Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'

by Bill Steigerwald

  Butte’s copper industry is now all but nonexistent, but vestiges of it weren’t hard to find. The skyline was broken by a dozen steel “headframes” – derricks, really – that once stood over the mouths of mineshafts and lowered workers thousands of feet underground and also brought the copper to the surface. A gigantic open-pit copper mine filled with acidic water had become an unlikely but symbolically apt tourist attraction for Butte. It’s also a substantial part of the enormous ongoing environmental cleanup that was trying to repair the damage from a hundred years of copper extraction and smelting.

  Butte is best known today for its colorful past and Knievel Days. Each summer its empty streets attract 50,000 bikers and daredevils from around the world who come to honor hometown hero Evel Knievel and his kin. But on Saturday afternoon, the Uptown streets and sidewalks were deserted. Most of the buildings had retail businesses on the ground floor. But most of their upper stories were vacant, with fake curtains or tarps hanging in place of windows.

  I parked along East Park Street, which used to be U.S. Highway 10. On Friday, Oct. 14, 1960, John Steinbeck is said to have stopped near there and popped into Phil Judd's Sporting Goods and Hardware to buy a used Remington bolt-action .222 rifle and scope. I was looking for Phil Judd's old store – or, more likely, the building it used to be in.

  Barging into Rudolph Furniture's showroom, I interrupted the lives of the innocent people working there with my standard drive-by journalism routine. As had become the pattern, the local folk were more than happy to help me. Mike Rudolph ran the store. His family had been operating it since 1919, when Butte was a rich, crowded, busy, violent, sinful, corrupt city famous for its red-light district, saloons, plutocratic copper kings and tough union mineworkers. Mike told me the bad but not surprising news – Phil Judd and his store were history. The good news was that Judd’s building was only five doors away, where Rediscoveries Vintage Clothing was.

  Next thing I knew I was on the phone with Mike's father, Lou Rudolph. He was 88 and sharper than a day trader. Lou was also Phil Judd's brother-in-law, so I couldn't have found a better source. No, Lou answered, there was no Judd family lore about the great John Steinbeck buying a rifle and a scope in their store and hanging around for an hour. And no, he knew of no autograph, no photos, no receipt and no framed canceled check for $73.50 signed “John Steinbeck.”

  A Tall Tale Debunked?

  I asked Lou about the cancelled check because of a newspaper article written by a writer/artist from Butte named Bill Baltezar. In a lengthy 1993 first-person piece in the Salinas Californian newspaper, Baltezar claimed he was in Phil Judd’s store the day Steinbeck walked in. He said Steinbeck paid for a secondhand Remington rifle and Weaver scope with a personal check for $73.50. Baltezar said he and Judd both saw the check and were surprised as all get out when they saw Steinbeck’s signature.

  Judd was dead. Unfortunately, so was Baltezar, who eventually moved to Salinas, California, and died there in 2009. He wasn’t around to defend his too-tidy tale. He made about a dozen mistakes that erode his credibility. Most are minor factual flubs or could be chalked up to what looked like a steinbeckian effort to squeeze every drop of fictional drama from a brief real-world encounter with a famous American.

  Baltezar said it was a “sweltering summer day,” when it was actually Oct. 14 and the high temperature in Butte that day was 42 degrees. He described Rocinante, a new GMC pickup with about 4,500 miles on it, “as a beat-up old truck.” And he said Steinbeck was going to follow his advice and go trout fishing in the mountains near the town of Dillon. But Steinbeck was hurrying west to Seattle to meet the missus. There was no way he’d consider wasting half a day by diverting to Dillon, which was 60 miles south of Butte.

  In addition to its factual errors, Baltezar’s elaborate story fails the basic smell test. Phil Judd was shocked to see John Steinbeck’s name on the check, yet we should believe he never told his family that the author of “The Grapes of Wrath” bought a gun at his corner store? Not likely. In “Charley,” Steinbeck says he bought a rifle and a scope in Butte, but doesn’t say where or how he paid for it. Baltezar said he was at Phil Judd’s the day Steinbeck came in and had a long chat with him. Maybe so. But until that canceled Steinbeck check turns up, Baltezar’s tall tale belongs on the fiction shelf with “Travels With Charley.”

