privately, however, he grew ever more alarmed.17
Albert Richard Wetjen, a friend of the Sea Dragon’s Captain Welch, weighed in with his own theory. As the author of several shipwreck novels, the cigar-smoking Wetjen surmised the intense winds and current had forced Welch to continue straight toward San Francisco. The junk likely no longer had an operational radio or enough fuel for its auxiliary diesel engine. Soon, he said, the Sea Dragon would sail triumphantly under the Golden Gate Bridge, its colorful sails waving in the breeze.18
But after nearly two months of fruitless searches, the public understood their beloved author was gone. Newspapers started running obituaries and letters from readers. Grace K. Ebright of Altoona, Pennsylvania, found a letter Halliburton had once sent. She read it over several times before sitting down to write an obituary. Ebright reflected on what motivates people, even when the odds are stacked against them—as they so often had been for Halliburton. “Our great geographic discoveries were made by such gallant soldiers of fortune as this. Columbus set out in the face of every known obstacle—but he had a dream and he stuck to it … that was the kind of thing he loved to do. He was made of the kind of stuff that welcomes danger, defies hardship, invites the unusual experience.”19
Many fans wrote to Bobbs-Merrill postulating all kinds of scenarios. Some insisted the Japanese had taken Halliburton prisoner, because they discovered the writer was a spy and had been on a secret mission for President Roosevelt. Others surmised the writer, fed up with publicity, was living on an atoll somewhere in the Pacific with only his crew for company. Seeking to quiet the conjecture, Captain Dale E. Collins, the President Coolidge’s chief officer, summed up what he knew in an article for the US Naval Institute’s magazine Proceedings. His connection with Halliburton coupled with his experience lent authority to the piece. There was nothing mysterious about Halliburton’s disappearance the night of March 24–25, Collins wrote less than a year after the tragedy.20 The exact date remains unknown, as the junk was crossing the International Date Line at the time.
Collins outlined three possible scenarios in his article. One, the Sea Dragon tried to outrun the typhoon instead of dropping a sea anchor and trying to ride out the storm. Two, the winds snapped the Sea Dragon’s mast and it toppled with the force of a giant sequoia, punching through the top-deck. The torrents of water washing over the rails would have drowned anyone below, and anyone standing near the mast when it fell would have been swept into the sea. Three, the force of the waves simply capsized the junk.21
Naturally, Collins couldn’t verify any of the three scenarios proffered, or even say which of the three was the most plausible; he simply wanted to present the facts, as he knew them. But having been privy to Halliburton’s trials and tribulations, Collins wasn’t trading in sensationalism when he called the expedition ill fated from its inception.
As Time magazine described it, his disappearance was “the only unpremeditated adventure of Adventurer Halliburton’s career.”22
In the weeks to come, Halliburton’s family and friends reluctantly accepted the truth: a brutal typhoon had swallowed the Sea Dragon.23 Halliburton was dead. The sea also claimed the lives of John W. Welch, captain; Henry von Fehren, engineer; George Petrich, radio man; Richard Davis, assistant engineer; George Barstow III, crew; Robert Chase, crew; Paul Mooney, crew; Ralph Granrud, seaman; Ben Flagg, seaman; Velman Fitch, seaman; and Sun Fook, Kiao Chu, Wang Ching-huo, and Liu Ah-shu.
