by Lee Server
In the 1920s, the region of the Gunderson farm in the small mid-Atlantic state was still largely unchanged since the nineteenth-century. There were expanses of virgin forest, horses remained a primary means of transportation and mechanical power, and telephones, radios, and various modern conveniences were not yet commonplace items as they were in Bridgeport. The farm was twenty acres or so of wooded and cultivated land, with an old clapboard main house, a tiny barn, peach and apple trees, forest. They kept a cow for milk and butter, a few chickens provided eggs on a good day, a swayback horse pulled a harrow. Oil lamps gave them light. Water came from a hand pump adjacent to the kitchen door. A sometimes muddy path led across the yard to the outhouse. In the winter the outhouse door would freeze shut and you had to go get a hammer and spike or else go squat in the frozen woods.
Life began at dawn. Uncle Bill, eagerly and for the first time in his life assuming an executive role, banged through the halls yelling, “Rise and shine!” and rousting them all out to begin the day’s chores. The kids—the Mitchums and Louise, Patty, and Gil Tetreault—milked the cow, fed chickens, gathered and chopped firewood. Bill was a taskmaster and at times a brutal disciplinarian. Once, Annette recalled, eight-year-old Louise did not jump to when her father barked an order and he knocked her clear across the room. But Bill never touched the Mitchum boys, John would remember. It was part of a sentimental vow he had made to the memory of their father. Their cousins would look on with envy as Jack and his brother often got away with murder.
Robert’s life on the farm was a new and exotic adventure. He liked being around the animals, picking fruit off trees, and wielding an ax to chop firewood. He could go swimming in a wooded pond or hike to Jones Beach on Delaware Bay and swim and fish and catch soft-shell crabs (they would bring them back in a sack for Aunt Gertrude to fry). He liked to tramp the woods, walking beyond the pathways into the deep overgrown wilderness so far from any sign or sound of people that he could pretend he had gone all the way to darkest Africa or the jungles of South America. At night in his bunk with the white light of the moon coming through the bedroom window, the dead silence of the farm freed his mind of distractions and he would conjure things from his imagination, images and stories. Some nights he would lie in bed and write rhymes in his head, jotting them down by the moonlight if he thought it worth the effort. In the night, in his bed, he would sometimes hear the keening whistle of a freight train hurtling by somewhere in the distance and he would imagine himself on board, on his way to strange places he had read about in books and dreamed of one day visiting.
John would write that Delaware taught them “about bigotry and red-neck perverseness.” The local toughs would come to harass the new city kids but soon found that Robert and Jack were hardly the Connecticut Buster Browns they had imagined. “Bob and I had to fight constantly . . . [but] the country boys fought with no style or grace. Their swings, although prodigious, were not exactly championship style.” Robert’s dangly arms were skinny as toothpicks but he fought with a cold-blooded decisiveness that managed to send most of the yokel attackers running in retreat.
When school opened in the autumn, the brothers hiked a dirt path to the main road and boarded the school bus to Felton High. Seventy years later, surviving schoolmates remembered young Bob Mitchum, skinny, very smart, and from the start bound and determined to get up to something.
“He was so thin then, you couldn’t believe how big he got as a man,” said seventh-grade classmate Margaret Smith. “His hair was kind of blond, and the face was just all bones, very narrow. They said he was part Indian and he looked like it with very high cheekbones. He was not handsome then! His little brother was the good-looking one.” Robert agreed—”I looked like a goddamned little ferret . . . my head was one big cowlick.”
“Skinny. Long skinny arms, bony face,” said Virginia Trice, another Felton schoolgirl. “And that prominent dimple in his chin—that was not something everybody had back then.”
“Nice, friendly, nothing uppish about him—of course his family had no money,” Emma Warner recalled. “The boys never had anything.”
“He wore old clothes, must have been secondhand,” said Smith. “They hung off him. A big man’s belt that was too big.”
“He was a character,” said Warner. “Always looking to get into trouble. He was bright. Didn’t have to study. I guess that’s how come he had time to get into stuff.”
