Stuart Leuthner Page 2

  Although elated by the birth of his son, Eric was troubled. Aurora, like the rest of the nation, was in the depths of the Depression. Wages had been steadily cut - Eric was taking home less than $15 a week — and rumors had been circulating for several weeks that Durabilt was planning major layoffs. The machines had only been running for a few minutes that morning when they ground to a halt and a supervisor ordered the men to assemble on the plant floor. After a few conciliatory remarks about the gloomy economy and how much the company regretted such extreme measures, he read off a list of more than 100 employees, including Eric, who were no longer on the payroll. After a few quick goodbyes, Eric cleaned out his locker and walked out of the plant into a cheerless dawn.

  The Cussler clan’s origins can be traced to a band of gypsies who roamed Spain during the fourteenth century. Migrating to France, they continued their nomadic wanderings until the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession in 1740. At that time, the name was spelled “Cussiliere” (pronounced Coos-lair). When the war ended, several families settled in Prussia and the name was Germanized to Cussler.

  Eric Cussler’s childhood was extremely grim. The youngest of three children, he grew up in Neunkirchen, an industrial town located in southwest Germany. His father, a career soldier, was a bad-tempered tyrant who verbally and physically abused his family. Shipped off to a military academy when he was eleven, Eric was assigned to an infantry brigade during World War I. Wounded, he would always walk with a limp, described by Clive as, “More like Grandpa McCoy on The Real McCoys than Deputy Chester Goode on Gunsmoke.”

  After graduating from the University of Heidelberg, the handsome, barrel-chested young man worked in a Frankfurt bank and joined one of the underground groups determined to evict the occupying French troops. When his political activities came to the attention of the French authorities and he realized Germany was setting out on a dark adventure, Eric booked a cabin on the SS Ohio. He arrived in New York on May 11, 1925.

  A limp was on the list of medical symptoms that could result in exclusion. After spending six miserable days in a crowded dormitory on Ellis Island, Eric was allowed to plead his case before the Board of Special Inquiry. Facing a one-way ticket back to Germany, he announced, “Herr, Ich bin ein klavier spielier!” (“Sir, I am a piano player!”). An official escorted him to Ellis Island’s third-floor recreation room and pointed to an upright piano.

  Eric’s sister, Francis, an accomplished pianist, had taught him to play an old German march. Eric sat down and played the song fast and slow, soft and loud. Standing on the “forte” pedal, he ended his extemporaneous concert with a thundering crescendo. As the melody faded, the official shrugged, “Mr. Cussler, it appears you are a piano player.” Thankfully, he did not request an encore, and Eric was allowed to pass through the “golden door.” As far as his family or friends recall, Eric never played the piano again.

  Francis had arrived in the United States several years before her brother married an American. Eric was living on a farm in Plano, Illinois. After a year in Plano, laboring in the fields and learning English, he moved to Chicago, pressing pants in a laundry for a nickel a pair, before landing a job as a bookkeeper for a large auto parts store. Clive recalls his father’s often told stories of the frenetic Roaring Twenties: “Driving his roommate’s Stutz Bearcat, making bathtub gin, seeing ‘Al Scarface’ Capone on the courthouse steps, walking by bullet-riddled gangsters sprawled in the street and meeting my mother, Amy Hunnewell.”

  Amy Hunnewell’s lineage can be traced back to Roger Hunnewell, an English fisherman who arrived in Boston in 1654. As the American frontier moved west, the Hunnewells followed. William “Will” Hunnewell, born in 1887, grew up on a farm in Idaho. Hired on as a fireman for the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad, Will married Amy Bigalow in 1887, and their daughter, Amy Adaline, was born in St. Joseph, Missouri in 1901.

  A rolling stone, Will left his job on the railroad, tried farming and managed several resorts in Iowa and Minnesota, before opening a saloon and distillery in Monticello, a small town located thirty miles west of Minneapolis. In a fortuitous move, he sold the saloon in 1919, two weeks before Prohibition went into effect, and went back to work for the railroad.