Perhaps the editors at Bobbs-Merrill said it best when they issued this statement to the public: “What the end was must remain forever one of the unsolved mysteries of the sea, but anyone who has seen the usually tranquil Pacific in one of its rare moods of tempest will know that there was high adventure indeed in those last final hours, and that for Richard Halliburton it must have been an end set to the tempo of a gallant life.”24
One month after the Sea Dragon disappeared, Alicia Mooney, one of Paul Mooney’s younger sisters, wrote to William Alexander. “No report—just general guessing that a typhoon sank the junk…. My favorite brother never was destined to die in bed; he got one more thrill when he looked upon a typhoon making toward him; and if fast thinking yet could save him, he’s still around,” she wrote.25
One year later, on St. Patrick’s Day 1940, Mooney’s mother, Ione, celebrated her sixty-second birthday. Grief had long settled into the eaves of her house. She thought about her son’s last message. She knew she needed to be more present, but Mooney’s death crippled her and her relationship with her four surviving children: “They know they cannot take his place. But who am I to expect to miss the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’? It’s just life.”26
Gordon Torrey learned about the Sea Dragon’s disappearance while still in Hong Kong. He had last seen Halliburton from a hospital bed.27 Torrey remained in China after his recovery and went to work for the Texaco Oil Company (China) Ltd., first in Shanghai and then in Haiphong, Indo-China, which by then had become the major transshipping point for all of the strategic war materials destined for interior China, particularly petroleum products.28 Eventually, the waters around Mount Desert beckoned. Torrey spent summers on the island, but after Hong Kong, he and Potter never saw each other or spoke again.
Torrey forever believed the tragedy of the Sea Dragon was avoidable. Instead of sailing a replica junk halfway across the world, Halliburton ought to have shipped it aboard a freight bound for San Francisco. Once near the California coast, he could have had the junk unloaded and then sailed to his mooring at Treasure Island. This would have saved lives and still allowed for commercial success at the Golden Gate Exposition. “Having moderately enjoyed forty-eight plus years of living beyond the others, I have always felt that a decision to sail as the Sea Dragon did should not be left to the whims and commercial aspirations of one person, as in this case,” Torrey wrote many years later.29
Seventy-five years after her father nearly perished at sea, Sarah Betts Alley, Torrey’s daughter, admonished the Sea Dragon adventure. “Adventure to fulfill monetary and commercial needs, while ignoring obvious risk to others’ lives is not an event to celebrate.”30
Seven months later, on October 5, 1939, a Memphis chancery court declared Halliburton, Mooney, and the rest of the crew officially dead. The ruling allowed the First National Bank of Memphis to probate Halliburton’s last will and testament regarding his estate, believed to be worth about $100,000. The decision also meant Prudential Insurance Company of America would pay a total of $20,099.60, the sum of two policies, to Wesley Sr. and Nelle Nance Halliburton.31
After the court rendered its verdict, Dr. Ernest L. Fitch, the father of Velman Fitch, spoke with the Associated Press. The younger Fitch had cabled his father on March 5 with his exciting news that he was sailing for San Francisco with the Halliburton. Fitch held out no hope that his son still lived, “but members of his family feel that if a tiny Chinese junk sighted off northern Vancouver Island, could stay afloat 106 days, there is still hope for Halliburton and Fitch.”32 The grief-stricken father was referring to the Taiping. Captain John Anderson of New York, a retired Yangtze River pilot, and his twenty-five-year-old wife had left Shanghai three weeks after Halliburton sailed from Hong Kong. According to Anderson, the Taiping trailed the Sea Dragon “until we were separated by a typhoon.” Before the Andersons had been sighted off the cost of northern Vancouver Island, they had been “battered and tossed for weeks in 30 foot boat … almost hysterical, waving white rags on bamboo poles.”33
Like frost heave, the court decision pushed tensions between Halliburton, Mooney, and Alexander to the surface. The elder Halliburton, who had no use for his son’s friends or the family of his son’s lover, found attending to his son’s estate a comforting distraction.
