Grumbles from the Grave (34 page)

I fixed him breakfast and he read the ad while he ate.

There was no discussion about what we would do. Robert sat down at his typewriter and wrote an answer. When he was finished, I read the full-page answer and suggested that he rewrite it, using the same ideas he had used, but not mentioning the opposition. He did that, and the ad is reprinted in
Expanded Universe
.

Colorado Springs had two daily papers, one morning and one afternoon. We took the ad to the latter, paid for a full-page ad, and later went to the other and also took another full-page for our ad.

These ads caused a sensation. The telephone kept ringing, the mail was filled with a few pledges, and one or two contained checks to help the cause. We ordered extra copies of the page and sent them out to our mailing list, which was not very large at that time.

With the assistance of a wet paper copier, I made copies and sent the originals in to the President, registered, return receipt requested. I strung up a drying line in the kitchen and suspended the copies to dry. For weeks the kitchen was difficult to get around in.

Some people took an ad in the
San Francisco Chronicle
and sent us a copy. A few more pledges came in.

I sat down and did some figuring. Not counting the time we both put into the project, it cost us $5 each to send those pledges to the President. Our backfire had failed, and we never heard a word from President Eisenhower.

The President then signed an executive order suspending all testing without requiring mutual inspection.

Robert had been working on
The Man from Mars [Stranger in a Strange Land]
. He set that aside and started a new book—Starship Troopers. Both books were directly affected by this try at political action—
Starship Troopers most directly, and The Man from Mars somewhat less directly. The two were written in succession; they are quite different stories from what Robert might have written otherwise.

(Robert's version of this can be found on pages 386 to 396 of
Expanded Universe
.)

April 26, 1958: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I don't know when I'll get any more fiction written—maybe never. This effort is taking up all of our time. On the other hand, we are spending money on it even faster than we spend money in traveling, so I may be flat broke soon and forced to go back to cash work.

But I refuse to worry about personal aspects of the future. I am convinced in my own mind that the United States is washed up and we will cease to exist inside of five to fifteen years—unless we quickly and drastically pull up our socks, both at home and in foreign policy. This opinion has been growing in my mind for years: I was simply triggered into doing something about it by this pacifist-internationalist-cum-clandestine Communist drive to have us treat atomics and disarmament in exactly the fashion the Kremlin has tried to get us to do for the past twelve years.

I wish some of those starry-eyed internationalists would go take a look at the illiterate, unwashed uncivilized billions whose noses they want to count in a "world state"! And also explain to me how you get a world state of "peace with justice" while dictators, both Red and garden variety, control the "votes" of a billion and a half out of two and a half. Somebody ought to tell them that "politics is the art of the practical." Me, maybe.

* * *

Enough, too much—but it is much on my mind. The Patrick Henry League has been getting more response than I expected, much less than is enough to be effective. But we shall persevere.

MISCELLANEOUS

May 15, 1963: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Thanks for that full house of checks. Ginny took 'em all. You will be pleased to hear that I bought her another emerald ring, a quite expensive one, which will insure that I go back to work again before too long.

* * *

Ginny is about the same and is so beat down from hand-watering her [Colorado Springs house] garden that she doesn't really know whether she is sick or exhausted. After every bath the bucket brigade starts, Ginny bailing, me toting. I have placed four barrels around the garden and there every bit of wash water goes—hands, baths, dishes—and from these she waters with an old-fashioned watering can. In the meantime, I am digging a drainage ditch all around the house to carry all rainwater (if it ever rains!) from the driveway and the roof to my reservoir pond. I am lining it with concrete tile to keep silt out, so that it will not clog my pump. After that I am going to work out a (very expensive!) underground tank and immersion pump deal to use septic tank water for irrigation. This is no temporary emergency here; this county has doubled in population in ten years—and the area is semi-arid. (Remember that range on which you hunted antelope.) Things will get worse, not better, and I intend to make us as nearly independent of the water company as possible. No other news. We don't do a damn thing but haul water.

July 5, 1963: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

. . . and it has slowed up my letter writing; I owe letters to everybody and am just barely managing to answer urgent business mail and send off checks for bills. Yesterday I celebrated the Fourth of July by bringing Ginny home from the hospital. Nothing to do with the mysterious ailment which has plagued her for so very long (which is as bad or worse than ever); this was an operation on her right wrist, orthopedic surgery to correct damage she did to it by endless toting of a heavy watering can when she was trying to save her garden. Yes, she saved the garden and, sure, I have now built a water works which makes us independent of the water company and permits her to water with a pump and a hose—but the damage was done during the month when every drop of water was applied by hand. It got so bad that she could not even sign her name with that hand, so they opened up her wrist and corrected it.

Since she is right-handed to the point that she can hardly hold a fork with her left hand, since her right hand is useless until it heals, and since I am a slow and inefficient housewife, not too much is getting done around here that does not simply have to be done at once—especially as I continue to try to get in as many hours of mechanical work as possible. The Heinlein Water Works is finished to the point where it operates, but I still have endless masonry and carpentry jobs to do before it will be utterly safe from flash floods and landscaped so that it does not look like an abandoned slum-clearance project.

September 3, 1963: Robert A. Heinlein to Peggy Blassingame

I won't send him [Lurton] flowers; his doctor has almost certainly forbidden roughage. I would like to mail him a blonde, but there is some silly regulation about livestock. I suppose the best thing for him to do is to get out of that ulcer-making business. (I would go crazy in it.) But when Count does retire, I, and almost certainly a lot of others, will perforce retire, too.

It might do him some good to come out here and fish for a month—there aren't enough fish in Colorado streams to bother anybody.

