CHAPTER TWO

COLORADO

Trumbo settles into his chair. His attention flags, and he looks for a moment as though he were thinking of something else. Is he tired? He says he is not. Would he like me to call it quits for today and come back tomorrow? No.

“I’m just trying to decide where to begin this damned story,” he explains.

“Tell me about your family.”

“Well, all right. Now, this is information I got not firsthand but from a remote cousin. You see, when my name first appeared in Who’s Who—I think it was in 1938 or ’40—there was another Trumbo there. He wrote me at once. He was a banker in Oklahoma and had spent some money and had traced the Trumbo name to Switzerland. There’s a waterfall there called Trummelbach, and the family apparently had taken its name from the falls, and they were van Trummelbachs. They then became Trumbach. They then apparently moved east into Alsace-Lorraine or around in there, and they became Trumbeau. They then went to England and became Trumbo. And in 1736 the first of them came into the United States, and they settled in Virginia. And when I was in jail in Kentucky, I took the Louisville Courier-Journal, whatever the newspaper is, and the local one, and I found both Trumbos and Tillerys—my mother’s family name—much more common there. They spread through Virginia and West Virginia and Kentucky.

“My grandfather Tillery, I think, was born in Missouri. His father fought under Morgan’s command for the South in the guerrilla raids. And in a raid into Indiana or Ohio, he was wounded and left behind and died. That was my great-grandfather. But then my grandfather married my grandmother in Missouri and came to Colorado. He built a log cabin and became a populist and then a Bryan Democrat. I remember once at the county fair I was with my grandfather Tillery, and I saw a man I thought looked like President Taft, although Taft at that time I don’t think was president. The man was making a speech. And I said to my grandfather, ‘Is that President Taft?’ My grandfather said, ‘No, that’s just some God-damned Republican trying to get himself elected to office.’”

His father, Orus Trumbo, was born in Albion, Indiana, not all that far from those Virginia and Kentucky Trumbos, in the year 1874. Orus was the son of James and Elizabeth Bonham Trumbo. James Trumbo was an angry man, given to awful fits of temper and bouts of excessive drinking—eventually he died of Bright’s disease, though not before the better part of the relationship between father and son had been destroyed in the course of bitter arguments between them. Orus left home more or less at the first opportunity. He had completed a “normal school” education (two years of college and a teacher’s certificate) and had done some teaching when he volunteered for army service in the Spanish-American War. The war ended when he was on the train on his way to camp. He had no special wish to continue teaching, and a friend persuaded him to come out West and take part in a venture in commercial beekeeping. That was how he happened to come to Colorado. Orus Trumbo’s career as a beekeeper proved to be brief and unsuccessful, his failure in that line foreshadowing a pattern that continued all through his life. He worked subsequently as a farmhand, and then as a grocery clerk in Montrose, Colorado, a mountain town on the western slope of the Rockies. And that was where he met Maud Tillery, eight years his junior, who was the daughter of the sheriff of Montrose County.

Millard Tillery was a real six-gun-toting frontier sheriff, one whose life and exploits matched the most potent myths of the Old West. He had operated a cattle ranch since the mid-1880s in a place just east of Montrose called Cimarron. He continued to ranch during the terms he served as sheriff. Ranching alone kept him pretty busy, but when the law needed enforcing he was always ready to go out and do whatever needed to be done. Sheriff Tillery earned a reputation as a good tracker, and he had to be that, for when men broke the law in Montrose County, they would invariably head out for the mountain wilderness that stood high around them on three sides. With Tillery in pursuit, the fugitives never got far—a hundred miles or so at the most—and he would bring them back alive, usually hitting his log-timbered ranch house just in time to overnight there before proceeding on to the jail in Montrose city. The lawbreaker might be a robber, a horse thief, or even a murderer, but he would be given the run of the house, unshackled and unchained, since it had already been demonstrated to him that there was no place in the surrounding territory for him to hide. A bluff? But it worked, all right—Sheriff Tillery lost no prisoners. His wife, however, objected strenuously to the practice. She felt that a house with murderers roaming around in it was no fit place to raise children.