  In 1921, Amy, now twenty, moved to Minneapolis and worked as a receptionist in a medical office. Evenings and weekends, she played the piano at a Minneapolis theater, providing background music for silent movies. During a weekend jaunt to Chicago with a girlfriend, Amy met Eric. “My parents,” Clive says, “always told everybody they were properly introduced by mutual friends. Only when they were in their seventies did they admit they actually met when my father asked my mother for a dance at the Trianon Ballroom.”

  Located on Chicago’s south side, the Trianon Ballroom was extremely popular during the Jazz Age. Ted “Is Everybody Happy” Lewis and his orchestra were on the bandstand the evening Eric and Amy met, and the star-crossed couple spent the night fox-trotting to “It’s Only a Shanty in Old Shanty Town” and “When My Baby Smiles at Me.” Eric and Amy were married on June 10, 1930, at the bride’s parent’s home. They rented a small apartment in Aurora, Illinois, and Eric was hired by Durabilt - a job that would prove to be short-lived.

  By 1931, the Depression had tightened its grip on America and unemployment reached more than 20 percent. With no possibility of finding another job in Aurora, Eric, Amy and baby Clive moved in with Will Hunnewell. Amy’s mother had died in January and Will was living in Minneapolis. Thanks to his seniority, Will’s job with the railroad was secure and he was fortunate to have a steady paycheck.

  Unwilling to sponge off anybody, especially his in-laws, Eric immediately looked for work. For a short time, he sold refrigerators. “Selling refrigerators,” Clive says, “door-to-door in Minneapolis, in the Depression, in the middle of the winter! He might as well have tried to sell them to Eskimos.” Clive chuckles, “Dad always insisted he actually sold one, but nobody believed him.”

  In late winter 1932, Eric’s luck took a turn for the better. He was hired, with a salary of $23 a week, as a traveling auditor for the Jewel Tea Company. Founded in 1899, the Jewel Tea Company was a home delivery service, offering housewives an assortment of coffee, tea, spices, laundry and toilet products. At one time, the company’s brown and yellow vans and their friendly drivers were a familiar sight in much of the U.S.

  During the Depression, it was not unusual for a company to give a new employee an advance on their wages. When Jewel Tea advanced Eric $8, he brought the check home and proudly laid it on the dining room table. Clive remembers his mother’s story about the entire family standing around the table, staring in awe at the check, while she burst into tears.

  Traveling by train or car, Eric was constantly on the road. To maximize his time with his family, the Cussler’s rented a series of apartments in Terre Haute, Indiana and Louisville, Kentucky, before moving back to Minneapolis in 1937. When they lived in Louisville, Clive recalls leisurely walks with his grandfather along the banks of the Ohio River. “We would watch the steam boats on the river and pass by the Seagram’s distillery. Seagram’s big water tank was shaped like a jug and I thought it was amazing. One of those things that always stays with you.”

  Now six, Clive was enrolled in kindergarten, but soon became desperately ill and was diagnosed with pneumonia. Before the development of antibiotics, pneumonia, known as the “captain of the men of death,” was often fatal, especially for children. Treatment consisted of simply placing the patient in an oxygen tent and waiting for recovery or death. Much to his family’s relief, Clive chose the former.

  After more than a week in the hospital, Clive’s condition began to improve and another patient was moved into his room - an elderly derelict named Wendell, who had been found half frozen in an alley. Bored to tears, Clive was happy to have somebody to talk to, especially a character as colorful as Wendell. “That old guy,” Clive says, “taught me card games, made funny faces, performed tricks with his false teeth and to
ld me stories no six-year-old should have heard.”

  One morning, a nurse came into Clive’s room to check the boy’s vital signs. Clive pointed to his new friend and asked why Wendell had turned an unhealthy shade of blue. The nurse took one look at the old-timer, gasped, and whisked the curtain around the bed. Shortly after, two orderlies appeared, covered Wendell with a sheet, and quickly rolled him out of the room. When Eric was informed a “street bum” died in the bed next to his darling son, Clive remembers his father’s fury. “I could hear him yelling in the hall with his German accent and was afraid he was going to tear the hospital down.”

