Being Hal Ashby. Nick Dawson

but it was ultimately rock and roll that most struck a chord with his rebellious nature.

      Eileen felt that Hal's rebellious side was becoming too dominant. Though he never got into serious trouble, hanging around with an older crowd meant that he was growing up too fast for her liking and drinking beer long before the legal age of twenty-one. One day, when Hal was in the tenth grade, Eileen found a pack of cigarettes and some condoms in his pocket. She immediately called up Ardith, who was working at City Hall, and told her to come home.

      “I can't,” said Ardith. “I'm working.”

      “You have to,” Eileen insisted. “It's an emergency!”⁴

      During all his teen years, and for the rest of his adult life, Eileen and Hal had that difficult relationship that develops when a mother's intense love manifests itself as controlling and domineering and the child clearly wishes to escape this excessive influence. In Hal's case, he got his wish. Eileen decided what he needed was a proper education and not the miseducation in life he was getting in Ogden. At the beginning of the eleventh grade, Hal Ashby found himself far from home and at a very different kind of school.

      Puget Sound Naval Academy (PSNA) was situated on Bainbridge Island, ten miles across the water from Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1938, it was a preparatory school for the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard but was often used by parents as a place for straightening out their undisciplined sons. It was remote, set in forty acres of prime land four miles from Winslow, the nearest town, and an all-male environment where discipline was always at the fore: a place with a minimum of distractions ideal for getting the best out of its pupils. The school taught not only the regular high school subjects but also naval drill, seamanship, and the rudiments of officers' behavior. Students quickly learned that no lapse in attention—whether to the subject being taught or to making one's bed—would go unnoticed. Those, like Hal, who had meandered through school and had relative freedom at home suddenly found much more demanded of them. Merits and demerits were handed out depending on pupils' performance, and if the latter outweighed the former, the imbalance could be expunged only by an hour of hard labor or drill marching per demerit.⁵

      Despite having been independent and a tearaway in Ogden, Hal missed Eileen and all the comforts of home when he arrived at PSNA in the autumn of 1945. “He didn't like it at first at all,” says Jack Swanson, a contemporary. “The discipline and regimentation—getting up, going to breakfast and going to lunch at a certain time—wasn't anything that he cared for.”⁶ After overcoming his initial frustration, however, Hal began to fit in and, as at Washington High, soon made friends and became popular.

      Even more so than in Ogden, he stuck out at PSNA as somebody who was different, particularly in his appearance. “He was very neat,” remembers another classmate, Gus Cooper. “He dressed more modern, like a kid from the big city.”⁷ “He had this crew cut and these big horn-rimmed glasses that made him look more professorial,” adds Swanson. “In fact, he gave you the impression that he was a wimp at first if you didn't know him. But he was a good size, and you soon found out that he could look after himself.”⁸

      Swanson was at PSNA because he had previously run away from home and, like Hal, had been sent there to get him on the straight and narrow. He ended up becoming the cadet commanding officer, with Hal as his second in command. The two roomed together and, during their time at PSNA, became close friends, though Hal was noticeably reluctant to discuss home and family. “My memory of him was that he was special in some way,” says Swanson. “It's hard to explain, but he seemed to have a certain air about him that was more mature. He loved playing jokes and stuff, but he seemed older than the rest of us in some way. He was really one of those people that you never forget.”⁹ That ability to be serious and authoritative while also displaying a sense of fun was something that Ashby developed at PSNA and that would become invaluable to him when he was a director.

      As is often the case with young people put in positions of authority, Hal took his role as a cadet officer very seriously and was as tough on the other cadets as a staff member might have been. In the mess hall, the boys ate at long tables covered in Masonite sheets. Unimpressed by the state of the tabletops, Hal once got the boys on mess duty to pick up the sheet and march out of the hall with it. For the next two hours, he made them wash and scrub it until he was satisfied with its condition. Hal also tried to toughen up the junior cadets, known as “dipes” (short for diapers), a name they hated. There was a boy from Seattle who, from the minute he arrived at PSNA, made it clear that he really didn't want to be there. Every week, his mother would send him a candy bar in an envelope. “Ashby 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