Nevertheless, that was the way that Maud Tillery, Dalton’s mother, grew up. Hers was an interesting mixture of qualities. She was tough and durable—as she would prove herself later on, when she raised her children on her own—but at the same time there was in this daughter of a profane, rough-and-ready frontier sheriff a great yearning for gentility. It must have been this that attracted her to that grocery clerk, Orus Trumbo. He was from the “East” (Indiana), had had a college education of sorts, but more important, he was an upright young man who read books and talked with her seriously about them. On the day of their marriage (December 4, 1904), in fact, he bought a set of Shakespeare, declaring that no home should be without Shakespeare and the Bible. Then the two moved into their room above the Montrose town library.

James Dalton Trumbo was born there December 5, 1905. There had already been a miscarriage early in the year, and Maud Trumbo, a small woman, had had a difficult pregnancy. The birth was a long and difficult one, too. As a result, Dalton Trumbo had forceps scars and an unevenly shaped head through his first year. He also carried a slight congenital defect that ran in the family—a drooping left eyelid that he had learned to disguise by arching his brow.

It was easy to get a sense of the sort of watchful, hopeful mother Maud Trumbo had been by looking at Dalton Trumbo’s “Baby Book.” It was, in a couple of ways, a remarkable document. For one thing, it told us far more about the mother who kept the record than it did about the child. Except for the scars he bore from his birth, he seemed to have been a normal baby in every way—perhaps a little above average in size and in his response to the world around him. But Maud Trumbo’s comments in the Baby Book made it clear she thought him superior in every way:

First sentence was “See Mamma’s baby.” While walking in front of the mirror he saw himself in the glass, and after stopping and looking for several seconds he uttered his first sentence.

At 2½ years. Remarks: While at his Grandfather’s one day he couldn’t understand why he was called papa. He said “Grandpa are you a papa,” his answer was yes. Dalton said after studying a moment, “Well, my papa is not a grandpa.” After being told to stop asking for fruit from the vegetable man he said all right and the next wagon with fruit which passed he said “Are you got any pears in your wagon?” When he came in with the pear, I asked him if he had begged it of the man, he said “no mama I just asked if he had any and he did give me one.”

And on and on. A nice little boy, to be sure—although there was no hint in the record of the fierce, wailing, head-pounding temper he had. What came through most plainly in these entries was that James Dalton Trumbo was a child on whom the hopes, expectations, and even the ambitions of his parents had been pinned: he had to achieve great things. Why? Because he was their son. For their part, Orus and Maud Trumbo would do everything within their means to see that he be given every opportunity to succeed.

The tragedy was—and within the limits of his parents’ lives it was a genuine tragedy—that their means to assure his success in life were sorely, almost pitifully, limited. Orus Trumbo tried hard. He worked at a succession of jobs, sometimes two at a time, both in Montrose and during the years that followed in Grand Junction, Colorado; but he was never able to do much more than scratch out a living for himself and his family. He was an intelligent and sensitive man, and an educated man who kept up with world events and had independent opinions, one who read widely for pleasure and to keep himself informed. Yet time after time, in venture after venture, his plans came to nothing. Dalton Trumbo remembered his father as “a very gentle man, a terribly hardworking man, who was just born not to succeed—financially. One would say that my father was weak, but that is not an apt or a correct description. He simply was not modeled for competitive success. My mother was.”

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 influenza 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.

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, with 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.

“It was the oldest fraternity on campus and certainly one of the best, if not the best. Anyway, it had the most substantial alumni around the state, and that seemed important to Dalton at the time.”

That’s George E. MacKinnon talking, who became a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia. He was the man most responsible for Dalton Trumbo pledging Delta Tau Delta. Graduating a year ahead of him from Grand Junction High School, MacKinnon (who was known universally as “Dizzy,” in recognition of his shambling, loose-jointed walk) had gone to the university the fall before, and when Trumbo’s name had come up in the spring among next semester’s prospective freshmen, he had backed him all the way: “I told them he doesn’t have a lot of money, but he’s a good bet to have some. I said he had great writing talent, and I recommended that they pledge him.”