  With Clive on the mend, Eric and Amy wanted him home for Christmas. Ignoring the medical staff’s objections, they extricated Clive from the hospital and soon tucked him into his own bed. Although money was still scarce, Clive discovered later his parents sacrificed their small savings to insure he had a merry Christmas.

  On Christmas morning, Eric and Amy helped half carried Clive to the living room where a shiny black Lionel steam locomotive and three bright-red passenger cars were racing around the Christmas tree. As the train passed a little white shanty, a switchman would spring out, swing his lantern, and pop back inside. Clive spent Christmas morning stretched out on the floor, entranced with the mechanical switchman. Amy suggested he give him a name. Clive thought for a moment and nodded. “I’ll call him Wendell.”

  “That’s an odd name,” Amy said, “Where did you come up with that?”

  As he continued to watch the switchman, dutifully swinging his lantern to protect imaginary motorists from the thundering express, Clive replied, “Oh, from a man who makes funny faces.”

  In late January 1938, the Jewel Tea Company notified Eric there were two available positions he might want to consider. One, a promotion, would require him to relocate to Chicago. The other, in the Los Angeles office, was a lateral move - his salary would remain the same. The temperature in Minneapolis was hovering near zero and Clive, still recuperating, was as white as the snow piled eight feet deep around their apartment building.

  With his son’s health paramount, Eric elected to apply for the job in California. Within a week, the Cusslers packed everything they could fit into their 1937 Ford Victoria and hit the road. The first day they managed only twenty-six miles. Road maintenance was almost nonexistent, and Eric often had to plow through a foot and a half of snow. The Ford slid off the icy roads three times; on two occasions, they were pulled out of a ditch by sympathetic truckers. After spending the night in a motor court, conditions improved and when they reached Omaha, the snow, much to Clive’s amazement, was beginning to disappear.

  In Texas, Eric turned west onto Route 66, and a few days later, they crossed the Colorado River on the Old Trails Arch Bridge and entered California. For Clive, “Our trip west was a great adventure. I, of course, knew absolutely nothing about California, but realized my parents were excited about the move.

  As the town of Needles receded in the Ford’s rearview mirror, Eric concentrated on his driving while Amy busied herself with a map. Sitting in the back seat, Clive, his face pressed against the window, stared at the desolate desert stretching forever in all directions. What kind of future, he wondered, waited for him in the Golden State?

  It was February 1938, when the dusty Ford rolled into San Bernardino. The seemingly endless desert had given way to groves of citrus trees marching into the distance, framed by the picture postcard San Gabriel Mountains. California, the Cusslers decided, might actually be a nice place to live.

  In Pasadena, Eric turned left on San Gabriel Boulevard and headed for Alhambra, a small city ten miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Amy’s cousin and her husband lived in Alhambra and Eric rented a small Spanish-style house on their block. A year later, he bought a brand-new bungalow in the same neighborhood. Except for the four years Clive spent in the Air Force, he would live at 2101 Winthrop Drive until his marriage in 1955.

  When Eric and Amy made the decision to relocate to California, the ramifications went far beyond simply moving to another state. For much of its history, California has been seen as a mythical paradise, standing apart from the rest of the nation - a place of new beginnings and realized dreams, where baseball-size gold nuggets were free for the taking and a future movie star could be discovered waiting tables.

  Writer John Gunther, who toured the United States in the 1940s, described California as, “A whole great world of its own” inhabited by “the outside fringe.” Carey Williams, a writer who reported extensively on the land and people of California, titled one of his books, The Great Exception. “The profound transformation of California,” Williams wrote, “economic, social and physical, are difficult to emphasize sufficiently.” Historian Merry Ornick called Southern California, “the end of the rainbow.”

  Growing up in Alhambra had a significant effect on Clive. Although born in the Midwest, he quickly adopted Southern California as his inherited spiritual destination. In the land of perceived unlimited opportunity, Clive developed imagination, confidence, and optimism - qualities that have served him admirably in business and in his writing career.

