World War II was a major event for Clive and his friends. Old enough to comprehend their parents’ anxiety, they eagerly followed the radio broadcasts, newsreels, newspaper and magazine articles describing the monumental battles raging in Europe and the Pacific. Clive built squadrons of model airplanes, friend and foe, and hung them from his bedroom ceiling. He also began his lifelong passion for collecting, filling his room with bottle caps, matchbook covers, and baseball cards. On the wall, he taped two paintings by Peter Helck clipped out of Esquire magazine: Jimmy Doolittle winning the 1932 Thompson Trophy air race in his red and white Gee Bee and Ralph DePalma and a mechanic pushing their Mercedes across the finish line after the car broke down with less than a mile to go at the 1912 Indianapolis 500.
In 1943, Eric Cussler left Jewell Tea and went to work as the credit manager for the Cudahy Packing Company in the company’s Los Angeles office. He had only been on the job for a short time when a Hollywood producer called and asked if Cudahy would donate a ham for a door prize at a charity event. Wartime rationing had elevated the gift of a ham to the level of a Cadillac, but somehow Eric managed to deliver the goods.
To show his appreciation, the producer arranged for Eric’s family to tour the Paramount lot, an event Clive recalls as “one of my biggest thrills.” He watched Gary Cooper shoot a scene from The Story of Dr. Wassel, based on the actual exploits of a heroic World War II physician in the Philippines, and was introduced to its director, Cecil B. DeMille. “He reached down from his lofty director’s chair,” Clive says, “and patted me on the head.”
The Cusslers also attended live radio shows. Eric and Amy’s favorite was the Lux Radio Theater. Hosted by DeMille, the shows recreated popular films, often with original cast members. Clive preferred the homespun antics of Fibber McGee and Molly.
Clive read the family’s copies of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid so often they ultimately fell apart. When Amy and Eric did their weekly grocery shopping, they would drop their son off at the local library, picking him up several hours later. Clive gravitated to historical novels: World War I, C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series and Joseph Altsheler’s harrowing adventures of two cousins, one a Confederate, the other fighting for the Union.
Clive also enjoyed the Tom Swift books, a series starring a boy-genius inventor who uses up-to-date technology, often not yet in existence at the time, to save the world and defeat villains. Among Clive’s favorites, Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout: The Speediest Car on the Road. Clive laughs, “I always thought it was pretty nifty that he painted the car purple.”
Amy Cussler belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club, and Clive used several of his mother’s selections as subjects for school book reports. When he was nine, Clive turned in a report on Gone With the Wind and his teacher doubted the assignment’s authorship. Amy assured her, not only had her son read the book, he had written the report by himself with no help from his parents.
Clive’s classmate and longtime friend, Felix Dupuy, remembers him as, “boisterous, outgoing and creative. Clive loved to dress-up in costumes and make-believe he was that character. When we were in seventh grade, Clive wrote and produced a series of skits he called his Dr. Doolittle plays. They were really clever and the teacher allowed him to perform several for the class.”
One of the skits, The Villain of the Lighthouse, featured Clive, who was always taller than everybody else, playing the part of the lighthouse. “He would stick his arms out, swinging them back and forth to simulate the light beams,” Dupuy says, “while all sorts of villains, damsels in distress and brave heroes chased each other around his legs. Clive always liked to be the center of attention. He had the ability to get everybody laughing.”
Clive’s friends would spend afternoons at the Cussler’s house, often being invited to stay for dinner. Dupuy remembers Amy Cussler, “as a wonderful, gentle-hearted woman who made us feel welcome. Amy never had a bad word for anybody, and she was constantly fussing over us, setting out a plate of cookies or some other treats.”
As much as they liked Amy, Clive’s friends admit being somewhat intimidated by Eric’s thick accent, burly physique and trademark limp. “I think my friends thought my mother and I lived in fear of Dad’s wrath,” Clive says. “Nothing could have been further from the truth.” On the rare occasions when Clive and his father did get into a row (usually provoked by Clive’s teenage automotive adventures) Eric could work up a head of steam, but that was as far as it went. Much to his credit, Eric was able to overcome the toxic memories of his unhappy relationship with his abusive father.
“Despite the lingering effects of the Depression, and the necessary sacrifices and shortages during the war,” Clive says, “my childhood was ideal. If there were ever two people who cherished each other, it was my mother and father. We were always doing things together and having fun. I loved them, and I knew they loved me. I have always considered myself extremely lucky to have such wonderful parents.”
When Clive was in the eighth grade, he had two paper routes. Getting up with the birds, he delivered the Los Angeles Times. After school let out, Clive would climb back on his Schwinn and sling copies of the Daily News. When Amy realized the grueling routine was affecting her son’s health, she insisted he relinquish the afternoon route, but Clive continued delivering the Times until he was a freshman in high school.