Although MacKinnon had supported Trumbo for the fraternity, the two spent no time together at the Colorado University chapter. MacKinnon returned to Minnesota, where his family was originally from, and transferred to the university there. It was as a Minnesotan that he was known in Washington: he had a successful career as a lawyer in Minneapolis which led to four terms in the Minnesota legislature, and one in the U.S. House of Representatives; his brief career as a congressman brought him an appointment as a federal judge. Then he rose to a judgeship in the second-highest court in the land.

We talked about his memories of Trumbo in Grand Junction, which were few, but then MacKinnon went on to say that he had kept contact with him after a fashion during the years that followed.

“Well, for one thing,” he said, “I was a field agent for the fraternity national. Whenever I’d meet the Delta Tau Delta man from Boulder, I’d say, ‘How’s Trumbo coming?’ Between what I heard from him and other fellows at the chapter, I gathered Trumbo had quite a successful time on campus but had a hard time financially. Then I looked him up when I was out in Los Angeles in 1932 for the Olympics. That was the last time I saw him personally.”

Trumbo had gone off to the university on a shoestring. He had saved a little; he would work there and help pay his own way; his father would supply what he could. To send a son to college on a shoe clerk’s salary may have seemed to some in Grand Junction an act of hubris. If it was, then the fall suffered by Orus Trumbo for his presumption was as swift and awful as any wished by the gods on some Greek hero, and it was certainly tragic in its consequences.

Hubert Gallagher, a year Trumbo’s junior, worked at Benge’s Shoe Store as a sweeper and stock boy alongside Orus Trumbo: “Dalton’s father was sort of my mentor at Benge’s. He was always helpful and considerate toward me, and others there weren’t—although in general Benge’s was a happy place to work.” However, the store fell on hard times in 1924, during one of the economic tremors that foreshadowed the earthquake of 1929. Harry Benge announced that he would have to retrench. He looked around at his staff, and…

“In many ways, Mr. Trumbo seemed like a loser, a real loser,” Hubert Gallagher remembered. “His health failed that last year—I thought he had TB. But still, he didn’t take much from people. He wasn’t the type to put up with fools. Some women would come into that shop and spend half an hour just trying on one pair of shoes after another. But not with O.B.—that’s what he was called. They’d try that on him and he’d get up and say, ‘Well, that’s it. Take it or leave it.’”

Perhaps he did that once too often in George Benge’s presence. Or perhaps it was, as Benge would later insist, a case where somebody had to go and preference was given to another clerk, Fred Gilbert, because he was a World War I veteran. Whatever the justification, or rationalization, the results were the same for Orus Trumbo. He was notified on Thanksgiving eve, 1924, that he would no longer be needed after the first of the year.

Dalton Trumbo heard about it while he was at the university in Boulder, without quite realizing what it would mean to him—though that was made clear soon enough. It wasn’t until much, much later that he realized what losing that job meant to his father: “Actually this loss was the thing which killed him. It uprooted him and completely upset the rest of his life’s plans.”

There was no other job for Orus Trumbo in Grand Junction. He took his wife, and his two daughters, Catherine and Elizabeth, and with Dalton still at the University of Colorado, moved to Los Angeles early that spring on nothing more than the promise of a job.

Dalton’s freshman year at the University of Colorado was a successful one and would have been exactly the sort of good beginning he had hoped to make—had there only been other years to follow. As it was, except for odd credits picked up in fits and starts over the next few years at the University of Southern California, that year (1924–25) at Colorado proved to be roughly the extent of his college education. His time was taken up with the ordinary things of college life in the twenties. He was anxious to get to know people on campus, and to be known by them. He went to classes and studied for them more seriously than he had back in Grand Junction. He began writing for the school paper. Even misadventures, when they occurred, were of the ordinary rah-rah sort: one day a group of upperclassmen came upon him when he was not wearing the green beanie, which was mandatory for freshmen, whereupon they picked him up and tossed him in a nearby lake.