  Amy enrolled Clive at Fremont Elementary School, a nine-block walk from their house. Alhambra had grown so rapidly there were insufficient classrooms, and a group of large, army surplus tents (wooden walls with sturdy canvas roofs) were erected next to the school. Clive will never forget the smell of sunbaked canvas, but he remembers most his anemic appearance those first few weeks. “I was still recuperating from my bout with pneumonia,” he says, “and looked like something that had crawled out from under a rock. Sickly pale, so skinny you could count my ribs and wearing short pants.”

  The local youngsters were tanned, strapping, and wore grown-up pants. Although the kid next door felt it his duty to beat Clive up on several occasions, the combination of southern California’s sunshine and Clive’s youthful resilience quickly restored his health and he was soon out on the playground with newfound friends. “I was very fortunate,” he says. “There were five or six other boys in the neighborhood who were my age and we were always up to something.”

  Clive’s “gang” scavenged scrap lumber from construction sites and built multi-room tree houses. Holes dug in the ground, covered with boards and lit with candles, became trenches of the Great War. A fanciful twenty-foot long pirate ship, complete with a crow’s nest and plank to walk, was “anchored” in a vacant lot. When a local farmer harvested his crop of hay, the boys would stack up the bales and defend their Foreign Legion fort against marauding Bedouin hordes.

  On most evenings, the boys played football or baseball, but Winthrop Drive would grow silent when they dashed inside and gathered around the glowing radios occupying a place of honor in their living rooms. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Clive and his friends thrilled to the exploits of Dick Tracy, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, Captain Midnight, and Red Ryder. When they listened to Inner Sanctum, Clive would turn off the lights to make the tales of assorted ghosts, ghouls, and lunatics even scarier.

  Like most Americans of their generation, Clive’s family was addicted to the silver screen - maybe more so. When Eric was attending college in Germany, he worked as a projectionist in a movie theater. According to Clive, “Dad was a real movie nut.” Hollywood’s wholesale dream therapy helped audiences of the 1930s temporarily forget the hardships of the Depression. Two or three times a week, Clive and his parents would catch a show at the Alhambra Cinema or Academy Theater in Pasadena. A thirty-five cent ticket delivered a lot of entertainment: short subject, cartoon, newsreel, and travelogue followed by the B film and finally, the feature. By the time the Cusslers arrived home, it would often be close to midnight. “I had school the next day,” Clive says. “Our neighbors and my teachers thought it was scandalous.”

  The ocean was only a half-hour’s drive from Alhambra and Clive’s parents would regularly take their son and his friends to spend a fun-filled day at the beach. They would frequently ride the legend
ary Cyclone Racer at The Pike amusement park in Long Beach.

  The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was especially terrifying to citizens on the west coast. Hawaii’s proximity to California convinced the state’s residents it would only be a matter of time before swarms of bloodthirsty Japanese soldiers charged through their front doors. Wild rumors suggested a massive Japanese battle fleet lurking near Catalina Island, clandestine Japanese air bases hidden in the California deserts, and turncoat Japanese fishermen covertly mining San Francisco harbor.

  Beaches were strung with miles of barbed wire, coastal cities were blacked out, anti-aircraft guns guarded defense plants with roofs disguised to look like suburban neighborhoods, and sandbags ringed businesses and homes. On February 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine attacked an oil field near Santa Barbara. Although the shelling only resulted in minor damage, the ship’s optimistic captain radioed home he left the entire city in flames.

  Eric Cussler signed up as a volunteer air raid warden. Wearing a white helmet and armed with a nightstick, he would walk through the neighborhood admonishing negligent citizens to close their curtains so an errant light would not provide a Japanese bombardier with a target. Incendiary bombs were one of the most feared weapons in the Japanese arsenal and many homes were equipped with so-called spare pumps. Hooked up to a large can of water, the hand-powered pumps could be used to extinguish fires set by the bombs. Although the attacks never materialized, Clive and his friends found a use for the pumps after the war, installing them in the back seats of their cars and gleefully squirting unsuspecting pedestrians walking on Alhambra’s sidewalks.