On November 11, 1651, the sailing vessel John and Sarah left London docks. On board were several hundred Scottish prisoners, soldiers who had been taken by Cromwell's New Model Army at the Battle of Worcester. The English Civil War had ended with the defeat of the Royalists and the execution in 1649 of King Charles I. England was now a Commonwealth, with Oliver Cromwell at its head. The king's son, also Charles, refused to accept this. He assumed the title of king, was crowned at Scone, and raised a Scottish army with the hope of winning back the crown. The Scots had fought bravely under incompetent leadership. Many thousands were killed or captured at Dunbar in 1650, but the survivors persisted. Such was the state of Scotland at the time, divided and impoverished, that there must have seemed little left to live for.
Charles now led his army south, heading for London. They met surprisingly little opposition until they arrived at the outskirts of Worcester. For a few hours it seemed that the Scots might triumph, but the arrival of fresh English forces soon settled the matter. Charles was among the few who escaped. For the Scots this second defeat was a major disaster. Those of the clan chiefs who had not been killed were either imprisoned or exiled, and the wearing of tartan was forbidden. Among those taken prisoner was William Munro, twenty-six years of age, son of Robert Munro of Aldie, Aberdeen, sometimes known as the Black Baron, although he was neither.
(Robert, who had fought in the German wars and had died of wounds at Ulm in 1633, was the head of the nineteenth generation of Munros, a clan whose history stretches back to Donald, son of Occaan, prince of Fermonaugh. Donald had sailed from Ireland to help King Malcolm II repel invaders from Denmark and as a reward had been granted land bordering the Cromarty Firth, north of Inverness. This land, with headquarters at the castle of Foulis, remains clan property to this day.)
William was fortunate. After being captured at Worcester, he was neither executed nor imprisoned but instead sold to the plantations on the east coast of the New World. He was consigned to Thomas Kemble of Boston, who a few years later sold him as an apprentice at the Saugus Iron Works. By 1657 William Munro must have been a free man, as his name appears in the records when he and a certain Thomas Rose were fined for not having rings in the noses of their swine.
By 1660 William was settled in Cambridge Farms, now known as Lexington, Massachusetts, in a part of the town then called Scotland. In 1690 he was made a freeman, and he held several important parish offices. In 1699 he was received into the Communion of the Church. He married three times and fathered fourteen children—four by Martha George, who died in 1672 at the age of thirty-eight, and ten by Mary Ball, who died in 1692, aged forty-one. Shortly afterwards William married a widow, Elizabeth Johnson, who died in 1714 at the age of seventy-nine. Four years later William himself died, aged ninety-two. He was buried in Lexington, Massachusetts. Eleven of his children survived and are mentioned in his will. Thus began the Munro/Monroe line in the United States.
Among William's descendants was Ensign William Munro, who built the Munroe Tavern in Lexington, which later became a historical museum. He died at age eighty-nine, having fathered thirteen children, although few survived infancy. His grandson Lemuel enlisted in the Revolutionary War in 1776 at the age of seventeen and fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill. He served in the New York State Militia in the war of 1812 and in various other campaigns. In between times he was a farmer and boot maker. In a family known for longevity he exceeded all others, dying at the age of ninety-seven. It was probably during Lemuel's lifetime that the family adopted the Monroe spelling of their surname.
Lemuel's grandson, Robert Emmett, was also a farmer. He enlisted in the 6th Michigan Cavalry in the Civil War, being called up to take the place of a conscripted man who failed to show. His wife, Jane, served as a nurse during the conflict, acquiring a reputation as a healer. To treat wounds she used a poultice of bread and hot milk. On one occasion, when treating a soldier's badly cut leg, the bread she used was moldy. The leg healed very quickly, which was regarded by the local people as miraculous. It is suggested that the mold was producing penicillin, but in any event Jane always used moldy bread after that. The couple had eight children, two of whom died in infancy. Jane died in 1915 and Robert Emmett in 1921 at the age of eighty-three. They were the grandparents of Robert Allen Monroe.
In later years, Bob Monroe's childhood was closely examined for clues that might throw light onto what happened to him in later life. But only a ray or two of that light was forthcoming.
Bob's father, Robert Emmett Jr., was born on February 11, 1883, and brought up on the Monroe family farm in Webberville, Michigan. He was the fifth of his parents’ six surviving children. In his early years he seems to have developed a particularly independent cast of mind, deciding that although he was a “farm boy” he had no desire to continue in the family farming tradition. He struck out on his own, determined to make his own way in life. It may be that it was the expectation of foreign travel that impelled him to study French at the University of Michigan, from where he graduated in 1908 with an MA degree. In the same year he married Georgia Helen Jordan, from Wabash, Indiana, whom he had met at university. Georgia, content to follow her own family tradition by studying medicine, had graduated in 1906, one of only six medical graduates in that year. After a year teaching French at Georgetown University, Robert Emmett obtained a junior professorship in Romance languages at Transylvania College, Lexington, Kentucky, where the family made their home. (It makes a neat coincidence that William, founder of the Monroe line in the United States, had settled in Lexington, Massachusetts.)