Bitter about his friend’s, and former lover’s, death, Alexander directed his attorney to write to Halliburton’s father. He stopped short of accusing him of rushing the official declaration of death so he could get his hands on his son’s money. “I am sure that weighing dollars is the principle of a man in the Farm Investment business and not in the profession of Architecture … I am informed that it was you who hastened the proceedings to declare your son dead, while Alex Levy has not lost hope of his safe return.”34
As for Mooney’s mother, she was angry with Halliburton’s father for not having yet paid the remainder of Hangover House’s outstanding debt. She was angry that Lloyd’s of London had so far denied her insurance payments. And she was angry that Halliburton’s death overshadowed her son’s death. “I have no heart for anything anymore…. Paul and I were too close, I fear.”35
She then took to bed for two weeks with a nasty bout of influenza. Thoughts of Mooney crowded her every waking hour. At night she dreamed of finding his diary. She asked Alexander to ship her some paintings and other things of her son’s that were in storage, including a brass bowl. “Bringing Paul’s things here has probably cost me more than they are worth intrinsically, but naturally I wanted them—especially his books.”36
There reportedly was a Halliburton diary that Lee Hutchings, a mutual friend of Alexander, had saved, “but after he died his physical therapist went into the apartment and threw it out, with everything else. The diary was falling apart,” Michael Blankenship, a friend of Alexander’s, said.37
Soon after the Sea Dragon disappeared, condolence letters from readers inundated the Halliburtons’ Memphis mailbox and the Bobbs-Merrill Company offices. The carefully affixed foreign and domestic stamps were poignant reminders of the nearly one thousand letters Richard sent his parents over his lifetime and the countless places he had visited. Fifteen years after Richard and his crew vanished, the letters kept coming. “A lot of Halliburton’s fans just won’t take the publisher’s word for it that the great adventurer is dead. One woman, finally convinced, insists on keeping up a correspondence just the same,” reported David Dempsey in the New York Times.38
The Halliburtons tried to answer as many letters as possible, just as their son had once answered his fan mail. One response to the Reverend George Lapp, who had met Richard in both Calcutta and Hong Kong, showed the stoic heartbreak that now sheathed the Halliburtons. Wesley wrote how he recently started rereading his son’s letters, starting from his first days at Princeton University all the way until he went missing. “We are grateful for your sympathy, and it is just such letters as these that help us pass through the valley without too great a strain upon our emotions. We naturally expected Richard to meet a dramatic end, but, of course, we hoped that he would be with us until we had passed to our reward. At this late date in our lives it leaves our future here rather drab, but it can’t be helped, so we will make the best of it,” Wesley wrote.39
But of all the letters they received, it was the one from twelve-year-old Roma Borst Hoff of Wisconsin that captured Wesley’s heart. Penned two years after their son’s disappearance, her words moved the grieving father. In her he saw the grandchild he would never have.
“It would be inhuman if we did not appreciate most deeply the delicacy of your feeling towards our sorrow and your desire to soften our disappointment because we can have no grand-child, the fear of which was the cause of lamentations in a letter to Richard,” Wesley Halliburton wrote in answer to her letter. “It is a sad defeat, my wife and I must acknowledge, that though she bore us two fine sons, they are both gone, and there can now be not any to carry on. We must try to think in the long last, it was for the best. We do not know or perhaps believe it to be true, but accept it we must.”40
The two grew close, and from 1930 until his death in 1965, Wesley’s grief found an outlet in ink. Through their letters he continued the conversation he had begun with his son so many decades before. When he told Hoff how proud he was of her, he was also saying how proud he was of his son. When he wrote to her of harnessing each day, he was speaking to his son of courage and opportunity. In Hoff he saw the enthusiasm and imagination his elder son once possessed.41
In 1950 Hoff’s grandfather died. It was eleven years after Richard went missing and thirty-two years after Wesley Jr. succumbed to rheumatic fever. Wesley Sr. offered his sympathy in a two-page letter that was affecting not for its words of comfort but for the way it spoke of his own infinite anguish. “Your grandfather’s passing was normally timed. I am disturbed when youth, unfinished untimely, passes. My Wesley was fifteen. What might he not have added to this world that was worthwhile? Richard passed in full flower with much yet to do that we know was good. And here I am, and their mother, old and useless, linger on for no good.”42
If the sympathy letters offered a degree of succor, the number of purported Sea Dragon sightings did not. Two of the most credible incidents dashed hopes as quickly as they were raised.