“The thing about Bob Mitchum,” said Margaret Smith, “he was very, very intelligent. He knew more than the teachers, and he wasn’t afraid to stand up and contradict them. And the teachers didn’t know what to say, because he would turn out to be right. They just looked embarrassed. He’d stand up and explain the way it should be. He was so advanced—makes our teachers sound kind of dumb, don’t it? He was the smartest one in the class that was for sure. But the strange thing is he never took any books home. I never saw him take a book home in his life and yet he knew everything. He was so advanced that it sort of disrupted the class.”
“Personally, I thought an awful lot of him,” Virginia Trice would say about the boy who became a movie star. “I always got along with him. Most of the kids liked him and . . . I think . . . even some of the teachers liked him because he had a good personality. A very bright fellow, didn’t have to work at school like some of the rest of us. But he was . . . ever’ once in a while a little mischievous.”
“He put thumb tacks on our seats,” said Smith. “And when you wore a sash he would tie you to the chair, him and some other boys liked to do that.”
“He and another boy went down to the brook close to the school,” said Trice, “and they caught hop toads and put ’em in the inkwells that were sunken into the desk. And once in a while you would hear someone scream because a frog would hop out of the inkwell at ’em.”
“Our classroom in seventh grade was a long, narrow room,” said Warner. “There were just two rows of desks, and the teacher, Miss Robbins, was sitting up on her desk at the front of the classroom. And Robert was in the back and threw an eraser that was just full of chalk dust and hit the teacher in the face and she fell off the desk. Why’d he do it? I don’t know. I didn’t know that he didn’t like her. Everybody just screamed and were so upset and the principal had to come in and fan her and straighten her up, and they took him away to the principal’s office. Suspended him, I guess.”
“There were some little kids and he stole their marbles. . . .”
“He had firecrackers one day at the school. . . .”
“. . . wrote a bad word on the blackboard, letters about a foot tall.”
“Somethin happened . . . no, I will not tell you or anybody else about what he did that time.”
• • •
The smartest kid in the school and the biggest mischief maker. It was a combination that puzzled and infuriated the faculty at the Felton school. The whip-smart boys had always been the apple polishers, the disciplined, the ambitious. Everyone, even the slow ones, wanted good grades, compliments, encouragement; but Robert, said his classmates, seemed indifferent to official approval. He was good at math, at history, at English, but it all seemed like yesterday’s news to him, the way he acted. “He musta been bored,” said one of the girls, remembering seventy years ago. “He acted like it was all kind of boring to him,” said another.
At Felton Robert found a pal. Another outsider, another discipline problem. His name was Manuel Barque. He came from New York City with his brother, Louis. The Barques were what were known as “home boys,” orphans or troubled youths resettled by an agency that arranged to place them on small family farms where they were boarded and cared for to a lesser or greater degree in exchange for their labor. There were some who knew Robert in school who thought he was a home boy, too, because he never spoke of his parents, and no one knew his people, and he had that same attitude—independent, a bit of a grudge against the authorities, didn’t care what people thought of him. Charlie and Annie Welch raised the Barque boys. They were
good people, kind, not like some of the sponsors of the home boys who just looked on them as free labor, unpaid farmhands. Louis was older and more reserved, and Mr. Welch liked him; the boy would go to Sunday school and to the little Methodist Church. Mrs. Welch was a good Christian woman, but Manuel was her pet, and Manuel was full of the devil, though Mrs. Welch liked to say that most of the trouble he got into was the fault of that boy Bob Mitchum.
Manuel Barque and Robert Mitchum shared a disdain for the teachers and especially for the principal. Felton had some good teachers, some OK teachers, and some Manuel and Bob thought were bastards, but they did not discriminate one from the other. Mr. McFadden, the music teacher, Mr. Severson, manual training, Mr. Glackin, science, Miss Robbins, Mrs. Greeley. Manuel and Robert hated them all. But their great enemy, their nemesis, was Mr. Petry, the principal. A short, chubby man, fierce, he brooked no nonsense. Everyone had to toe the line in his school. Bad boys got a stern lecture with a wagging finger in the face, and if they were really bad he would take a switch to them and whip them on the buttocks and the back. He roamed the halls—if he caught you where you weren’t supposed to be, he would grab you hard on the ear or pinch you on the soft part of the shoulder just below the neck and march you to his office. He gave Robert the shoulder pinch treatment one time and Robert backhanded him in the face and ran down the hallway and out the door. Petry got him into his office and went at him with the whip, threatening to expel him.
