Reed was a Pendergast man and former mayor of Kansas City. Politics in the Kansas City of the Pendergast era was a matter of personal contacts. Robert could create personal contacts.
There was a certain amount of irony in Robert having to court Senator Reed, because Reed had helped kill Congressional approval of the League of Nations five years earlier. Robert could not be expected to like having to go through him—but the way to the military academies was through Reed, and that was how he had to go. It was an early and important lesson in practical politics.
Machine politics was an odd mixture of very good and very bad. The ward system meant that there was personal contact with every individual voter. It was Pendergast policy that nobody in need was turned away emptyhanded—irrespective of affiliation, background, religion, or race. Tolerance was good politics.
While Robert was growing up in Kansas City, the Pendergast machine paid strict attention to the superficial civilities, yet it was to become as rapacious as any corrupt political machine in the country.35 Heinlein as a young man got a worm’s-eye view of how it worked, and he had a practical demonstration that year of how the local and the national merged into each other: when the Teapot Dome scandal erupted in the news, the quality of the local corruption was echoed on the national stage.36 Robert’s first real exposure to the Pendergast machine came just at the time the Teapot Dome scandal erupted in the national news. Although Robert was always to insist on the need to work in practical politics, he also developed a permanent disgust for hypocrisy.
His efforts paid off: early in 1924, he was formally notified by the Senate Judiciary Committee that Senator Reed had nominated him to Annapolis. If all went well, he might be there by July. He later found out that there had been fifty-one applicants for the one appointment Senator James Reed had not yet made to the military academies. Fifty candidates had each sent a single letter of recommendation with their application. Robert had sent in fifty for himself.37 Robert began a course of self-treatment to strengthen his eyesight—myopia ran in his family—using the method described in William Horatio Bates’s Cure of Imperfect Sight Without Treatment by Glasses (1920).38
And the preparation and hard work paid off: he continued to drill in the Central High School ROTC and was promoted to major on February 14, 1924. The Kansas City Star reported the promotion, noting that he had been in service for only six months when he was jumped ahead of two-year men.39
Robert’s rapid advancement in ROTC was not universally admired. He had driven his “men” unmercifully, and he received what was probably his first anonymous hate mail—a sarcastic note signed “Very Respectfully, Mr. Major,” saying he had stolen the credit from the people in his regiment who actually did the work. The note was illustrated with a stick figure saluting in the stiff-armed “Sieg—Heil!” mode, limp penis dripping.
His commanding officer, Sergeant Frank Bowling, PMST at Central High, received a petition signed by every member of his regiment protesting Robert’s strenuous drillmastering and asking that he be relieved of command as a “detriment to the morale of the unit.”40 But the CO left Robert just as he was. Two months later, on May 13, Robert was advanced to Lieutenant Colonel of ROTC—the same rank Ivar had held. But Ivar had gotten his honors easily and was liked by his men. By working very hard Robert could recapitulate Ivar’s successes, but no matter what he did, he didn’t have that knack of being liked.
Robert could not have been easy to live with. Like Tom Sawyer, he was invested in the romance of the military. The late-nineteenth-century idealization of the medieval in which Twain had so gloried left an indelible mark on Heinlein’s personality, and he was to celebrate gallantry for the remainder of his life. Along with them went a boyish love of ceremony and ritual, and adolescent punctilio. His appearance in the Central Officers’ Club group portrait in his senior class yearbook for 1924 conveys a little of this in his ramrodstraight posture, shoulders thrown back, flanked by the civilian Sponsor-Major Kathleen Carey and by his CO, PMST Sergeant Frank Bowling.
Adolescents respond to outsiders like sharks to the smell of blood. Many of his contemporaries probably saw Robert as brilliant, undeniably—possibly even as brilliant as he thought himself—but a wart nonetheless, and an outsider. It takes an unusual moral strength to survive the ordeal of high school in such circumstances—particularly since the appointment to Annapolis did not come through that spring.
Robert graduated from high school in June 1924. The school yearbook, The Centralian, had collected its final information between February and May 1924 and listed his activities as:
National Honor Society, 23–24; Major, R.O.T.C.; President, Central Officers’ Club; Captain, Negative Debate Team; President, Central Shakespeare Club; Student Council; Inter-Society Council; Boy’s High School Club; Kelvin Club; Central Classics Club; Rifle Club.41
He had entered the school’s literary competition each year but without conspicuous successes; this year, he was given an Honorable Mention in the yearbook for his entry in the thirty-ninth Annual Inter-Society Contest:
The Last Adventure
Why stand ye here with lagging feet when ye can go beyond?
Why say ’tis cowardly to defeat your fate as Death’s poor pawn?
It seems to me to take oneself out of the Three’s cold hands
Were better far than let life ebb and leave you on the sands.
The craven thing that rates the flesh above romance to come
May gain a little hour of life but lose the greater sum.
But the brave soul that pledges all on one cast of the die
Gains the adventure of his life and learns all reasons why!
And whoso says a man’s a fool to call his death his own
Lacks the courage to depart as soon he must—Alone!
Let then each man who’s lived his life and wishes to be free
Set then his feet in freedom’s path and taking courage—Be!