His best friend at the university was his roommate at the Delta Tau Delta house. Llewellyn Thompson, also a freshman, from Colorado. The two kept in contact through the years and once, years later, had occasion to work together again. Llewellyn Thompson, now deceased; he was, of course, ambassador to Russia from 1966 to 1969, when he retired from the Foreign Service.

Trumbo apparently loved fraternity life. The only conflict that arose between him and the chapter—and it was sharp and bitter while it lasted—had to do with exclusions of which he had apparently not even been aware. When a young man named Mike Loeffler came to Boulder to look over the campus, Trumbo had him out to the fraternity house for dinner. Loeffler was the son of one of the two Jewish merchants back in Grand Junction; he had been a friend in high school, and Trumbo invited him, thinking nothing more of it. Well, when Loeffler left that night, the fraternity’s policy on Jews was made clear to Dalton. He was surprised and angry, and he moved out of the house that very night, telling them he didn’t think he wanted to be a member of an organization that had such rules. In the end, however, they persuaded him to come back.

It was a busy year for him. He became involved in a number of extracurricular activities, all of which had to do with writing in one way or another. In addition to the University of Colorado’s newspaper, Silver and Gold, he helped edit the college yearbook, and he was invited to submit pieces to do with college life to the Colorado Dodo, the campus humor magazine, so as to be eligible for appointment to its staff. He was also chosen to be a member of Sigma Delta Chi, the national journalism honorary fraternity. All this may seem quite a lot of work for a young man in his freshman year of college—and it certainly was—but few came to the university with the wealth of practical experience that Trumbo had gained as a cub reporter on the Grand Junction Sentinel. He was already a journalist when he arrived. When money became a particular problem to him, in the second semester of his freshman year, he was even able to get a job with the local paper, the Boulder Daily Camera.

Most of the letters he wrote home were appeals for funds: “I never had any idea how tough things really were and was very demanding.” As best they could, the Trumbos met those demands. Money was sent from time to time, but it was never enough. In their new situation, there never would be enough to keep him at college; by the end of his freshman year there, he had grasped that and had made his plans to withdraw and join his family in Los Angeles. When the time came, he signed up to ferry a Ford over the Rockies to Grand Junction. The trip, made on Colorado roads in 1925, put plenty of wear and tear on the cars, but once at their destination, they were sold as new. That was how he arrived back home. Once there, he borrowed money to continue on to Los Angeles. He took a train from Grand Junction sometime in July of 1925. Dalton Trumbo never returned there.

He left the town; but, as we shall see, he went back again and again in his writing. So much of what he would write in the years that followed—practically anything that mattered more to him than a routine screen assignment—represented an effort to come to terms through art with the events and feelings of the first eighteen years of his life. Three of his four novels and his only play are set, at least in part, in Shale City, Colorado, the putative Grand Junction. More important, though, his best work has dealt with such themes as his father’s apparent failure and his own sense of exile, of dispossession.

Colorado, his memories of his years there and the fantasies they may have inspired, seems to have contributed something to some of his movie work, too. He had a tendency to sentimentalize his feelings for the land and for the rural childhood that he really never had. He may well have drawn upon them when he did one of his scripts for M-G-M, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. Just because these feelings were sentimental and based, to some extent, on fantasy doesn’t mean they were lightly held: that screenplay, and all the other work he did for M-G-M, was written up on a remote ranch in the wilds of Ventura County that he had been moved to buy for just about the same sentimental reasons. Family tales of Grandpa Tillery, the frontier lawman, may have helped a little in the writing of the half a dozen or so westerns Trumbo turned out while on the blacklist, although as a character his grandfather seems to appear only in Lonely Are the Brave, as the relentless but sympathetic sheriff, played in the film by Walter Matthau.

From this point forward, and for many years to come, it would be Trumbo’s intention to show them back there in Grand Junction that he could amount to something. To take his revenge upon them for what the town had done to his father, to have the success his father had been denied. How else to account for the furious energy with which Trumbo attacked life in the next few years? What more could he have felt, to touch a specific point, but a kind of Gatsby-like yearning in the years to come, for Sylvia Shore, the girl whom he was sure was meant just for him? He had to show her. He had to show them all.