Robert and Georgia had five children, all born in Georgia's family home in Wabash, where she returned to live in the final stages of all her pregnancies. There were two girls to begin with: Dorothy, born in 1909, followed two years later by Margaret, usually known as Peggy. Robert Allen was born on October 30, 1915. His sister Dorothy recalled that he weighed twelve pounds at birth. The new baby was actually christened Bob Allen, but Bob was later changed to Robert by the school authorities on the assumption that this was really his given name. A younger sister, Georgia Helen, was born in 1919, but died when less than two years old. The family was completed in 1923 with the birth of Emmett Paul.
Bob's parents were both strong characters. Theirs was a household full of books and the sound of music. His father was vigorous and purposeful, with a restless, inquiring mind and a lurking sense of fun. As a parent he seldom displayed any signs of emotion, asking few questions and allowing his children a good measure of freedom, provided they did not interfere with the smooth running of the household. Georgia, described later by Bob as an idealist, held the family together with an air of quiet authority. Both parents accepted their children for who they were, despite the fact that Dorothy and Bob both at times pushed hard against the margins of acceptable behavior. Dorothy once described her father as a tyrant because he insisted that his children follow the school and college courses that he chose. He was suspicious of her boyfriends and threatened to withhold her pocket money if she did not conform to his wishes. It was a threat that failed to work, as she was blessed with a beautiful alto voice and could earn up to fifty dollars a time singing with a local choir. There was, however, concern for Peggy, a quiet little girl very much attached to Dorothy and quite different in nature and character from her elder siblings.
Lexington at the time was a small segregated town with a population of about thirty thousand and with tobacco warehousing the only industry. The Monroes had little to do with the town itself, Robert being a college professor and Georgia that exceptional creature for the time, a female MD. Robert was a strong, single-minded character; Bob later described him as “the authority figure in my childhood—calm and sure-footed, the one who made important decisions in the family, without even questioning the needs of other members.” He refused to allow Georgia to practice medicine, insisting that her prime duty was to the family. The only time she was able to make use of her training was during the years of World War I, when Robert himself was overseas.
Apart from his job and his family—who seemed for the most part quite able to look after themselves—there was nothing in the locality to attract the lively minded Robert Emmett. He was drawn to the prospects of foreign travel, especially to Europe. He volunteered for war service and was sent to France in 1917. On the strength of his linguistic skills he was attached for a time to the French army. Although he saw no action in the field, he saw plenty of it in the boxing ring, becoming an army middleweight champion boxer and a boxing instructor. After the war he was decorated by the king of the Belgians for athletic coaching he undertook for the YMCA.
On returning to civilian life, Robert found his college remuneration barely sufficient for raising a family, and for some years they continued to live in apartments rented to them by the college. However, he soon found a way of increasing his income tenfold by organizing and conducting vacation tours to Europe for three months every year. His return from these visits were exciting occasions for the children, as with a ceremonial flourish he would open his portmanteau and distribute gifts to all.
What tensions did occur within the family were often relieved by Robert Emmett's sense of humor. He was also fond of a practical joke, as when he hid young Bob in his suitcase, producing him with much ceremony at a presentation to a group of prospective tourists, or when he terrified six-year-old Bob and his friends who were telling ghost stories in a graveyard by donning a white sheet and screaming at them from between the tombstones. He was something of an entrepreneur, setting up a small pottery and selling garbage collected from the college to a pig farmer. However, he was never much of a companion for his children, being deeply involved with his own concerns, especially in drumming up business for his highly profitable European tours. From these profits he was eventually able to buy a house for the family on Ashland Avenue in Lexington.
It was Georgia, described by her son Bob as “a doing person,” who supplied the visible love and support for the growing children. She was the family peacemaker, seeking always to preserve harmony when disputes arose. Georgia was also a talented musician, playing the cello in a local orchestra. Both Dorothy and Bob inherited her musical ability, while her younger son Emmett followed in her family medical tradition. Peggy, however, was never able to pursue a career and it became clear that there was no prospect of her being able to live a normal life. It was not until she was about thirty that she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and had to be hospitalized for the remainder of her years.
Bob Monroe was a quick learner—he could read and write by the age of four. He was an active and adventurous child, eager to make his own way. He was left-handed, which concerned his parents, as they thought this would put him at a disadvantage. For a time they compelled him to put his left arm in a sling, but eventually they gave up trying. Generally, they allowed him to make his own way, provided that he did his chores as required and was home in time for meals. Still only four years old he was sent to kindergarten, but after one week he decided that it was not for him. He insisted that he should start school, to which his parents agreed provided he could get there by himself. This required him to walk sixteen blocks and cross a busy road, clutching three cents in his hand for his lunch—two cents for a peanut butter bun and one cent for a cup of watery cocoa.