The yearbook entries reveal how Robert Heinlein appeared to his classmates—accepted, barely; an outsider. He was designated the class’s “Worst Boy Grind,” and his tagline said, “He thinks in terms of the fifth dimension, never stopping at the fourth.”42 He must have been considered particularly memorable in his class, as he is noted twice in the Retrospectives section of his graduating yearbook—on page 287 as expected to grace the cover of Scientific American magazine, and quoted on page 301 under the “Practiced Proverbs” heading: “A man of understanding holdeth his peace.”
He was remembered as “the sweetest boy in his graduation class” by another of the girls in the Shakespeare Club43—though possibly it was a sweetand-hot with some deviltry involved: his very first date had been, very proper, with the “queen of the campus,” a former neighbor; but of another girl at Central in the same years he reminisced: “I’ll go to my grave regretting one little 16-yr.-old in high school. She was a lecherous little honey—and I was too young and too chicken.”44
And directly under Robert’s picture in The Centralian for 1924 is that of Alice Catherine McBee—a pretty, swan-necked girl he had met in the Shakespeare Club. He felt quite sentimental about Alice McBee: her Christmas card from later that year, addressed to “Bobby,” is preserved in his scrapbook. He would stay in touch with Alice McBee.
A ticket from Stripes, the annual ROTC ball for 1925, suggests he was casually dating someone else—one Elinor Curry. They had attended the same grammar school, but Elinor had gone to the new Westport High when it opened. They got reacquainted through their respective schools’ debate squads: Curry was the captain of her debate squad and captain also of the Negative Debate Team at Westport High, as Robert was captain of the Negative Debate Team at Central. In 1924 and 1925 the schools in Kansas City had debated whether the United States should recognize Lenin’s Russia—though Elinor and Robert probably had not squared off on that topic in the main competition that year: not only were boys and girls segregated by teams, but the Westport Negative Team debated Manual High—and lost. C
lippings from The Kansas City Times spell her name variously as “Elinor” and Elanor.”45
Robert’s brother Larry joined the Missouri National Guard on June 8, 1924. Robert had already enlisted, by lying about his age, and by this time had been promoted to corporal—a move he received with mixed emotions since it would mean losing one of the two specialist ratings (surveyor and draftsman) he had held as a private first class—and consequently taking a cut in pay of $1.31 per drill. But: “I didn’t mind: I was terribly proud of those two chevrons.”46
Robert was deeply affected by the feeling he was a part of something greater than one person and living through history. If the family was a unit tiled against the outside world, so, too, was the military. There was something almost magical about the visceral way these things affected him: “Did I ever tell you of the first time I heard ‘to Arms’? I had never heard it before, didn’t know it, but I came bursting out of my tent with rifle and cartridge belt. And most of the other recruits did so too.”47 Even more: he learned at first hand that Army “chicken shit” was only part of the story. There were always petty individuals who abused the hierarchical structure, but there were also thought-provoking counterexamples:
When I was a Pfc. in the 35th division, our company latrine at Camp Clark got plugged up. My captain, Captain Clifford Marchant, remarked that he had never yet asked a man to do anything he was not willing to do—rolled up his sleeve, stuck his arm down into the filth, and cleared it out with his fingers.48
The Civilian Military Training Camp in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, took up the full month of August in 1924. Robert was enrolled in Company H, and he mentioned being a drill instructor that year and leader of a company of “incredibly raw recruits.”49 The training was designed to give the young men a broad exposure to military subjects. He recalled taking equitation and musketry under Captain Hobart “Hap” Gay (later General Patton’s chief of staff). Robert soaked up anecdotes and personal history from the older men, as well as military technique. He began to rise in rank, and his company commander in the 110th Engineers wrote to Robert, forwarding recommendations for the Annapolis appointment and declaring himself “mighty proud of the reputation you have gained up at Leavenworth. It is not only a boost for yourself, but also for the company.”50 Major George B. Duncan, commanding the Seventh Corps Area, visited and Robert, as “student brigadier general,” was commanding officer for Major Duncan’s review. In the final standings, he was named “Best Drillmaster” and awarded a silver loving-cup trophy by the commander of the CMTC, World War I hero Brigadier General Harry A. Smith.
So his hard work had paid off—and the lesson he learned was that faith in himself was justified.
If he had not been able to get in on any of the “friendly and/or frantic” fornication at his high school, he was able, finally, to remedy that situation. There is only one reference to the occasion in his later correspondence, and that reference says only that he lost his virginity during the Coolidge Administration (1923–1929) to a grandmother (which, given the early marriage and childbirth common at the time, might mean only a woman in her mid- to late thirties).51
In the fall of 1924, Robert enrolled in the engineering program at Kansas City Junior College, which was accredited as a junior college of the University of Missouri–Columbia.52 He later recalled, in defense of his later aggressive policy of inclusiveness, that his teacher of advanced calculus was a woman, and he was tutored by a Negro.53 He continued working full-time, at night, using the time until the appointment should come through to save up for the expense of moving to Annapolis—someday.