Manuel and Robert plotted their escape from school. They talked about stealing a boat somewhere out on the bay and sailing off to a life of adventure. One morning a group of the kids were milling around by the service station across from the school. People bought candy and sodas there and hung around before the nine o’clock bell rang. Manuel and Robert said they weren’t going to school; they were running away. They were going to go up to Connecticut to see Robert’s mom, maybe get some money and things, and then head off for Canada and become trappers, or maybe down to Florida and live on the beach and fish. Margaret Smith remembered standing there with them that morning. “They’d gotten off the bus and just decided they weren’t going in to school any more. The bell rang and everybody headed into the building but them. Me and another girl looked back and saw them across the road. And they weren’t there long before they got into a big truck that was stopped there and drove off with them. This other girl and I were dumbfounded. Children didn’t do that kind of thing then, hitchhiking. There was some ruckus when it became known they were missing. We didn’t have the communication you have today, so it took some time for everyone to get alerted and to have the police looking for them. I don’t know if they thought they were kidnapped or what. I knew they went hitchhiking, ran away from school, but I didn’t say a word. I was pretty lively when I went to school and we didn’t squeal on each other.”
They were found a day later. Cold and hungry, they had begged for food and a woman had called the sheriff. Mr. Welch and the school bus driver, Mr. Moore, drove up the thirty miles or so and brought them back. Uncle Bill, who had a soft spot for Bob that did not extend to his own children, just sadly ordered the boy up to his room. Grandmother Petrine came in later, red-eyed, and reluctantly administered a brief whipping.
Manuel’s Mrs. Welch tried her best to keep him away from the Mitchum boy. She rued the day they ever met and was never so happy as on the day Robert moved out of Delaware. Bob wrote to Manuel after he left, according to people who knew them, even after he became a movie star, and Mrs. Welch would not tell Manuel but would take the letters and burn them.
In the summer and on holidays, the missing members of the Gunderson and Mitchum clan came to visit. Ann would arrive for a stay, along with Annette, now a veteran in show business after her seasons on the vaudeville circuit dancing in an act put together by her Bridgeport dancing teachers. Grandfather Gunderson—the kids called him “Big Daddy”—would return from months at sea and frolic with the young ones and carouse with the local farmers. He liked to dazzle the children with shows of his incredible strength; and once, during a Fourth of July gathering, he slipped under a haywagon holding half-a-dozen occupants and with his powerful shoulders and back muscles lifted the wagon from beneath and toppled it sideways. Then one time he arrived at the farm less than his usual boistrous self, and the adults became very subdued as well. The doctor in Bridgeport had told Captain Gunderson that he had an advanced cancer in his stomach, and Big Daddy had come to say good-bye to everyone. He returned to Connecticut, and a few weeks later he was dead.
One morning Ann showed up with Major Morrison in tow and announced to all that they were now husband and wife. Bob and John scratched their chins. The Major rooted around Woodside with his usual affable, oblivious manner, his heavy British accent all but incomprehensible to the local dirt farmers of whom he inquired about the possibility of riding in their next big fox hunt. A year later Ann arrived from Bridgeport heavy with child. She gave birth to a girl they named Carol Morrison, and mother and baby remained on the farm for a time with Grandmother Petrine to care for them while the Major stayed behind at the newspaper, writing obituaries.
Robert’s days at the Felton school were numbered. The abrupt disruption of his formal studies was nigh, the result of a culminating act of antiauthoritarianism, an act that in those more innocent times was considered unthinkably outrageous. The whole incident would forever remain a legend among the classmates of Felton High School, a tale told and retold—though more often whispered—from those hallowed halls to every corner of Delaware, from one generation to another. As legends will, some details have faded or become confused with the passage of time, but all who speak of it agree to the general turn of events. There was Bob Mitchum, there was a hat, and there was something unexpected inside the hat.