Young Bob Monroe had several special interests at the time. The first of these was the cinema, and whenever the opportunity arose he would take himself off to watch whatever flickering black-and-white silent films were being shown. When talking about them afterwards, he would refer to the films as if they were in color. He also greatly enjoyed swimming in the recently opened local swimming pool and would talk about the underwater lights as if they were colored also. He was much surprised to learn in later years that they were not. It was as if he was interpreting imaginatively what he observed, especially when his mind was fully involved in what was going on.
Another special interest was music, and it was this that led to Bob's involvement with the church, despite the fact that his parents rarely attended services and there was no copy of the Bible in their house. His ambition was to join the children's choir, but this necessitated becoming a member of the church. He took himself off to consult the minister and, to his consternation, found that baptism by total immersion was compulsory if he was to be allowed to join. Having survived this experience, he was enrolled as a member of the choir. From time to time he also attended Sunday school, although he admitted to being more attracted by the oranges provided for refreshment than by the teaching he received.
Robert Emmett was not at all enthusiastic about his elder son's activities. Music, Robert Emmett insisted, was for sissies and girls, so Bob's requests to take piano lessons were firmly refused. Boxing was for boys, he declared, and he began to give his six-year-old son occasional lessons in what he thought of as the manly art. “I was a reluctant, then a willing student,” Bob later recalled. This was just as well; as a contemporary of his remarked, “You had to know how to fight to establish yourself at the beginning of every school year.” His boxing ability also meant that he could carry a girl's books on the walk home from school without being called a sissy.
Even so, boxing was no substitute for music. While Dorothy and Peggy were learning to play the piano, the only instrument available to their young brother was the harmonica. This he soon mastered; harmonicas became something of a passion for him, and in later years he amassed a large collection. He was also allowed to use the family wind-up Victrola that resided in a large mahogany case with a box of wooden needles. Although most of the available records did not appeal to him, he managed to borrow what he wanted from a friend, Harry Bullock, who shared his enthusiasm for such notables as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Fats Waller. “Ain't We Got Fun” was a special favorite, as he recalled some seventy years later. Altogether his interest in music was so strong that when he attended junior high school he chose the music option, although this meant he was the only boy in a class of thirty girls.
Many of Bob Monroe's later concerns were prefigured in his childhood. In an early introduction to the entertainment world he was cast as Aladdin in a school production of Aladdin and His Lamp. Recalling this, his brother Emmett later suggested that the magic of the lamp may have been Bob's first contact with “the beyond.” His chief interests at the time, however, lay in the world around him. Trains were a major attraction and young Bob spent much time at the local train yard, climbing on and under freight cars and locomotives and exploring the engine roundhouse. This interest was reflected later in his first successful radio production, Rocky Gordon, which ran for four years on NBC, with trains featuring in every program. Cars were another obsession for the growing boy, and by the age of ten Bob not only understood how their engines worked but he was also able to repair them. This was in contrast to his father, who when driving used only two gears—top and reverse. When his car broke down, which usually happened shortly after he had bought it, he would dispose of it and buy another one—any used car that was available. When Bob was thirteen his father at last acknowledged his expertise and agreed to follow his advice. From then on he became known as the professor who drove “hot cars with big souped-up engines,” although to his son's despair he still preferred to drive in top gear.
Aircraft also fascinated him. Four miles outside Lexington was an airfield with one makeshift hangar. Whenever he could, Bob would hurry out to this field to watch aircraft land and take off, and he was an eager spectator at the Gates Brothers Flying Circus. On one occasion he witnessed a fatal accident when one aircraft flew too close to another. The pilot of the second aircraft lost control and severed the tail of the one ahead. The leading aircraft crashed to the ground and caught fire. The pilot burned to death. Already beginning to understand something about the principles of flight, Bob was convinced that the accident was caused by the second plane being caught in the turbulence created by the leader. The accident in no way affected his enthusiasm for flying, although none of the pilots he chatted with at Lexington ever offered him a ride.
Shortly afterwards, when Robert Emmett was on one of his trips to Europe, the rest of the family took the train to Knoxville, Tennessee, to visit one of the aunts. Bored with the conversation, Bob suddenly became aware of the noise of aircraft engines nearby. Making some excuse he found his way towards the sound, even though it meant climbing over several fences. Arriving at a field on the outskirts of the town, he was enthralled to find several aircraft practicing taking off and landing. Bob watched for a while and then noticed a stationary aircraft with the pilot standing beside it. He ran over to it, more in hope than expectation. To his delight, the pilot, seeing the youngster's eager expression, asked him if he wanted to take a ride. For Bob it was a few minutes—all too few—of sheer exhilaration, even though he was not tall enough to see out of the open cockpit. When the pilot realized this, he banked the aircraft so that Bob could identify the various features on the ground below. On landing he was bubbling over with excitement, but he managed to keep his mouth shut when he returned to the house. Surprised by this, his mother looked at him closely when he came in and asked him where he'd been. Unable to control himself he told her of his adventure and was extremely relieved when there was no rebuke. All she said was, “Well, come on and eat.”