On November 9, 1924, Robert was mustered with the rest of National Guard Company C for the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone of the Liberty Memorial—the war memorial that had been in preparation since 1919. President Coolidge, recently reelected, attended the ceremonies.
December came, and Robert was hired as a temporary “non-certified clerk in the Railway Mail Service at the Kansas City Terminal,” where Elinor Curry’s father was a clerk. He was paid $5.25 a day for sorting Parcel Post mail for the Christmas rush season.
Once the postal rush was over, Robert had too much time for reflection that Christmastime of 1924. He had been waiting on the appointment to the Naval Academy for nearly a year, since Senator Reed had nominated him. He continued his Bates exercises to strengthen his eyesight. Waiting on the process, he took stock of himself. A list of his jobs was preserved in his scrapbook. Not all of them can be dated with any certainty, and some of the jobs he later talked about in letters are not included on this list (movie theater usher, for example):
Janitor
Insurance (salesman for Aetna Life Insurance Company)
Magazine salesman [presumably the PJG route]
Nutcracker [shelling pecans by hand]
Bum
Roadhouse hoofer [professional tap or soft-shoe dancer for saloons on a road between cities]
Navy
Pre-medic
Engineer stewdent [sic] [presumably at Kansas City Junior College]
Art stewdent
Taught mathematics, yeah? [no doubt tutoring]
Railway mail clerk
Artist’s model, no foolin!
Librarian [the recent page position for the Kansas City Public Library]
Telephone operator—PBX
Sap.
And that was Robert Heinlein’s preparation for a career in the U.S. Navy.
4
PLEBE SUMMER
On January 7, 1925, Heinlein received a telegram from the secretary of the Senate Judiciary Committee notifying him that Senator Reed’s appointment to a midshipman slot at Annapolis had finally come through. He telegraphed his acceptance, and the appointment was announced in The Kansas City Star on February 18, 1925. His two-year campaign had paid off.
This incoming Class of 1929 was the first under a new admission system that required each candidate to pass a series of examinations “to prove his fitness A. and B. -neck (above and below).”1 In February, Heinlein gave the Bureau of Navigation, which handles personnel matters for the Navy, a certification they accepted as a substitute for the psychological examination.
The new competitive examination for academic subjects was not a problem, though it took some time to get through channels. On May 16, 1925, Ivar sent Robert a telegram from Annapolis: “Congratulations. Your name posted today as having posted [passed?] examinations.”2 The official notification was dated May 20, 1925, just three weeks before he had to be at the Academy, and he had a thousand minor details to attend to. Clothing (shirts and a travel suit), books, and train tickets to Annapolis by way of Chicago, where he had a third hurdle to get over: a physical and athletic skills examination at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago. This exam might pose a problem for him: his health was good, but he was quite underweight.
Heinlein was formally discharged from the 110th Engineers, Company C of the Missouri National Guard, with a purely nominal bump from buck sergeant to staff sergeant. Another man stood down long enough for Heinlein to take the promotion with him to the Academy.3
Heinlein’s formal enrollment in the U.S. Naval Academy was processed in absentia on June 5, 1925. Three days later he left Kansas City by train after a farewell dinner at the Muehlebach Hotel. He arranged a five-day stopover in Chicago for his physical exam, one entire day of which was spent at the Great Lakes Naval facility. On June 10, he was able to wire his family that he had passed the physical. He had weighed in at six feet tall and 118 pounds. He later remarked wryly of his Medical Department photograph that “it is living proof that a skeleton can walk.”4
Heinlein spent the rest of his time in Chicago sightseeing and left for Annapolis on Saturday, June 13, arriving on Monday, June 15. He was awed, as many westerners still are, to see and even touch the living legacy of his country’s history. One of his earliest and sharpest memories of Annapolis was the sight of “a tattered and shot-torn homemade flag occupying the central position of hon
or in Memorial Hall which reads: ‘DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP!’”5
The Class of ’29 had 409 boys arriving over a two-week period, and Heinlein’s quarters were not yet ready. He was given the name of some hotels in Annapolis and told to find someone to bunk with and let the school know at 9 A.M. the following day. Roommates were usually left to the discretion of the students, and could be changed each year. If he didn’t have any preferences, they would try to match him up with another singleton.
He stayed that night just outside the Academy grounds, at Carvel Hall. A number of arriving candidates were staying there until their quarters were ready. Heinlein was not impressed with the rest of the incoming Plebes:
I have met a lot of my classmates and have kept my mouth discreetly shut. But I don’t see how some people can be that ignorant and live. One of them thinks he is going to be a cadet [cadets are students at the West Point, the Army Academy]. And he isn’t the worst of the lot.6
One of the incoming Plebes he met—presumably not the one who thought he was going to be a cadet—was Frank Novak, of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and they agreed to request room assignment together for their Plebe year. Novak was described by a later roommate as quiet and unassuming, with a sense of humor—athletic and interested in “ac” [academics].7
On the morning of June 16, 1925, the candidates who had arrived assembled in the shade of the gatehouse. A clerk came out of the administration building and spoke briefly to them—a ceremony that would be repeated many times as Plebe candidates arrived on campus. At 9 A.M. Robert Anson Heinlein took the oath and was sworn in as a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 5
