Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

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 he never made it to dinner.

      That day, he was at the Uintah Dairy Company offices. Just before noon, he told one of his young employees, Denzil Shipley, that he was going to clean his guns, which he had not done since the end of the hunting season. At five past midday, another employee, Bernadine Anderson, heard a shot and rushed into her boss's office. By the time she got there, he was already dead, having died instantly from a shot to the head.

      On the few occasions that Hal would discuss his father's death, he always said it had been a suicide; what he did not say was that he was the only person in the family who believed that. It has been said that Hal's father killed himself because he had refused to pasteurize his milk and therefore lost the dairy,¹⁵ that he killed himself in a barn, and that Hal was the one who first discovered the body.¹⁶ None of these stories is true: Hal's father had not lost the dairy; he had no livestock, let alone a barn; and Hal did not find his father's body.

      However, determining the truth surrounding James's death is not a straightforward matter. If James was considering rekindling his relationship with Eileen and had no major business problems, there is no readily discernible motive for suicide. And that Hal alone believed his father killed himself makes suicide even less plausible. However, if one examines the sheriff's department's report, it begins to look more likely:

      Weber County Sheriff John R. Watson said today officials had decided the death of James Thomas Ashby, 54, of 3531 Washington, who died of a gunshot wound Sunday, was accidental. After an investigation, he said, officers concluded there was no need of an inquest, and none will be held unless requested by the family.

      Mr. Ashby died at twelve—five P.M. Sunday at the offices of the Uintah Dairy Products Co., 3667 Washington, of which he was president. Investigation revealed he had been cleaning guns at the time of the accident. He had cleaned two, and was working on the third when it was discharged.

      When police arrived, they discovered the barrel of a .32-calibre rifle clutched in one hand. The bullet had entered the head beneath the chin, and medical reports indicated death was instantaneous. Mr. Ashby was alone in his office at the time of the accident. Miss Bernadine Anderson, an employe [sic], was in the next room when she heard the shot. Another employe, Denzil Shipley, said he had been talking to Mr. Ashby a few minutes before. He told the youth he had not cleaned his guns since the hunting season so he decided to do it Sunday afternoon, and then have them registered, according to the sheriff.¹⁷

      Whether or not there was an obvious motive, the circumstantial evidence all seems to point clearly to suicide. The fact that James pointedly told an employee he was cleaning his guns five minutes before he shot himself seems too measured, as if he were giving others a way of interpreting his death as accidental; and it seems highly implausible that a man so accustomed to dealing with firearms would clean a .32 rifle while it was loaded. Furthermore, the fact that he shot himself beneath his chin so the bullet entered his brain immediately causing almost instantaneous death