Altogether this was a wonderful time for a young and active boy. Railway yards and airfields were not closed off, cinemas had no age restrictions, roads could be crossed with impunity, caves could be explored, and no one seriously thought that danger lurked round every corner. Even though opportunities for cadging a flight occurred very seldom, Bob found a substitute in building enormous kites that, if the wind was strong enough, could lift him several feet off the ground.
Both Robert Emmett and his son escaped the embarrassment of instruction in sex education. The only mention of it was when Bob found two potato bugs, one on top of the other. He showed them to his father, asking him what they were doing. “Reproducing,” was the answer, and that was that. What information Bob otherwise acquired came, as he said, from “here, there, and around the corner.” Bob and his friend Harry, who had a pretty ten-year-old cousin, sometimes discussed the subject, about which each of them claimed to know more than they did. One day it was agreed that Bob and the cousin, as they were not related to each other, should retire to some secluded spot and try it out. They climbed up to a room over the garage and then paused, looking at each other. The conversation, as he later recalled, was brief.
“What do we do?”
“I don't know.”
To save face, they agreed simply to say, “We did it.” They waited a few minutes, arranged their clothing to make it look as if it had been hastily removed and replaced, and came downstairs. In response to Harry's eager questioning, they replied, “Fine, fine,” and exchanged what they hoped were meaningful smiles.
This episode did nothing to further their sex education and innocence persisted for a while, as shown by another incident. Bob and Harry were both members of the Cub Scouts. When at camp they became intrigued by the behavior of the scoutmaster who used to select a boy to join him in his tent at bedtime so that, as he explained, they could both keep warm. Also, when the camp ended, the scoutmaster would choose a special little boy to help him clean up. This was odd, they thought, but that was as far as their thoughts went.
Some months later, however, Bob's eyes were opened wider. He had a paper route that took him into a poor area of the town populated almost entirely by blacks. His best customers were a group of white women who lived in a sizeable run-down house, but he could never understand why they kept their money in their shoes. One early morning as he approached the house he saw a familiar figure emerging from the door. It was, he realized, the scoutmaster—and before long the pieces began to drop into place.
While Bob and his father were often at odds with each other, his relationship with his mother was always harmonious. Georgia adored him, accepting whatever he did far more readily than his father. It was part of her nature to sidestep any unpleasantness, a trait that Bob himself developed in later life. He appreciated the freedom he was granted and was also grateful, as he once said, that neither of his parents ever attempted to indoctrinate their children with a heavy religious belief system that they would have had to unload in the years to come.
In some ways he had more in common with two elderly relatives than he had with his parents, One was his father's older brother, always known as Uncle Charlie. Charlie was a jack-of-all-trades, but was mostly employed as a construction worker. He enjoyed life, was full of energy, played the ukulele, and was a good storyteller. Everyone loved him. He would bundle Bob and his two sisters into his car and drive them to the Saturday movie. There he would usually fall asleep. One afternoon they saw the movie three times before he awoke. When Robert Emmett bought a new Dodge Taurus, Charlie borrowed it to see what the engine would do and promptly blew it up. Later he became a writer of a syndicated newspaper column, which required him to develop another talent—having to write poetry. Uncle Charlie reckoned he would live to be a hundred; sadly, he fell off a horse and died at the age of ninety-seven.
Another favorite relative was Bob's stepgrandmother, Minnie Jordan, his maternal grandfather's second wife, whom the family would often visit when Robert Emmett was away in Europe. Minnie practiced medicine in Wabash, with her consulting room in her home. It was just large enough to accommodate the grandchildren on their summer visits. Her laboratory was in the kitchen, all mixed up with everything else, with the result that the food was sometimes flavored with carbolic acid. As well as enjoying her company, Bob spent much of his time chatting with the pretty young girls who lived on either side, one a red-head and the other with long dark hair. However, he became temporarily disillusioned about the opposite sex when he went to a carnival in town. He was watching a group of dancing girls when he spotted a notice saying that for an extra ten cents you could see a special show in the back tent. He paid his money and for the first time he could remember he saw a naked woman. What stuck in his memory, he recalled, was not her nudity but the sight of her enormous appendix scar. There was more fun to be had swimming in the nearby creek, he said later, despite the leeches.
Things changed radically for the Monroe family when, in 1929, Robert Emmett, feeling the need for something more secure, decided to give up his tourist business, which earned him up to sixty thousand dollars in a good year, to become a full-time professor at Ohio State at a meager six thousand-dollar salary. It may be that he had some sense about what was soon to happen, as in the fall of that year came the stock market crash that wiped out the tourist business along with very much else. “It was,” wrote the historian Hugh Brogan, “as if the whole fabric of modern, business, industrial America was unraveling.” What did endure, however, was the steady income from the university. To supplement this income, and also possibly because he was still a Michigan farm boy at heart, Robert Emmett acquired a 370-acre farm some twelve miles from Columbus, with a lake, barns, and woodland. He stocked the farm with 150 Jersey cows, instead of the more typical Holsteins, about five hundred White Leghorns, instead of the more usual fifty or so, some eighty turkeys, and a flock of sheep, as well as an orchard and an extensive vegetable garden. Later he added about two hundred steers, which young Emmett had to look after.
