A Different Childhood

I stood watching the man tack up the red notice with large black print on our front door. QUARANTINE, it read, and I was impressed. As a child of eight I understood the sign to mean no one could come into or leave our house for two weeks except Dr. Riemer who, apparently, was unable to transport germs. As an adult it becomes a metaphor for my experiences during the thirteen years in which my father was subpoenaed, blacklisted, and imprisoned. Our family was cast out of the American experience and, although technically I belonged, I never felt like a welcome participant in the culture.

For two weeks I wouldn't have to go to school, which made me happy because I didn't enjoy school. I didn't have trouble learning, but I was shy and had few friends. I felt that I didn't fit in, and perhaps I didn't. Early photographs of me show an olive-skinned, fat-cheeked child who looks distinctly Native American or Mexican. Perhaps the teachers and children thought I was the child of a gardener or servant—someone who didn't belong in the posh Beverly Hills school I attended. So I wasn't unhappy to be quarantined for two weeks. I looked forward to playing cowboys with my brother, Chris.¹

My father was sick, which was the reason for the quarantine. Several weeks earlier, we had moved from our large house on Beverly Drive into a smaller house just south of Wilshire. The move was precipitated by warnings that the FBI was investigating us and my parents thought it prudent to move to less expensive quarters while they figured out what to do about a possible subpoena to testify before HUAC. Their plan was to move us to the ranch, nestled in a valley in the Maricopa Mountains, eighty miles north of Los Angeles, which my parents had bought in 1938 just before I was born. An extravagant man, my father had been busy transforming it into a gentleman's ranch with barns and outbuildings, living quarters for a foreman, a sprawling ranch house for the family, and a small man-made lake stocked with trout.

Just before we moved from Beverly Drive, we were invited to a goodbye dinner in Little Tokyo by the Yamashiro family. Chris and I played with Louie and Lily, the younger Yamashiro children, while their father tended the gardens of the house across the alley from ours. Our families had become friendly. Shortly after that evening, my father developed a dangerously high fever and Dr. Riemer diagnosed diphtheria, the only reported case in Los Angeles County, which he speculated my father contracted in Little Tokyo. I wonder now whether Dr. Riemer was making an ignorant assumption about the residents of Little Tokyo, but the story went down in Trumbo family lore. My father was very sick and for a couple of days was delirious. I could hear him ranting loudly from his bedroom, castigating the FBI for tapping his phone line as he tried to talk to friends. Although frightened, I found all this quite exciting.

The family moved to the ranch not long after the diphtheria incident. We were five miles from the nearest neighbor, twelve miles from the nearest town (population 280), and twenty-four miles from our school. The altitude was six thousand feet so we had snow every winter and sometimes even a white Christmas. We had electricity and our own back-up generator for emergencies, but no telephone. Chris and I were enrolled in El Tejon School, a small four-room schoolhouse in Lebec staffed by wonderful teachers and a sympathetic principal who apparently made sure that my brother and I weren't ostracized while we were there, which spanned the time of the HUAC hearings, the appeals process, and my father's year in jail.

The ranch and the school were a haven for us away from the maelstrom of hysteria and fear that engulfed the rest of the country, and particularly the Hollywood community. Our friends were all left-leaning and many were under suspicion. Some would...