Once a week, Boy Scouts of America Troop Six would meet in a large log cabin built with telephone poles donated by the local phone company. Clive became a member of its Cobra Patrol shortly after his twelfth birthday. The troop would spend one weekend a month and several weeks during the summer at Camp San Antonio in the San Gabriel Mountains. With some assistance from his father, Clive earned the twenty-one merit badges required to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout before he was fifteen. “The hiking and camping,” Clive recalls, “Thursday night meetings, wonderful friendships and working on my merit badges with my father - those marvelous experiences will always be with me.”
After he gave up his paper route, Clive toiled at a succession of after school and summer jobs: sanding and polishing pianos in a music store’s basement, grinding water pump impellers, and loading trucks at a commercial laundry. “It was a wonder the job at the pump company didn’t kill me,” Clive says. “The air was so thick with metal grindings I’d have to wash my hair with Old Dutch Cleanser.”
When he was sixteen, Clive spent the summer at his uncle’s dairy farm in Monticello, Minnesota. His friends thought he was crazy for passing up the beach, chasing girls, and hanging out at the drive-in, but Clive would not have missed it for the world. It was not only Clive’s first trip East since his family moved to California, he would also have the opportunity to spend two months at a real, working farm. “That summer at my aunt and uncle’s farm was one of my best summers ever,” Clive recalls. “I worked in the fields, pitched hay, fed horses from my hand, went fishing on the lake behind the barn, and attended county fairs. Believe it or not, I still know how to milk a cow.”
“When I was fifteen, I didn’t just want a car,” Clive says. “I had to have a car!”
Walking home from school, Clive spotted a 1923 Jewett languishing in the back row of a used car lot owned by Joe Servais, a sympathetic confidant of Alhambra’s car-crazed adolescents. Built by the Paige-Detroit Motor Company and named for H.M. Jewett, the company’s president, Jewetts were produced from 1922-26. Post-war America was zooming into the rocket age, and a boxy sedan built in the 1920s was considered positively prehistoric. Servais informed Clive the Jewett could be driven off the lot for $15.
Whenever Clive brought up the subject of a car, Eric would tell his son he needed insurance, effectively ending the discussion. On his own initiative, Clive called several insurance companies, but when he told the agents he was fifteen, they told him to call back in a few years, laughed at him or hung up.
Dejected, Clive went to see Servais and explained the obstacle between him and the Jewet
t. Servais, working under a car, hollered, “Call Lloyd’s of London, they’ll insure anything.” Although Servais was obviously joking, Clive only heard, “they’ll insure anything.”
When Eric came home from work that evening, a large, black touring car was parked in the driveway. Charging into the house, he yelled, “Damn it, Clive! You’ve been told a hundred times you couldn’t have a car without insurance.” Faced with his father’s fury, Clive blurted out his carefully rehearsed response. “Dad, Lloyd’s of London will insure anything.” Clive still remembers the look on his father’s face. “It was one of the few times I really got to my old man.”
Although the Jewett was never insured, Eric allowed Clive to keep the car after he promised to limit his driving to the immediate neighborhood. Stripping the car to its bare bones - removing the fenders, hood, top, and trunk - Clive added a truck-style flatbed and painted a large number “12” on the doors and radiator. He had transformed the staid Jewett into what is known today as a “beater” or “rat rod.”
Clive had owned the Jewett for only a short time when the car’s vacuum fuel pump gave up the ghost. A volunteer had to perch on the cowl in front of the windshield and pour gasoline directly into the vacuum canister. One afternoon, Clive was descending a hill when the car hit a bump. The youngster holding the gas can lost his grip, fell back into the car, and Clive, blinded by a face full of gas, lost control. Jumping the curb, the car skidded into a vacant lot. It had rained earlier and the Jewett’s brakes (mechanical, rear wheels only), questionable under the best of conditions, were useless in the mud. Crashing through a rail fence into a neighbor’s yard, the runaway jalopy careened across the lawn, down the driveway and back into the street. Clive kept going. Afraid the Jewett and its daredevil driver were probably on the Alhambra police department’s “most wanted list,” Clive sold the car to a junk dealer.
Returning to Servais’s back row, Clive bought a 1925 Auburn for $22. A pair of silver flower vases in the spacious back seat was a reminder of the car’s genteel heritage. Now insured, Clive recalls, “We had a lot of fun in the Auburn. My buddies and I would drive to football games, dressed like gangsters. We’d wear overcoats, old fedora hats pulled down over our eyes and clamp big stogies between our teeth.”
In an attempt to expose her son to the arts, Amy had signed Clive up for violin lessons when he was ten. After three years of suffering for all involved, the instrument was relegated to the garage. Clive salvaged the violin’s case and the school’s security guards never figured out it was filled with beer and wine instead of an imaginary Tommy gun.