As a farmer, however, Robert Emmett was notable more for enthusiasm than for expertise. The farm was not a success, being too large and too heavily stocked for the family to handle, even with the help of a full-time farmhand. Most of the chickens caught a disease and died, including one that used to perch on his shoulder as he walked around the farm. The death of this special chick distressed him greatly. Then his sons, who spent much of their spare time, not always willingly, working on the farm, sought to persuade him to buy a second-hand tractor. He would not hear of this and purchased an old white mule instead—which died within a week. Before long he was compelled to sell, and the family moved back to Columbus to a house in Oakland Park Avenue. In a second effort to bolster his income Robert Emmett invested much of the savings from his tourist business in a number of rental properties, which his two sons, again with no great enthusiasm, helped to maintain.
Bob found Columbus a cold city, very different from the small-town atmosphere of Lexington. When the family first arrived, he found himself isolated, being nearly two years younger than most of his classmates in the thousand-strong high school he attended. Most of all he wanted to join the school orchestra, which had more than fifty members, but he was initially frustrated because he was unable to read the scores. Determined to overcome this, he claimed to be a percussionist and was accepted as such, although he had to do his best to memorize the music and had to keep his eyes fixed on the conductor throughout the entire performance.
His attempts to become involved in social life also led to much frustration. Coming from a very different environment, Bob found it difficult to make friends and, lacking previous experience, was wary of encounters with girls. “Sex is evil except when legal” was the prevailing view at the time, and fear of being compelled to marry, or of contracting syphilis, were common restraints. Eventually he gained sufficient confidence to summon up enough courage to approach two or three older girls with a reputation of being easy, but they told him to go away and grow up. Still attracted by the opposite sex, however, he began to attend the Saturday night dances. On one particular Saturday he was short of two dollars to go to the dance but became convinced that he would find that amount beneath a plank in the yard. He went to look and found a plank lying on the grass—it looked as if it had been there for ages. All the same, he lifted it—and there were two dollar notes, new ones—and no possible explanation for how they were there! In later years, this became a familiar tale to participants in Institute courses.
At the age of fifteen Bob entered Ohio State College, joining the Phi Kappa Alpha fraternity. Robert Emmett had suggested that he should aim at becoming a family doctor so, for once compliant to his father's wish, he signed up for a pre-med course. This did not last long. As he later said, when he began to consider the lifestyle of those of his relatives who were family doctors—two aunts, an uncle, and his own mother—he came to realize that theirs was not the sort of life that he was looking forward to. No one at the time told him of the possibility of becoming a ship's doctor or working for an oil company, which in retrospect he thought he might have enjoyed. He decided to change course, switching to mechanical engineering, which he thought would offer more opportunities for travel and, he hoped, for adventure also. It was not only the choice, of course, that caused problems. To begin with, he found it difficult to be accepted into the social life of the college, partly because of his age and also because his father was a college professor. To this problem there was also a solution. At high school Bob had become friendly with a girl whose father ran a speakeasy in a basement near the Ohio State campus and under her guidance he had visited it once or twice. Now as a college freshman he gained a certain kind of popularity by introducing some of his fraternity colleagues to the speakeasy's delights. This assured his acceptance, and from then on he became known as “the guy that has smarts.”
It was just as well for Bob that his father knew nothing of this. While Robert Emmett did not inquire closely into his elder son's activities, apart from forbidding him to accept the post of editor of the university newspaper, as he thought it improper for the son of a professor to hold this position, he was ready to accept his word and defend him against any accusations of sexual misconduct that might be leveled. Yet Bob may well have felt stifled at times by his father, though not to the same extent as his feisty elder sister Dorothy, who considered him a tyrant, always knowing better than she did about what she should do. Of the four siblings it was she who had the most difficult time, although, to her surprise, she did win his agreement that she should stay on at the University of Kentucky when the family moved to Columbus so that she could continue to play in an all-girls band. Bob's younger sister Peggy seemed to go quietly along with whatever was happening, although at times her behavior aroused Dorothy's suspicion that something was seriously amiss—a suspicion that Georgia abruptly dismissed. The two boys were more fortunate in being able to escape into their own activities, Bob being at college and Emmett having discovered a fascination for playing golf. All four of them were devoted to their mother, who made no demands on them. It was from Georgia, according to Emmett's wife, Alice, that Bob inherited his imagination and “his sense of adventure into the Unknown,” while from his father came his practical and productive qualities.