  I asked Lou Rudolph – who said he knew Baltezar – how Butte had changed in the last 50 years. Like Pittsburgh and other fallen industrial powerhouses Back East like Cleveland and Buffalo, Butte's population in 2010 was half what it was in 1960. Lots of miners were still working underground then, Lou said. Uptown had many more bars and restaurants. When Steinbeck drove through Butte, Park Street (U.S. 10) would have been congested with local traffic and cars and trucks working their way to Seattle or Fargo.

  I-90 put a merciful end to that traffic nightmare, but things had gone to the other extreme. At 4 p.m. on a Saturday I stood in the middle of Old Highway 10 at the corner of East Park and North Wyoming, taking all the photos I needed without fear of being hit by anything larger than a raindrop. I wanted to go to the top of the mountain, high above Uptown, to see the panoramic view of Butte.

  But first I had to check Rediscoveries Vintage Clothing for Steinbeck ghosts. Heather Meeks was in there looking for Halloween costumes for her two kids. She was 44 and not originally from Butte. But since she arrived she had learned a lot about the city's boom-bust history, its current environmental debacle and its clashing natural and manmade charms.

  "Butte is a gritty, grimy, hardworking, take-no-prisoners city," she said. "Butte is what America claims to be – a true melting pot. English, Cornish, Welsh, Chinese, Eastern Europeans – they all crossed the country to come here to make their fortunes. Three dollars a day were top wages for miners for decades."

  Though Meeks referred to herself as “an old hippie,” she and Steinbeck would have got along well politically. She didn't hide her working-class sympathies when she described how the Anaconda copper mining company and its executives got filthy rich for decades while the miners just got filthy.

  I disagreed with most of Meeks’ progressive politics, of course. But like so many of my fellow Americans I met from Maine to Wisconsin to Montana, she was smart, friendly and quick to reveal her passions and opinions to a stranger armed with a Professional Reporter’s Notebook. To my discredit, I never found out the names of her kids or what Meeks did for a living, just that she was born in Hawaii, was well-traveled and somehow ended up in Butte. She clearly loved her adopted city and knew it well. Summing up its gloried past and troubled present, she sounded like a native when she quipped, "Butte used to export copper, now it exports people."

  Steinbeck’s Two-Night Stand

  Steinbeck fell hard for Montana. As he mooned in “Travels With Charley,” “Montana has a spell on me. It is grandeur and warmth. If Montana had a seacoast, or if I could live away from the sea, I would instantly move there and petition for admission. Of all the states it is my favorite and my love.”

  He can’t be blamed for being smitten. But his relationship was more like a two-night stand than a serious love affair. He drove down the main streets of Billings, Bozeman, Butte and Missoula and other smaller U.S. 10 towns. He stopped in bars, a clothing shop and a gun store. He stayed one night in a trailer court near Livingston and a second on private land west of Missoula along the Clark Fork River.

  But other than gawking out his windshield for hours at the state’s natural grandeur, that was pretty much it for Steinbeck’s fling with lovely Montana: Two days, two nights, two sunsets. Fifty total hours and about 850 miles of driving. All packed into 2.5 pages of “Travels With Charley.” Steinbeck obviously missed a lot of Montana. Curving from southeast to northwest on old U.S. Highway 10, he saw just a sliver of the country’s fourth biggest state.

  He didn’t see Glacier National Park, Flathead Lake or the Missouri Breaks. He didn't have time to do the signature outdoor Montana things –- fly fishing in the Yellow
stone River, hiking up creeks to the toxic but cool ruins of silver mines, driving 10 miles into a pine forest on a dirt road for a picnic in a meadow at 7,000 feet or conquering your own nameless mountain.

  Yet after only 50 hours in Montana, Steinbeck got it. He nailed her and its people. In “Travels With Charley,” he writes “… It seemed to me that the frantic bustle of America was not in Montana. Its people did not seem afraid of shadows in a John Birch Society sense. The calm of the mountains and the rolling grassland had got into the inhabitants.... Again my attitude may be informed by love, but it seems to me that the towns were places to live in rather than nervous hives. People had time to pause in their occupations to undertake the passing art of neighborliness.”

