Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

waiting for him to call “Action!”

      1

      Enter Hal

      I was born in Ogden, Utah. Never a Mormon. Hated school. The last of four children. Mom and Dad divorced when I was five or six. Dad killed himself when I was twelve. I struggled toward growing up, like most others, totally confused.

      —Hal Ashby

      Hal Ashby's paternal grandfather, Thomas Ashby, came to America in 1870. Just twenty-one when he left his hometown of Leicester, England, he crossed the Atlantic with his eighteen-year-old fiancée, Rachael Hill. After training as a shoemaker in Lynne, Massachusetts, then the American center of quality shoemaking, he moved west in pursuit of new opportunities. He ended up in Utah, and, after unsuccessfully joining a boot and shoemaking cooperative, he settled in Ogden, where he started his own business.

      Sixty miles north of Salt Lake City, Ogden was a growing town rich in potential for entrepreneurs because it was the “Junction City” of the Union and Central Pacific railway. The population was doubling every ten years, and Thomas Ashby benefited hugely from an ever-growing number of customers: by the early 1880s, he was employing eleven men and had moved to a specially constructed building with a factory in the rear and a shop in the front. His family was growing too: by 1885, Rachael had given birth to seven children (only five survived). The following year, however, she died, and Thomas married Emily Coleman, the sixteen-year-old daughter of James Coleman, one of his shoemakers. A year later, Emily bore him a son, James Thomas Ashby, but Thomas's fortunes after this did not look up.

      His decision to bring his brother John into the firm and significantly expand the business coincided with a major downturn in the American economy that culminated in the Panic of 1893. Having had huge success as a maker of high-quality shoes and boots, he discovered to his great cost that luxury products were the last thing people bought when times got tough. Massively overstocked, and crippled by enormous debts, Thomas was forced to sell off $20,000 worth of goods for almost nothing. He ultimately lost his business as well as his wife, who married another man, Herbert Peterson. As the century drew to a close, Thomas left Ogden and moved to Salt Lake City.

      In early 1901, the “Salt Lake News” section of the Ogden Standard announced: “Thomas Ashby was yesterday examined by County Physician Mayo and Dr. H. A. Anderson touching his sanity. He was found to be insane and committed to the asylum. Ashby is 53 years of age and his mental derangement was brought about by business difficulties and domestic affliction.”¹ Four years later, he died in Provo, Utah, aged only fifty-five.

      Raised by his mother and stepfather, Thomas's son James Ashby never really knew his father. Though the overwhelming majority of people in Ogden (and Utah as a whole) were Mormon, Herbert Peterson was a Gentile, and James grew up only nominally a member of the church. A highly sociable youth, he attended more to fraternize than because of any religious fervor but was grateful he did when he met and fell for a pretty young Ogden girl, Eileen Hetzler, at a church social function. Eileen was intelligent, strong willed, and aspirational, and in the handsome and charismatic James she saw someone with similar drive and potential. Like James, Eileen had grown up in an unconventional family setup: she was the daughter of the polygamist Ogden dentist Dr. Luther Hetzler and one of his two wives, Martha Ann Hadfield. Dr. Hetzler had died when Eileen was only three, and Martha had remarried another fervent Mormon, David Steele, subsequently showing her daughter little affection at all. Eileen was, in fact, much closer to her “Aunt Cate”—Dr. Hetzler's other widow, Catherine Tribe—with whom she remained close for many years.

      On November 10, 1909, James and Eileen were married in the temple in Salt Lake City, the home of the Mormon Church. Eileen quickly became pregnant and gave birth to a boy, James Hetzler Ashby (known as “Hetz”), in December 1910. He was followed just over a year later by a baby girl, Ardith, born in February 1912. James got a job working on the Bamberger trains that took commuters to and from Ogden and Salt Lake City, and Eileen would meet his train as it came along the Ogden Canyon, bringing him a packed lunch to eat as they walked home together.

      Unlike James, Eileen had been raised as a strict orthodox Mormon, and as a condition of their marriage he had been baptized. Eileen and her family wanted James to become more involved with the church, so they convinced him to sign up to go on a mission, something usually undertaken by those without ties, young men in their late teens or early twenties, or retirees.

      Unfortunately, James was sent on a proselytizing mission to South Africa, one of the most demanding missions conceivable. It was usual to go to a different state to spread the word of the church, but James had to leave his wife and children and go halfway around the world—and pay for all of it himself. Given the dangers involved in traveling to and then living in Africa, there was no guarantee that he would return. It was the biggest crisis of James and Eileen's life together so far, both financially and personally. The home that had been built especially for them at the time of their wedding was sold to pay for James's mission. Eileen and the children were relocated to a quickly assembled house built by James in David Steele's back garden, and through Steele Eileen got a job cooking in the county jail. For the next few years, she was to be the family's sole breadwinner.

      On September 19, 1916, James left Ogden, his family, his friends, and everything he knew behind. During the two and a half years he was away, he traveled all the way around the world, visiting Honolulu, American Samoa (where he wrote that he “picked bananas and coconuts, and visited the natives in their huts”), Australia, Madeira, and England.²

      In South Africa, his time was mostly spent tracting and proselytizing in Cape Town, where he was called a he-devil, attacked by prospective converts' dogs, and threatened with being shot. In his time off, however, he played tennis and baseball, caught a shark, saw penguins, scrubbed tortoises, made a whole freezer full of ice cream, and discovered the wonders of the cinema. On one occasion, he found a vantage point from which Robben Island, the Atlantic Ocean, “the Indian ocean,…Cape Town harbor and docks and the city of Cape Town with her suburbs” could be seen at one time, “the most beautifull [sic] sight I ever saw in my life.”³

      James had never left Utah before, let alone America, and his time in South Africa not only broadened his horizons immeasurably but also taught him about life's brutal realities. James and another missionary, Elder Merrill, were sent to Port Elizabeth to tract, and the pair had to make the return journey of more than four hundred miles on bicycle. If they were lucky, they slept exhausted in barns after eating scraps, but often their requests for food and shelter met with aggressive responses from wary farmers, and they had to lie in fields and ditches, able only to dream about food.

      Just before James left South Africa, the Spanish influenza pandemic reached Cape Town. Within days, huge swathes of the population were stricken, and in the poorest parts of the city the dead lay in the streets, piled up on wagons to be buried in mass graves. James was fortunate not to be infected, but he nursed many of the sick and saw his fellow missionary Victor Burlando, a Mormon baby, and many more around him die. Only on Armistice Day, a few weeks later, did anyone in Cape Town smile again.

      James kept a diary during the course of his mission detailing his experiences. In his final entry—dated April 19, 1919, the day he returned home—he wrote that he met a friend at the station “who took me home in his car,” poignantly adding that he “spent the afternoon getting acquainted with my wife and children.”⁴

      On his return, James bought out the business he had previously worked for, the Uintah Dairy Company, which had a bottling plant and a milk route. Over the next ten years, he turned it into a mini empire comprising five or six routes, a neighborhood grocery store, and a roadside lunch stand. The steely determination that had gotten him through his mission, along with his innate charm, made him a natural entrepreneur.

      While his business flourished, things were more difficult at home. James had missed out on crucial years of his children's development and felt distanced from Eileen. Communication during their years apart had been almost impossible: there were no telephones, and letters were sent via China and tended to turn up in bundles of twos and threes or not at all. James felt bitter about what he had been through and