Much of Bob's free time was spent haunting airfields and air shows and taking flying lessons, for which he somehow managed to pay. He experienced his first parachute jump, once managed to borrow an aircraft and fly solo to Lexington and back, and by the age of seventeen was qualified as a pilot, later obtaining a limited commercial pilot's license. While still at college he occasionally ferried airplanes from the factory to the purchaser. His enthusiasm for flying was such that he applied to join the Army Air Corps, but he was rejected because of impaired vision in one eye. Before long, however, he found himself too short of money to pay for flying time. Then while he was still wondering what action to take, the decision was taken out of his hands.
Girls were now beginning to feature in Bob Monroe's life. Once at high school he had been accused by an angry parent of taking part in an orgy, although he didn't at the time even know what an orgy was. On a trip to Europe with his father he had taken a girl out for a sail around the Bay of Naples and had almost been run down by a freighter. Then at the age of seventeen he slept with a girl for the first time—which meant, according to the standards of the place and period, that he was obliged to marry her. He put down a deposit on an engagement ring, and the two of them borrowed a car and drove across to Kentucky to find a justice of the peace. Shortly before midnight they discovered the house, but the justice they sought, so they were told, had gone fishing. They waited until four in the morning; then they decided to give it up and drive back to Columbus. Marriage, they concluded, was not an option. Bob's unintended gracefully returned the ring, which the jewelers readily accepted, especially as they insisted on retaining the deposit.
While Bob was fortunate to emerge unscathed from this adventure, this was not the case a short time later. He was paying a visit to another girl when they decided to prepare a meal. He was frying potatoes in the kitchen when the oil caught fire. He wrapped his arm in a wet towel, grabbed the pan with a pair of pliers, and threw it out of the door. The burning grease flew back into his face. He was hurried into hospital with third-degree burns. To make matters even more discouraging, while Bob was still in hospital his father had the difficult task of informing him that he had flunked out of college, having failed to obtain at least a C-plus to be able to continue.
It was several weeks before the scars were repaired and Bob no longer felt that he was, as he said, “walking around with a mummified head.” Rejection from college meant that he was thrust out into the world of work, except that in Columbus, as in so many other cities throughout the United States in the Depression years, there was no work to be had—or rather, no work that young Monroe wanted to put his hand to. Living at home was now out of the question, so he decided, like many others in similar situations, to take to the road. He took on occasional jobs as a traveling salesman, selling tombstones at one time and silk hosiery at another. He hitchhiked on the railroads, jumping off wherever the fancy took him or the train happened to stop—at Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, St. Louis, Memphis, or Knoxville. Alighting at this last city, he recalled that this was where his aunt was living. He called on her, enjoyed a hearty meal, wandered along to the offices of the local newspaper, and was offered a job as a cub reporter on the Sentinel. His aunt was aware that if he took the job it would mean that she would have to accommodate this hobo—not the sort of person to respect her antique furniture—or even if she refused him he might well be living nearby and posing an occasional threat to her valued possessions. She talked him out of accepting and paid his fare home.
Bob's hobo experience lasted just over a year. To get from here to there he would hitchhike, finding that it was not difficult to travel this way, provided he looked clean. When from one manual task or other he picked up so much dirt that drivers were wary of stopping for him, he turned to riding the railroads. During this time one particular episode seemed to him in later life to have marked a turning point. He found himself in St. Louis on Christmas Eve, broke, cold, and hungry. Wandering through the streets, he came across a café, where he could see food cooking just inside the window. He stopped to inhale the tempting smell, when the owner spotted “this skinny kid” (as he described himself) and called him in, gave him a meal, and told him he could stay the night in the stockroom. Deeply moved by this spontaneous act of kindness, he began to wonder whether his life was following a worthwhile path. It so happened that the next time he visited St. Louis was in response to an invitation from the chairman of McDonald Douglas aircraft manufacturing company to join him in the boardroom.
Feeling that he had no more to learn from rough living, Bob returned to Columbus and applied to the university to be reinstated. After several requests the authorities eventually agreed, possibly owing to his father's intervention although Robert Emmett never admitted it. He refused his father's offer to pay his fees, as this was made conditional on his working on the farm during the summer vacation. Intent on keeping his independence, he sought work in town having just ten dollars, a gift from his mother, in his pocket. He soon found a job with a company manufacturing blades for circular saws. It took “the College kid,” as he was known, less than five days to learn how to use an old rotary surface grinder to sharpen the blades, and he was taken on for $31.50 a week. As college fees were only fifty dollars a quarter this proved a good deal. The manager, impressed by his skill, put him on piecework, which enabled him to attend classes during the day and also to earn still more. He would begin work at five in the afternoon, complete his quota, find something to eat, and be back home in bed soon after midnight.