In the meantime, he should avoid newspapers, authors, publishers, and editors.

August 23, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

[Concerning the arrival of a letter addressed to "Robert A. Heinlein, United States of America."]

The empty envelope herein is for your amusement . . . It was delivered with no delay at all, being postmarked the 9th and reaching me on the 11th, via surface mail. It need not be returned.

POLITICS

June 15, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I am still getting no professional writing done and our household continues to be stirred up night and day by politics. I had intended to take no real part in this campaign other than donation of money, while Ginny devoted practically full time to it. But I find myself in the situation of the old retired fire horse downgraded to pulling a milk wagon—a school bell rings . . . and milk gets scattered all over the street! Last week I found myself, for the first time in a quarter of a century, presiding at a political rally—co-opted without warning at the last minute. I must admit that I rather enjoyed it. And I find myself pulled in on many other political chores and devoting perhaps half as much time to it as Ginny does.

Editor's Note: The preceding fall I had become much taken with politics—a group of us had started a "Gold for Goldwater" campaign. We set up a Colorado Springs headquarters in a donated storefront, and gathered together campaign literature, buttons, and all the trappings.

Six of us agreed to take one day a week at the headquarters, and there were all sorts of meetings and speeches to be given. Robert gave his blessing to my endeavors and I was allowed to spend as much money as I thought we could afford.

He accompanied me to political dinner parties and other doings, and presently he could no longer stand the political inactivity, so he joined me. His activities were a revelation to me. Instead of simply charging the price for a book, he set up a goldfish bowl, and asked for contributions, getting more out of each customer. He set up a dinner party, at $50 a head, and sold it out. Some bought tickets, and returned those to him to sell again, and he sold them, sometimes two or three times each, garnering a lot of "Gold" for the campaign.

The telephone rang constantly, and he could get no copy written. We were fully involved in an already lost campaign. Eventually we recognized that, and made plans to leave for South America after voting on Election Day.

October 2, 1964: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

We still miss Shamrock but her little golden tomkitten is healthy and full of beans. Now I must run, get dressed, and rush to still another political dinner.

STUFFED OWL

April 15, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Ginny fetched home a stuffed owl and gave it to me. She was almost hysterical from self-panicking, laughing harder than I have seen her laugh since the time in Oct '65 when we were blockaded on a 70 mph freeway in Utah by 5,000 milling sheep. For some years I have used a family cliché concerning useless gifts: "Just what I've always needed—a stuffed owl." So she gave me one. The cliché dates back to my childhood. Do you remember Hairbreadth Harry, the Beauteous Belinda, and Rudolph Rassendyl the Villyun? Well, one Christmas about forty years ago Belinda gave Harry a smoking jacket that fitted him like socks on a rooster, and he gave her a stuffed owl—to which she said glumly: "Just what I've always needed."

So now I have just what I've always needed, and the stuffed owl (now named "Pallas Athena") is perched facing me just beyond my typewriter.

READER

December 10, 1968: Lurton Blassingame to Robert A. Heinlein

. . . However, not all people love you. I had a call this morning from a frantic mother in Minnesota whose fourteen-year-old son had run away from home for the third time. On his desk she had found your name, care of me. He has read all your books and she thinks he may be out to find you. Before taking off he had gone through his mother's purse and his father's store, so he has about $2,000 on him.

Editor's Note: We never saw the boy.

VIP

March 20, 1969: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

This almost fractured me. Our tickets arrived marked "VIP." No fooling. I thought "VIP" was just an idiom—but swelp me, our tickets are so marked. I laughed until I was hoarse.

Editor's Note: In early 1969, an invitation came from the Brazilian government to attend a film festival to be held in Rio de Janeiro. All expenses would be paid by that government—we would be guests. The only payment would be that Robert give a talk.

Robert wrote this as a P.S. to Lurton in a business letter. His talk was given at the theater at the French Embassy.

As I recall, this was the only free trip Robert ever accepted; it even included courtesy of the port—no customs or immigration needed. The return to New York was another matter!

APPRAISAL

November 21, 1968: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Did I tell you about the appraisal on my donation of mss., et al. to the U of Calif[ornia]? If not, I must—for I am astounded. The appraisal was made by Robert Metzdorf of New York and Connecticut, and the IRS has been fidgeting about the long delay in getting an appraisal. But the university librarian wanted this appraiser and no one else, because of his high prestige and his past successes in making his appraisals stand up in court. So at last Metzdorf had a couple of other jobs out this way and did my small job while he was here.

What he appraised was just the fraction of the total gift which is now actually in the university's library, to wit, about two-thirds of my mss. plus a couple of boxes of foreign editions and some [paperbacks] in English. The valuation he placed on this fraction was $30,230.00—

—and I was flabbergasted.

Sure, Ginny had placed a guesstimate of $25,000-plus on the whole gift—but that was for all mss., plus our entire library, plus several valuable paintings, plus several other things. Since the IRS permits deductions for gifts of chattels only after the physical property is delivered, I had been fretted that the valuation on what I had been able to deliver (some mss. plus a few not-very-valuable books) might be less than the cost of appraisal—i.e., leave me with a net loss in cash and much loss of professional time spent in cataloging and preparing the stuff for the library. I never thought of my old mss. and notes as being worth much—hell, to me they were simply papers that cluttered up my files but which I did not dare throw away for business reasons. As for the foreign editions and paperbacks, for years I have been giving them away to anyone who would take them.

I still expect the IRS to scream about the appraisal. I'm very glad-now—that we got the number one appraiser. If the IRS won't accept it, I now feel safe in taking it to Tax Court.

Editor's Note: The IRS did not object to the valuation placed on these papers.

CATS