“Well,” said one who had been there, after some reluctance and with a degree of laughing embarrassment, “Bob . . . or somebody . . . did a number two . . . he just . . . well, what they said . . . he shit in the teacher’s hat.”
Other survivors confirmed or elaborated the tale.
“Sir, it was the hat belonging to Mr. McFadden.”
“Mr. McFadden, he was the music teacher, a nice-looking, crippled gentleman, had a limp. . . . Why him I can’t say, maybe he was too serious for some of the boys, I don’t know.”
“I don’t know whose hat it was,” said another, “but it was a very nice man’s hat and they shouldn’t have done that to it.”
“The hat situation . . . they said he did it. . . . I don’t know.”
“I only heard tell of it later, but they said he stood on the teacher’s desk and did it.”
“They found it in Mr. Petry’s chair.”
“In the girls’ locker room . . .”
“In my opinion the other boys put him up to a lot of things, and he would be the one [to] just go ahead and do it. He was the one always took the rap for ’em anyway.”
“Either him or Manuel did it, I think. And they was proud of it.”
Rightly or wrongly accused, Mitchum would take the fall for the shit-in-the-hat caper. Petry had him brought into the outer office and formally expelled him, then escorted the boy out the front door. Bob left without looking back. There were some things you just didn’t dignify with a protest. He walked the entire long route back to Woodside, a nearly six-mile hike. Under grilling he confessed to his family what had happened and to them declared his innocence of the charge. Uncle Bill rode to the school to talk things over with the principal and see about setting things right. Petry told him what he thought of the little fiend he called a nephew, and Uncle Bill was soon illustrating some of his favorite wrestling holds. The secretary screamed, faculty members came running, and with an honor guard that included the beefy football coach, Tetreault was shown the exit.
Robert wrote a letter to his mother in Bridgeport: “Petry is a coward, preying on a child. Some day I am coming back and so help me I am going to ruin him as he ruined me if he is still alive. But I suppose it will be
just his luck to be dead.”*
• • •
They had always lived close to the bone on the Woodside farm. Uncle Bill tried to make a commercial success of the place, but his attempts to market crops—grapes, peaches, Christmas trees—had never added up to anything. They could barely be described as self-sufficient. And now, with no more support from Big Daddy Gunderson, it had become a hand-to-mouth existence. The boys wondered why their mother’s new husband back in Bridgeport didn’t make a better effort to support them. Later, more forgiving, Robert would say, “We couldn’t understand that he was full of shrapnel and couldn’t work hard enough to keep us all together as a family unit.” Instead they turned to the only member of the extended Mitchum clan who showed any propensity for solvency. Annette had begun to enjoy a degree of success as a performer. She toured on one of the East Coast vaudeville circuits for a time, part of an all-female troupe known as the Six Yankee Doodles. She was still just a girl, not long in her teens, but she had matured with all her experiences working on the road. In Washington she met a boy in the U.S. Navy named Ernie Longaker—a sailor like Big Daddy, a man in uniform like Daddy Jimmy—and she married him. Annette continued to work while Ernie went to sea. She appeared on the stage in Philadelphia and then in the chorus of a variety show in New York City. She had an apartment there, and soon she was sharing it with her peripatetic mother, two brothers, and baby Carol.
Annette believed the family had a strain of Gypsy blood on her mother’s side. None of them ever worried much about putting down roots or where next month’s rent was coming from. “They were an unusual family,” said Reva Frederick, who knew them all later in California. “They were not a warm family; I did not see a lot of emotion or physical closeness that you might see in other families. Robert was certainly not family oriented in the way some people are. But the women had this interesting matriarchal point of view; I don’t think they expected much from the men in the family, never expected them to be the bread-winner. Ann thought the best bet was that everybody should live together in the same place, everybody welcome. And whoever was working, I guess, chipped in and the rest took a piece of it. If you didn’t want to work that didn’t seem to bother Ann, and if you did then you could spread it around to those that didn’t. As I say, it was an interesting point of view.”