The first came in the spring of 1940 when Captain Charles Jokstad of the President Pierce wired his supervisors. While steaming across the Pacific from Yokohama to Honolulu, the officer on watch sighted a fair amount of wreckage in the distance. Jokstad grabbed his binoculars and trained them on the horizon. He scrutinized every piece of debris. “To my amazement we sighted the very rudder of the Sea Dragon which I had condemned! This same rudder, as well as the other timbers, had about a year’s growth of barnacles,” Jokstad later wrote. The state of the debris corresponded with the timeline of the junk’s sinking. But choppy seas coupled with a touch of engine trouble prevented him from salvaging anything. He went to his grave sure with “little doubt that I had witnessed the last chapter of Halliburton’s adventures.”43
Another jolt of hope came in 1945 when wreckage from a small craft washed ashore on San Diego’s Pacific Beach. According to newspaper reports, it appeared to be the waterlogged hull of a small wooden vessel similar to the Sea Dragon. The piece was a flat-bottomed section of heavy timbers, held together with huge brass bolts.44
The article speculated the timbers were the exact type, size, and kind used in the Sea Dragon’s construction. It said the carvings and workmanship were unmistakably Chinese. “It is indeed possible that these timbers were part of the once proud Sea Dragon but it is only conjecture and circumstantial evidence, and perhaps a little dramatic wishful thinking,” Collins said. “Anyway it makes a fitting end to the story of Richard Halliburton that sections of his latest adventure would come finally to reset near his former home at Laguna Beach.”45
Maritime experts agreed the debris was Chinese or Japanese in origin, but they doubted it came from the Sea Dragon. So too did the ever-practical Nelle Halliburton. She told the newspapers her son never mentioned anything concerning brass fittings in all his letters about the Sea Dragon. “Having never seen the Sea Dragon we would not be able to identify it even though this Sea Dragon wreckage was that of the small boat, and from what we have learned through news releases from that point we are positive that the Sea Dragon is not the vessel involved.”46
Memphian John Maize was almost sixteen years old when the Sea Dragon vanished in 1939. He held close the memory of hearing Halliburton speak at the Goodwyn Institute, although because of the impending war, “I wasn’t thinking about his disappearance or Richard Halliburton anymore at the time.”47 Two years after the Sea Dragon sank, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Maize was now a freshman at Southwestern, as Rhodes College was called, and school seemed frivolous. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps and became a B-25 pilot. He spent the better part of his war stationed in the Philippines.
Toward the end of the war, Maize experienced what he called his own personal sequel to Halliburton’s Hong Kong sojourn. On June 22, 1945, Maize and his squadron were assigned to reconnoiter the Chinese coast and verify that the Japanese had withdrawn from their position in Hong Kong. They flew upriver and checked every boat to see if there were military personnel or supplies on board. Observing nothing, they flew back to the Philippines. Concentrated as he was, Maize didn’t realize he had flown over Hong Kong in the course of his mission.
“That has bothered me ever since. Then when I looked at the exhibit at Rhodes and I watched the film very carefully I realized that was Hong Kong. That’s where Richard Halliburton built his junk and where I was just a few years later,” Maize said. “I didn’t see anything like what he saw. The harbor was—all empty. There was not a rowboat anywhere, but I know I was exactly where Richard Halliburton was.”
Many decades later, whenever Maize traveled, whether it was to roam through the antique cities of Europe or to explore the lush islands of Hawaii, he said, “I always had my traveler with me, and my traveler is Richard Halliburton.”48
In late 1939 Halliburton’s parents marked the passing of their elder son in a quiet ceremony at the Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis.