The second spell at Ohio State was more successful. Bob joined the Officer Training Unit, which helped to pay part of his tuition, switched courses from engineering to journalism, and worked on the college daily paper, The Lantern. He was nominated for the salaried editorship of the Sun Dial, the university's literary and humor magazine, but discovered that his father had intervened to prevent his appointment, possibly because he thought the magazine too racy for the Monroe name to be associated with it. He joined the university radio station and the dramatic and musical society, Strollers. He also revived another dramatic group, The Scarlet Mask Society, of which film director and actor Elliott Nugent and the humorist James Thurber had once been members, and helped to produce a couple of musicals. Throughout this phase, he was much influenced by one of his teachers, Professor Herman Miller, who taught drama and from whom he learned the sense of stagecraft that was to be of much benefit to him in later life.
Bob's drama career at Ohio State culminated in his being awarded second prize in Strollers’ one-act play competition. Bob wrote his contribution at the last possible moment, and then dissatisfied with what he had done, retrieved his copy and rewrote it during the night before rehearsals began. The story was based on an incident in his days on the road. He had spent a night in a flophouse in St. Louis, where an old man had died in the bunk next to his. In his play Bob made the old man into a mystical figure on the point of death. An angry, cynical, resentful young man in a nearby bed heard him coughing and went over to tell him to shut up. In essence, as the dialogue made clear, the old man passed a symbolic torch to the aggressive, starving youngster, an action that totally changed his character. The play, performed before an audience of eight hundred, received a standing ovation. This first experience of communicating with an audience, Monroe later said, deeply affected his life.
Now thinking that his future might lie in drama, in his final year Bob moved to the Arts College to major in English. He took three courses in Theater Studies and was also appointed to teach freshman English to students of engineering. This involvement meant that he had to give up his part-time job. Fortunately, throughout his somewhat unorthodox university career he had managed to obtain enough credits to be awarded a degree.
Bob was now confident that his future lay in the world of entertainment. An opportunity arose, when early in 1937, he began a close relationship with Jeanette, the daughter of a local lawyer. Jeanette had recently graduated and since then had enjoyed some experience in local theaters. With their mutual interest in the stage they devised a plan to create a summer stock company that would provide students with acting and technical experience. To set this up they applied to Jeanette's father for a loan of $8,500, with the expectation that the project would in time become self-financing. The loan was forthcoming, but a complication arose. Bob heard of two empty theaters in Pittsburgh that they could use. To get to Pittsburgh, however, they had to cross the state line. The Mann Act, prohibiting the transport of women across interstate boundaries for immoral purposes, was in force at the time, and Jeanette's father also insisted that they had to marry if the project was to proceed. They had just two months to put the project together and to undergo a hastily arranged church wedding. That accomplished, off they went to Pittsburgh as man and wife with high hopes for the future.
Of the two theaters available they chose the smaller one. They rented a nearby hotel to accommodate the students that they had recruited through advertisements, and signed up two professional actors to help with the teaching. As soon as they felt the cast of students was sufficiently accomplished, they decided to put on a performance. The play they selected was Good-Bye Again, a popular Broadway production. On the opening night, however, only four seats were occupied in the four hundred-seat theater. After three more performances with a maximum audience of ten, they closed.
Not entirely discouraged, they determined to try again. To ensure an audience they gave out free tickets in a nearby amusement park. For one night the house was full, but over the next few days the paying audience never rose above fifty. After two weeks they had no option but to close down. Owing money they did not have, they appealed to Jeanette's father to be rescued. Her brother answered the call and drove from Columbus to move them out at night. Then as they were loading up their equipment, police flashlights went on all around them. The couple were marched across to the theater manager's office. He regarded them sadly. “Why didn't you tell me about it?” he asked. “I would have given you jobs for the rest of the season if you'd not tried to run out on me. But you've not been honest with me—so unload all that stuff and leave it here.”
They returned to Columbus broke, having had to leave some three thousand dollars’ worth of equipment in lieu of unpaid rent and with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. Unable to find an acceptable alternative, they moved in with Bob's parents, which they considered marginally preferable to living with the notoriously self-righteous lawyer. Bob had no money, no job, and a wife to whose father he owed $8,500. It took him seven years to repay the full amount.
Not all was gloom, however. Bob's experience with radio broadcasting at university now proved helpful and he managed to get a job at station WHK in Cleveland as a continuity writer for $31.50 a week—the same as he'd been paid for sharpening circular saw blades. The couple moved to Cleveland, where before long Bob was promoted to director of programs and became a full-fledged script writer. After six months, however, he was suddenly told he was no longer needed. (Some time later he happened to meet the station's continuity chief and discovered why he had been fired. The station manager had seen him typing with his feet on the desk folded around the typewriter. He had considered this undignified and ordered Bob to be dismissed forthwith.) In his spare time Bob had built a rear-engine car, with a chassis but so far with no body. He and Jeanette loaded it with their luggage and drove back to Columbus.
Back home, Bob completed the car and managed to trade it for a less flamboyant black Ford coupe. Then he applied for and obtained a job at seventy-five dollars a week with station WLW in Cincinnati. Here he quickly became involved in all aspects of radio production, writing programs, directing, and producing. The station had 120 hillbilly performers on its staff, together with its own orchestra. One of the programs Bob produced was a hillbilly show called Rainbow Ridge—a name that many years later was to become familiar to visitors to The Monroe Institute—and others included The Boone County Jamboree and Moon Rover. Some of the programs he directed were taken up by major networks such as the Mutual Broadcasting System and NBC's Blue Network.
