had the idea that we should take this candy bar and pulverize it inside the envelope before we gave it to the kid,” says Swanson. “It was like handing him a bag of sand, because we broke the candy bar into as many pieces as we could without damaging the envelope. If you couldn't stand up for yourself, if you showed the other guys you were weak, we weren't very kind. To his credit, Ashby was one of the guys who would say, ‘OK, we've gone far enough,' and backed off.”10
It was not only his peers whom Ashby was tough on. One of the principal dishes made by Blackie, the PSNA cook, was something called “fried mush.” One day, Hal was eating this when he bit on something hard and almost broke one of his teeth. On inspecting the offending item, he discovered that it was the knob from Blackie's radio, which, unbeknownst to him, had fallen into the mush. Hal called Blackie into the mess hall and, in front of all the other cadets, gave him a dressing-down, about not only the offending knob but also the generally poor quality of the food. It cannot have done Hal's reputation or popularity any harm when there was a marked improvement in the standard of cooking following Blackie's very public shaming.
Another staff member Hal had a run-in with was Laird, the football coach. An ex-military man and former professional football player, Laird was, in Swanson's words, “tougher than a boiled owl, and was hard on us. [He] was trying to make men of us.” Laird slammed into the boys too violently, and Ashby wasn't afraid to protest the coach's cruel behavior. Swanson reveals that Ashby and Laird “sort of got into it a few times.…One time I thought him and Ashby were actually going to get into a fistfight!”11
Because of the very small number of pupils at the academy, PSNA teams would invariably lose games, often by a large margin, but the one edge the boys had over their adversaries was mental and physical toughness. Gus Cooper nonchalantly recounts an incident that occurred when he was in one of the school vans on the way to PSNA's sister school, Hill Military Academy, in Portland, Oregon. “Jack Swanson was the driver, and went around the corner, and we tipped over. We were all in this van, Ashby, myself—there must have been about eight of us in there. We had to get out and push it back up, and we took off again.”12
Fortunately, life outside the classroom at PSNA was not all rigorous drill and sporting tribulation. The boys attended dances held twice yearly to which pupils from girls' schools in nearby Seattle and Tacoma were also invited. Jack Swanson had a crush on one of the girls but couldn't get any time alone with her: “Ashby had the idea that I ought to dress up like a girl and then I could go back to Seattle with these girls when they left the academy, which I in effect did. And got into trouble for it.”13 Swanson got on the girls' bus unnoticed in his disguise but was inevitably discovered when he tried to get on the ferry back to Seattle.
Ashby became known at the academy as an adviser on matters pertaining to the opposite sex. His old Ogden friend Bob Ballantyne confesses that Ashby, despite being younger, had been more up on these things than he had: “We together learned the early ways of sex. We masturbated a couple of times together. He showed me how to get the last juices out, so it won't be dripping. It was all part of growing up.”14
Not only was he was more clued up on certain matters than his peers, but the tall, gawky, professorial-looking Hal also unwittingly won the hearts of a Winslow shopgirl, one of the PSNA coaches' daughters, and one of the Seattle schoolgirls (who asked Swanson to put her in touch with Ashby long after Hal had left). Jack Swanson, however, recalls that the adoration of these young women was never particularly reciprocated by Hal. In the summer of 1946, he returned home to Ogden and that fall started his senior year at Washington, where he became a member of the Sigma fraternity. And it was at Washington that he would meet the first girl to have a real impact on him.
Much had changed in Ogden since his departure the previous year. The war was now over, and Jack had been back home already for six months. He had remodeled the grocery store, adding an ice-cream parlor to tailor it more to Eileen's area of expertise. Jack was also about to get married to Beth Christensen, a girl he had met in Ogden while back home for Christmas.
Strangely, Jack was not the first Ashby boy Beth had had contact with. “A bunch of us girls had a little club that we belonged to, and we had a ‘girl ask boy' party,” Beth recalls. “I didn't have anyone I was going with, so I said to my friends, ‘Who shall I ask?' They said, ‘Ask Hal Ashby, he's a neat kid.' So I called Hal Ashby and asked him to this party—and he said no! It kinda took the wind out of my sails.”15
Hal spent much of the summer of 1946 hanging out with Jack and Beth while his mother was working at the store. “Hal was in and out,” Beth recalls, “and he would ask me if I would mind pressing his trousers. He'd bring his clothes over to wash, and he'd bring the gang with him. They would sit around while they got their clothes cleaned, and I would make them some cookies.”16 After Jack and Beth got married, Hal took advantage of his elder brother's more upmarket lifestyle. Not only did he come round regularly to listen to Jack and Beth's record collection, but he twice borrowed Jack's Chrysler New Yorker, both times tearing the transmission out of it.
Over the next two years, Eileen's children all began to settle into family life. Hetz got married in June 1946, and Jack and Beth followed suit that October. Ardith, who had married in 1942, had her first child, Larry, in September 1948, and a month later Guy, Jack and Beth's firstborn, made his entrance.
Despite being only seventeen, Hal was also part of this sudden rush of familial activity. A sixteen-year-old blonde at Washington called Lavon Compton had caught his eye, and he asked a mutual friend to arrange a meeting. Lavon seemed interested, so Hal was invited round to the Compton family home, and the two started dating. It was a case of opposites attracting: Hal, the troubled teenager with a rebellious streak, fell for Lavon even though—or maybe because—she was the quintessential good girl, sweet natured, dainty, and petite.
One day in February 1947, when they had been going out for three or four months, Hal and Lavon went to Eileen and told her that Lavon was pregnant and that they were going to get married. They were not old enough to wed legally in conservative Utah, but Nevada, famous for its quickie weddings, was not too far away. On March 1, 1947, Hal and Lavon drove the 250 miles from Ogden to Elko, Nevada, with Lavon's sister and brother-in-law in tow as their witnesses.
The ceremony went off without a hitch, but the marriage was difficult from the beginning. On the day they eloped, Hal and Lavon left the following note for Eileen:
Mom,
We're sorry every thing turned out this way. But maybe some day things can be made right.
This $10 is on the big bill we owe you. We'll pay the rest the best we can.
We'll get our things as soon as possible.
Try to understand.
All our love,
Lavon and Hal
P.S. We both love you very much and thank you for all your help.17
Eileen had significant reservations about the wedding but still loaned Hal and Lavon the $10 for the marriage license. However, a condition of their marriage was that Hal finish his studies back at PSNA, where there would be no further distractions. So, immediately after getting married, Hal and Lavon were separated.
It was difficult for Lavon, who not only was apart from her new husband but also had to live at home with her disapproving parents. Like Eileen, they had frowned on the union, and they were also upset that the couple had not been married in the Salt Lake City temple like good Mormons. However, it was principally Hal that Lavon's parents objected to. Much of their dislike stemmed from the fact that he was so far from the good Mormon son-in-law they had hoped for. Conversely, Hal, as Jack put it, “had nothing good