  How he figured out Montana so quickly testifies to Steinbeck’s superior powers of observation. I’m just a Montanan by marriage. My wife Trudi grew up in Great Falls in a family that was part working class and part bohemian. Her dad James Logan, who dropped dead of a heart attack at age 54, was a foreman at the Anaconda copper smelter by day and a prominent Montana artist and Paris Review subscriber the rest of the time. Her mother Ele was a Northwestern grad and drama major who after the death of her husband taught at the Goodman Institute in Chicago and did acting in New York with young bucks like Danny DeVito.

  Trudi’s family lived on Smelter Hill, a storybook company-owned neighborhood at the foot of the copper smelter’s colossal smoke stack along the Missouri River. They spent their summers at a log cabin on federal forestland in Lewis and Clark National Forest near Neihart, a gas station/variety store “town” of 51 on U.S. 89 about 150 miles north of Bozeman.

  Near their cabin, scattered about the beautiful wide and winding canyons of the Little Belt Mountains, were rectangles of fenced-in concrete. Located at the end of conspicuously well-maintained gravel roads, they looked like vacant parking lots that someone had perversely carved out in the middle of the vast forest of spruce, fir and lodge pole pine. The only clues that you had come upon an armed-and-ready Minuteman ICBM silo were a strong razor-topped cyclone fence and a small, serious sign that warned that lethal force would be used against trespassers, KGB agents or Washington Post editorial writers like Rachel Dry.

  For decades, thanks to the Cold War’s doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction and those Minutemen silos, the empty beauty of North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana was a prime target for Soviet ICBMs. Steinbeck worried about “The Bomb” and complained about the absurdity of the nuclear arms race. But local Montana folks – what few there were scattered around Neihart – didn’t seem to notice the nukes in their backyards. They had learned long ago to live with the fact that if World War III broke out they would be among the first Republicans to die.

  From what I know of the state and its lucky inhabitants, what Steinbeck wrote about Montana was still true. Since the early 1980s I had spent a total of about three months of my life there. I liked the natives as well as the land. My favorite Montanan was my sister-in-law’s boyfriend Bud. He had a big place on a hill where he could see four different mountain ranges and the lights of downtown Lewistown, population 8,000 in a spacious county of 15,000.

  Bud’s apparently a fairly common Montana type, but to an effete Easterner like me he looked, thought, talked and acted like an old-time Western movie hero. In his 70s when I met him, his hair and sideburns were gray, his skin thick and suntanned. As solid as a Marine recruit, with powerful forearms and hands, on a family picnic he carried my six-year-old daughter Lucy on his back across a swift icy creek that was hip deep and wide as an interstate.

  Bud was an archetypal American success story. He migrated to Montana in the late '30s from Missouri, when he was 17. A farm boy, he arrived with an eighth grade education, $15 in his blue jeans and a yearning to get his own place some day. His first job was as a ranch hand. By the time Steinbeck and Charley sped by, Bud was well on his way to owning 2,500 acres and 350 head of cattle. He also would get his very own Minuteman silo.

  One day in the mid-1980s Bud decided to run for county commissioner as an independent and was elected in a landslide. He didn’t say much at the public meetings. But when he did, it was exactly what he thought. He kept his own tax return on public display at the courthouse and spent most of his time helping troubled local kids, fixing fences and remodeling the county jail.

  Bud was my kind of local politician – a throwback from the 19th century. His inherent common sense and simple ideas about government would terrify anyone living east of the Hudson River, but they sprang up from inside his “own self,” as he might say. They were pure Jeffersonian – keep government limited, local and out of people’s hair. He thought people should own up for what they do, pay their own way and be left alone if they weren’t hurting anybody. Sounded pretty progressive to me, but I was a radical.