Halliburton’s empty grave lies next to his brother’s. His parents considered burying all of their son’s letters in an empty casket. But Juliet Halliburton Davis, Richard’s younger cousin, convinced them otherwise. Davis asked her uncle to think about editing the correspondence and publishing them as a book. She accompanied Wesley to his office in the First National Bank Building, where he kept all the letters locked in a safe. After rereading just a few, Halliburton decided burying them would be like burying his son; instead he wanted to give the world a look at the private Halliburton, albeit a heavily edited look.49
With sharpened pencil in hand, he removed any passage he felt would reflect negatively upon his son. He deleted anything alluding to his long-term relationship with Mooney, and he scratched out anything that spoke of Mooney’s literary contributions to his son’s books. When in 1937 Halliburton wrote home about his work on the Book of Marvels to say, “I’ve been so busy with Book I’ve had no time to work on house. Now that I’m here Paul would rather I take charge,” his father deleted the second sentence entirely.50 Nevertheless, the end result was a book that took readers from Halliburton’s innocent boyhood days through his last adventure.
In 1940 Bobbs-Merrill signed a contract with the Halliburtons to publish a book of their son’s letters. According to the contract, his parents would receive ten free copies of the book.51 Bobbs-Merrill released Richard Halliburton’s Life of Adventure: His Letters to His Father and Mother in June that same year. On its cover, the Sea Dragon leans into the wind, making its way over the sapphire sea. An American flag snaps in the wind high above the orange, white, and scarlet sails.
Hundreds of thousands of copies sold in the United States. A dozen countries abroad printed the book, which contained but a fraction of the thousands of letters Halliburton wrote. Halliburton represented the young men and women whose best years lay between two world wars—restless, questioning, dissatisfied, curious, bored by inaction. The New York Times called it “engaging and revealing” and said, “If, as has been rather strongly intimated, he was a show-off, these personal writings prove that he was conscientiously and consistently such. He was, moreover, a showman, not only in connection with his deeds but with his thoughts; his letters to his parents prove this.”52
Aside from the book, of which the Halliburtons were proud, they wanted to further memorialize their elder son. They chose to have a redbrick bell tower erected on the campus of Rhodes College so the city might forever remember their “Memphis Boy.” Neither parent lived to see the tower dedicated, but today when the massive bronze bell, cast in France, rings, it can be heard across campus.
Throughout the years, Halliburton’s life continued to touch even those whom he never met, from generation to generation. Mary Chapman remembered how her grandfather J. Penfield Seiberling frequently regaled them at family dinners with stories from his youth. Many of these stories centered on Halliburton, his old college friend. One story in particular haunts her these decades since.
“Grandpa told us that Dick Halliburton was a born adventurer, and they all knew he would never settle down nor marry, but would be a traveler and an adventurer soul all his days … and so he was! Halliburton told the roommates, and Grandpa told us, that if he (or they) ever heard a phrase repeated publicly concerning the whereabouts of Dick Halliburton, that they would KNOW by that phrase being made public, that he had already passed away. Grandpa knew that Halliburton had been on a trip to India and the Orient, and was set to return across the Pacific via a Northerly passage. According to Grandpa, Halliburton was on a ‘Chinese Junk’ ship, off Alaska, and was caught in a violent storm. One of the last cables, perhaps the last cable was from Richard Halliburton, saying simply ‘Everything’s all right, WISH YOU WERE HERE.’ When Grandpa heard the ‘Wish you were here’ phrase read, he said he told Grandma that Richard Halliburton was dead.”53
Chapman believes the story was her grandfather’s means of coming to terms with his friend’s death. A friend whom “one would need the ‘tongue of angels’ to accurately portray.”54
The Halliburton family tree spread from its roots in Scotland; it has branches across the United States. Richard Halliburton, seventy, of California, never knew his namesake, but seems to possess the need to crisscross the globe. Each year the former professor publishes a family newsletter, The Glorious Mis-Adventure.55
