when Jack decided to throw the “spear” at a cushion on the porch swing. But just as he threw it, Hal's head popped up from behind the seat—and the “spear” hit him square in the forehead, knocking him to the ground.
Jack rushed to see what had happened to Hal and saw that there was a big gash on his forehead and that he was completely still. With great trepidation, he quickly phoned his parents at the store.
“You'd better come home,” Jack gasped. “I've just killed Hal.”8
The store was only a few blocks away, and James and Eileen rushed home in a complete panic. Fortunately, with the help of Uncle Wiley, it was discovered that Hal was merely concussed and that his gash needed only a few stitches.
For Jack and Hal, the first half of the 1930s was a happy time, filled with fun and games and the innocence of childhood. They had picnics and went on camping trips, and neither of the boys saw the signs of the problems between their parents that Ardith and Hetz had been seeing for years. On the surface, nothing seemed to be wrong. There were no arguments, and both parents always seemed to be around. But in 1935, James and Eileen got divorced.
At first, things were not much different. The divorce was dealt with quickly and amicably by both parties so that the children were not too traumatized by what was going on. Though they no longer lived with him, Jack and Hal nevertheless spent a lot of time with their father, who was still welcome at the house. They also worked for him at the store, stocking the shelves and cleaning up for extra pocket money.
The divorce seemed to be what caused the Ashbys to finally and fully split from the church. As 80–90 percent of Ogden residents were Mormons, the Ashbys being “inactive” was an issue for many people, and though they were not ostracized, they were still made to feel uncomfortable. A number of Jack and Hal's classmates at school repeated their parents' verdicts on the matter, telling the Ashby boys that they “were not on the right path.”9
In later years, the memory that Ashby chose to share from these times was, in fact, humorous rather than sad. It concerned a trip to Salt Lake City to see the Ashbys' general practitioner, Dr. Barrett, that Hal recalled with considerable amusement:
I went to him for a check up of some sort. All the tests were finished except for my urine specimen. Naturally I couldn't go, so Dr. B told me to go out and walk around Salt Lake, drink plenty of water, and return in an hour. It was during the summer and, as you know, there were water fountains every half block. I must have drunk from thirty of them before returning to Dr. B's office. They handed me a very small bottle, stuck me in a very small room—a room, I might add, that did not have a toilet. It was with grave misgiving that I started to pee. The misgivings were well founded; once started I couldn't stop; there was enough in me to fill five bottles the size he gave me. Needless to say, I flooded that small room. The only saving factor was a box of Kleenex. That, at least, allowed me to sop up the excess. I never told Dr. B. about that, and it must have been twenty years or more after that before I was able, without great difficulty, to give a urine specimen, when requested by various doctors, even if I was put in a room with ten toilets in it. Also, I have often wondered what the person thought when they emptied the waste basket in that small room and found all those soggy Kleenex tissues.10
On March 14, 1936, Hal's father went to Las Vegas to tie the knot with one Clarissa Little. Quite how long they'd been a couple is unclear; however, the proximity of his divorce and their wedding raises questions as to whether Clarissa was a factor in the dissolution of James and Eileen's marriage and set Ogden tongues wagging. People's allegiances were with Eileen rather than “the new woman,” who many assumed had broken up a twenty-five-year marriage. Even worse, Clarissa was a Gentile. James's customers made it clear that she was not welcome at the store, and she was seldom seen about.
About this time, Eileen decided to pack up with the boys and leave Ogden. They moved a lot in the next few years while Eileen, as Jack puts it, “just bumbled around, kinda trying to find herself,…trying to figure out what she wanted to do.”11 First they moved fifty miles north to Logan, where Eileen set up a boardinghouse for students at the Utah State Agricultural College. They stayed there eighteen months, before moving west across the Rocky Mountains to Portland, Oregon. At the time, Hetz was working in Portland in the lumber business, and Eileen settled down there—again for a year and a half or so—putting her cooking prowess to use by opening a restaurant.
Eileen was energetic and full of ideas—which were often unconventional—and was, as Jack says, “always looking for something better.” She bought bags of carrots, got Jack and Hal to clean them by putting a load in their washing machine along with a handful of scrubbing brushes, then made carrot juice and sold it, years before it became a fashionable drink. Later, Jack and Hal would laughingly call her “the original hippie.”12 She knew about food and what was good for people and made sure her children ate healthily. A number of her big business ideas revolved around food. In the late 1930s, she bought recipes for donuts and butter toffee for the sum of $200, a huge amount of money at the time. People thought she was mad, but the donuts did such good business that they easily paid back her investment.
During Eileen's restless period, Hal and Jack spent even more time together than usual because they were never anywhere long enough to properly get to know the neighborhood children. All the moving around seemed to be necessary from Eileen's perspective, but it wasn't at all easy for the boys.
To their relief, they returned to Ogden in 1939, but Eileen was still restless, and they moved five or six times within the town. Nevertheless, Hal and Jack were more grounded. They could also once again spend time with their father and, as Hal was now ten, were able to do more grown-up activities. The three of them would go into the Wasatch Mountains, pitch a tent, and spend a weekend hiking, fishing, and hunting. One of the Ashby men's traits was that they rarely had to go to the toilet, which was handy on those camping trips. (Later, when Hal spent weeks on end stuck in an editing room, determinedly focused on his task, this talent was again useful.)
Some days, Jack and Hal would borrow .22 rifles from their father, who collected guns, and go off after school to shoot at old tin cans for target practice. Other days, they grabbed their bikes and rode to a fishing hole a few miles from their home and spent the afternoon fishing or swimming. Once a week, they went to the movies. “Almost every Saturday, Hal and I went to the theaters that showed the weekly serial adventures and cowboy movies,” Jack recalls.13
The Uintah Dairy pasteurized, bottled, and then delivered milk on seven or eight routes, and when Jack was fourteen, his father made him a delivery driver on one of the routes. The milk had to be delivered to the customers' doorsteps before sunrise, so Jack had to get up at three in the morning, and despite the hour, Hal was sometimes with him. Jack would drive the truck, and Hal would put the bottles on the doorsteps. “In the summertime we'd take the doors off the truck, and he would just jump out with the milk in his hands and run up to the porch and pick up the empty bottles and run back,” Jack recalls. “It really was tough getting up that early. It really ruined our social life.”14
Fortunately, life at home was good. Though they never had a lot of money, Eileen always made the important occasions memorable. For birthdays, she made special cakes, and Santa never let the Ashby boys down on Christmas Eve. Their father was another regular visitor at Christmas and was often invited over for dinner at other times too. In 1941, Hal did not receive individual Christmas cards from his parents, just a joint one from “Dad and Mom.” Because Hal and Jack had no contact whatsoever with Clarissa, there must have been times when they almost forgot their parents were divorced at all.
On Sunday, March 22, 1942, James was due to have dinner with Eileen and the boys. Eileen thought he was unhappy with Clarissa and suspected that he wanted to end the marriage, and apparently they had even discussed the possibility of getting back together.
But