Bob was now perfectly happy in his work, but his personal life was becoming difficult. This became apparent when Jeanette insisted on joining him in Cincinnati. He was beginning to realize that his marriage had been a major mistake. His wife was not as sophisticated as he had thought she was, or had hoped that she would become, and he had to face the fact that what they had was no more than a marriage of convenience.
Before this situation could be resolved, he was called to the office and paid off. He discovered that the station's agreement with the Radio Artists Union, of which he was a member, had required that pay be increased and that no dismissals should take place. To meet the increased pay demand, the management had decided to ignore the “no dismissals” clause and dispense with Monroe on the principle of “last in, first out.” He appealed to the union, only to be told that having just signed the contract they were not prepared to take action over one guy. Bob's words to the union organizer were “You have just made a rabid antiunion person,” a stand that he maintained for the rest of his life.
Back in Columbus, Bob briefly considered and rejected other employment, being convinced that his future lay in the entertainment industry. There were, he concluded, two possibilities, Hollywood or New York, and New York was nearer. Leaving Jeanette behind, he traveled to the city by bus, carrying his battered typewriter under his arm, one more youngster from the provinces seeking to make his fortune. To begin with, he obtained work with a medical doctor, Matthew Goudiss, who had his own radio show. Goudiss took him on as a writer, paying him fifty dollars a script. This gave Bob enough to survive on for the time being, although the show was to last for only a few weeks. Finding somewhere to live in New York, however, was a major problem. He moved from one cheap lodging to another, eventually joining up with three young actors to rent a large room with a kitchenette for fourteen dollars a week. They had just one job between them: soda-jerking in a local drugstore. While the actors searched for work, Bob mostly stayed indoors, writing and answering advertisements, sending out scripts, and contributing occasional pieces to newspapers and magazines, earning a few dollars thereby, supplemented by the occasional twenty that his mother enclosed in her letters to him.
Throughout this time Bob received letters and phone calls from Jeanette, all asking when she could come to join him. He thought hard about this, he said later, but felt he could not accept her as the mother of his children-to-be. He admitted that at least some of his reasons were based on a kind of snobbery. Although she had many positive qualities, she failed to suit what he described as his “mental set” at that time, partly because “she made all the familiar grammatical mistakes.” He had not spoken to her of these misgivings when she telephoned to say that she had just arrived in New York. His friend Ben Green, one of those with whom he shared accommodations, collected her from the station and took her to a hotel. Then Bob went to see her.
It was a very difficult meeting. Jeanette's family had persuaded her to come, she said, and one can only imagine how desperate she felt. But Bob was adamant. The marriage was over. He left her in her hotel room and returned to his lodgings. Ben Green came to collect her and saw her safely on a train taking her back to Columbus. It was not an episode that Bob could look back on with pride.
One other family matter affected him at this time. It came in a phone call from his sister Peggy. She had never phoned him or written to him before. Now she begged him to let her come to New York to live with him. Peggy was always quiet, unassuming, and passive, and although she did not tell him why she was asking to join him, he could understand how difficult it could be for her to continue living with her parents, two powerful individuals, and with her dominant elder sister nearby. He knew how hard it would be for her to ask for help. Yet he had barely enough money for himself to live on, and there was no way she could join the four men accommodated in one large room. While he did not refuse her outright, she was aware of his hesitation. She did not repeat her request but changed the subject, asked how he was doing, and then hung up. A month later she was diagnosed as schizophrenic. For the rest of his life her father paid for her care in a private hospital. After his death, her younger brother Emmett, now a medical doctor, took on the responsibility, providing medical services in return for her care.
Despite these deeply personal concerns, Bob found life in New York stimulating and exciting. His faith in his own ability seldom faltered and when it did so it was not for long. There were occasional spells of depression when script after script failed to be accepted, compensated for by samplings of a better life when Ben Green's brother, a sailor in the merchant marine, visited on leave with a wallet full of dollars, extra danger money for convoy duty. Off the four of them went with Ben as their banker, doing their best to spend the lot on the various delights New York high life had to offer. Then after the fun it was back to the typewriter and the mailbox for another round of attempts as the first months of 1940 passed by. So it was, until in the first year of the new decade news came from the Monroe home in Columbus. NBC had telephoned—something about a script that someone called Bob Monroe had sent in some time ago. Would he please make contact…
The tide had begun to turn.
Note
For much of the information in this chapter I am indebted to Bayard Stockton's biography of Monroe, Catapult (Donning, 1989). Bay, who was a good friend, generously gave me permission to use whatever I wished. I was deeply saddened to learn of his death shortly before this book went to press. Some information is also derived from Monroe's taped reminiscences of his childhood.