For nearly two decades, the Memphian’s zest for adventure spurred people to inhale life. Never believing he held a monopoly on adventure, Halliburton encouraged others to experience. The writer spoke to budding writers; to Walter Cronkite, the bestselling adventurer-journalist was a daredevil with movie star looks.56
Susan Sontag first read Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels when she was seven years old. He sparked her desire for adventure. “Halliburton’s books informed me that the world contained many wonderful things. Not just the Great Wall of China,” Sontag wrote in her essay “Homage to Halliburton.” For her Halliburton was carpe diem personified. “You have something in mind. You imagine it. You prepare for it. You voyage toward it. Then you see it and there is no disappointment, indeed it may be even more captivating than you imagined.” And every time she did something big and adventurous like he did, she thought “I’ve done it. They were on his list.”57
And though the travel writer Paul Theroux never met Halliburton, he recalled that “reading his books at a certain age filled me with a desire to travel…. I believe he was a complex man.”58
John Nicholls Booth, who first met Halliburton backstage in Toronto in 1933, lived this lesson. “If anyone possessed the world it was Richard Halliburton. He would do something in connection with it—he would sleep on top of Mount Olympus. He became a part of what he was seeing; he made you feel the history. The spirit of Halliburton will remain alive in the world. I think what he did was bring people together better than any formal political efforts,” said Booth.59
His spirit revealed itself in the late newsman Charles Kuralt, who hosted the CBS show On the Road. He remembered curling on his grandparents’ porch swing as his grandmother read from Halliburton’s travel books.
Indeed, Halliburton’s knack for connecting with people revealed itself in the way he persuaded King Abdulaziz to meet him inside a royal tent in Jedda, swayed a Dayak chief to go flying, and convinced the Japanese government to grant him safe passage in wartime. “He was an appealing, confused individual, a US phenomenon, a US symbol. The nice son of a nice US environment, he never entirely either out grew or betrayed it. He was essentially, if mildly, an artist and a rebel, he achieved neither art nor rebellion. He was an innocent sort of Byron—of his time,” Time said.60
In 1944 the United States Maritime Commission recognized this gift when it named a Liberty ship in honor of Halliburton. As was custom, Liberty ships were named for deceased individuals who made notable contributions to American history and culture. As one member of the naming committee told Wesley Halliburton Sr., he proposed Halliburton because “the spirit of adventure which characterized his career eminently suited him to the honor of having a ship named for him.”61 The Richard Halliburton was a 10,000-ton and 430-foot-long cargo ship. A life ring from the boat now hangs in Rhodes College.
“If Richard Halliburton had not actually lived, no novelist or satirist would dare have invented him. Any fictional character who had the time, ability, or inclination to do all the exciting, grueling, and often ridiculous things he did simply would not be believable.”62 So wrote Joe David Brown in a piece for Sports Illustrated twenty-four years after Richard Halliburton disappeared at sea.
Esquire magazine’s George Weller celebrated the writer in his essay “The Passing of the Last Playboy.” Acknowledging Halliburton’s polarizing nature, Weller applauded his ability to rise above his fiercest critics. “Probably no adventurer with such meager personal pretensions to authorship ever excited so much dispute in American letters as this man,” Weller wrote. Once his critics concluded that Halliburton did what he said, they chose other reasons to lambast him, primarily for his writing style. Weller believed Halliburton had died ten years too late. When the 1920s closed, Halliburton had done, seen, and sampled everything possible. Made of too mercurial, too romantic stuff for the Depression, Halliburton “was an Ariel, left over from the summer of the Jazz Age.”63
Today, four columns, one for each family member, stand in Memphis’s Forest Hill Cemetery. Set in the ground are four rectangular stones engraved with the names of each Halliburton: WESLEY JR., 1903—1918; NELLE, 1869—1955; WESLEY HALLIBURTON, 1870—1965; and RICHARD, 1900—1939 LOST AT SEA.
For thirty-nine years Richard Halliburton sought the kind of immortality enjoyed by the literary heroes of his childhood, but the dream he had chased for so long died with him. The tragedy lay not in his dying young, but rather in his fading glory.