  14 – Sprinting to Seattle

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Saturday, Oct. 15, 1960 – On the road to Seattle

  Steinbeck left his overnight camping spot midway between Missoula and the Idaho border and rode U.S. 10 into the top of Idaho. It is here where things again get vague and confusing. In “Charley,” Steinbeck says he stopped overnight at an isolated, rundown motel/gas station in the mountains near the Idaho-Washington border and rushed sick Charley to a vet in Spokane the following morning. If Steinbeck did stop in northwest Idaho Saturday night, however, it means he drove only 136 miles that entire day. It’s possible Charley’s sickness really did slow Steinbeck’s pace, as he says in the book. Maybe Charley really did have to see a vet. But given his haste to meet his wife in Seattle, Steinbeck probably spent the night somewhere farther into Washington or drove to Seattle in one 400-mile gulp. Whatever he did on this date, it’s a mystery with no clues.

  Metropolitan Saltese

  Leaving Butte behind, zooming toward Missoula on I-90/Old Highway 10, I got another overdose of what captured Steinbeck’s heart. Even at 80 mph the broad valleys and mountains ranges just rolled on and on. The sinking sun and wispy rain clouds played tricks with the light. Gray-brown mountainsides and valleys were spotted or smeared with dark pine and spruce trees. The flatlands by the shallow rivers were yellow with what? Oaks? Cottonwoods? Steinbeck would have known.

  About 25 miles east of Missoula, the mountains squeezed the road as it threaded through the Sapphire Mountains. Arriving in downtown Missoula, I joined the mobs on the streets. The Saturday night scene was a stark contrast to Butte’s dead Uptown. Every one of the University of Montana’s 15,000 students apparently was out looking for a beer. At 63, I was the oldest man on campus – and the only one without a backpack or a bike.

  I ate at the crowded bar of a crowded restaurant and slept at the crowded Holiday Inn for a Hotwire.com price of $63. By noon Sunday I was halfway to Idaho. I was on the wet, warm, Pacific side of the Rockies. It was sunny, 50 degrees and still only token traffic. I was 4,630 Steinbeck Highway miles from Sag Harbor and had yet to wear socks.

  As I twisted west down a long mountain valley, crossing and re-crossing the Clark Fork River as it fell toward the Columbia River, I made a rookie mistake. For some unknown reason, I completely forgot to look for where Steinbeck spent his second night in Montana. In a letter to his wife, part of which is in Jackson Benson’s biography, Steinbeck said he was camped on private land west of Missoula, 60 miles from Idaho. I should have stopped at Tarkio, or near there, to perform my drive-by journalism act, but I mindlessly cruised by the Tarkio exit on U.S. 10.

  I lucked out, though. Tarkio was probably not the place after all. Months after my trip ended, I called a seventh of the population of the Tarkio Valley – four people – to seek their help. One person said it was possible Steinbeck parked by the Clark Fork River at the old Forest Grove Campgrounds. But some of Tarkio’s oldest and most helpful citizens were stumped. Exactly where Steinbeck slept on his second night in Montana remains another trivial “Travels With Charley” mystery.

  In the thick forests of northwest Montana I pulled off at the Saltese exit to
inspect a well-preserved stretch of Old Highway 10. About half a mile long between its two dead ends, the main street of “The Recreational Capital of the Northwest” was a compact 1960s time warp with about 20 buildings.

  Steinbeck drove down Saltese’s main street on Saturday morning, Oct. 15, 1960. Mangold's General Store & Motel had a different name then. But the grocery, six pine-paneled motel rooms and the big "M-o-t-e-l" sign were all there by the edge of the road when Steinbeck and Charley motored past. So were the decommissioned state highway maintenance shed, most of the homes and the building housing the Old Montana Bar & Grill.

  Terri Mangold has owned and operated the grocery store/motel complex on the bank of the Clark Fork River since 1995. She played local historian for me. When I-90 was poured on top of U.S. 10's right-of-way in the early 1960s, Saltese's only street – U.S. 10 – was frozen in time and the town got its own interstate exit.

  Saltese, which Mangold said was in the middle of “a winter play land,” had about 60 permanent residents. It gets 20 feet of snow a year and sits under a steep, rugged forest at the foot of the Lookout Run ski resort. Mangold’s all-pine motel rooms were absurdly reasonable – $30 a day and up depending on the size. She said they were usually full year round, thanks to the hunters, fishermen and snowmobilers who stay for a week at a time and spend their days killing big things in the woods.