Felix Dupuy has fond memories of their escapades in Clive’s Auburn. “After dark, we’d sneak onto an abandoned country club and drive around the fairways.” During one of their nocturnal outings, Clive, Felix, and another friend, Dick Klein, were watching a motorcyclist jump over a sand trap. Determined to emulate the stunt, Clive managed to get the Auburn airborne, but the heavy car quickly ran out of airspeed and buried itself in the sand. The engine expired in a cloud of steam, and all four wheels fell off.
“Clive made a typical Cussler move,” Dupuy says. “He doused the car with gas and set it on fire. When the fire department showed up, the three of us were sitting on a hill, watching all the excitement and laughing like hell.”
The Jewett and Auburn had been good for laughs, but Clive, now seventeen, wanted a hot rod. Born in California, the stripped down, modified vehicles first appeared in the 1930s on the dry lakes located northeast of Los Angeles. During the 1940s, drag racing grew in popularity and hot rodders were often seen as rebels, a viewpoint perpetuated by films like Hot Rods to Hell and Dragstrip Riot.
Clive bought a 1936 Ford sedan, a car with first-class hot rod potential, but soon discovered the car had a major drawback. “Most of our gang,” Clive says, “drove sporty roadsters with room for one passenger. My Ford had a back seat, and I usually wound up chauffeuring everybody around.”
During the next year, Clive transformed the Ford into a classic California hot rod - lowered, teardrop fender skirts, custom hubcaps, and a dark, metallic green paint job. Under the hood, the warmed-up flathead V-8 was equipped with milled heads, oversize pistons, a three-quarter cam, and a pair of Stromberg 97 carburetors.
The Ford was Clive’s daily driver until he joined the Air Force. “I invested a huge amount of time and at least $1,000 fixing the car up, which at that time was a hell of a lot of money. As soon as I joined the Air Force, my father wanted the car out of the driveway and sold it some kid for $69.”
Clive’s success might suggest he was an excellent student. “Not so,” Clive concedes, “I was average, at best.”
While his teachers lectured on the fine points of transposing fractions or transient verbs, Clive would be “staring out the window, lost in another time, manning a cannon on John Paul Jones’s ship, the Bonhomme Richard, charging up Cemetery Ridge with Pickett’s division, or reversing the tide at Little Big Horn, saving Custer and his 7th Calvary. When called upon to recite, I would look at the floor and mutter an answer so out of context that the teacher thought I wandered into her class by mistake.”
His report cards were filled mostly with Cs and Ds, and Clive’s teachers would invariably tack on the admonishment familiar to generations of perceived underachievers: “Clive seems bright enough, but he doesn’t apply himself.”
In their senior year, Clive and his friends discovered they could choose several electives. The boys immediately signed up for typing and home economics, believing the classes would provide an opportunity to meet girls. Clive learned how to type, a skill that would ultimately prove extremely useful, but chances for romance vanished when the girls became annoyed because the boys’ cakes consistently rose higher than theirs.
With his afternoons and weekends occupied by a job or wrenching on his hot rod, Clive had little time to pursue girls. “Why,” he says, “would I spend money on a date when I needed a new carburetor? I did have a steady girlfriend in grammar school, but we split up in high school. Years later, I received a letter from her. She was living in Tucson and wrote. ‘You probably don’t remember me, my name’s Joy Marshall.’ I wrote her back: ‘You have to be kidding. How could I ever forget the first girl I ever kissed?’”
Organized sports were also out of the question, but Clive taught himself to play golf. When his grandfather managed the resort at Lake Okoboji in Iowa, Clive’s mother took lessons and her dusty bag of antique clubs hung in the corner of the Cussler’s garage. Clive borrowed Byron Nelson’s book, Winning Golf, from the library, dusted the spider webs off his mother’s golf bag, and spent his evenings in the backyard working on his short game.
Felix Dupuy’s family belonged to the posh San Gabriel Country Club. The two boys would often play together and Dupuy, impressed with his friend’s performance on the fairways, convinced him to compete in one of the club’s tournaments. On the day of the event, Clive, who now owned a respectable set of clubs, arrived in his hot rod, wearing his customary costume: a leather jacket, white T-shirt, and jeans with the cuffs rolled up. He recalls the day with obvious satisfaction. “I went out on the course, shot a sixty-nine and shocked the hell out of the stuffy country club crowd.”
Students entering their freshman year at Alhambra High School were allocated 100 merits. During the next three years, the number would go up or down, determined by a convoluted formula based on grades, attendance, and behavior. Graduation required a minimum of seventy merits. At the end of his freshman year, Clive was comfortably in the black with 116. By the time he was a senior, his score had plummeted to the low forties. To make up for the deficit, Clive was required to stay after school for a month and work with the groundskeeper, mowing, trimming hedges, and edging “miles of sidewalk with that miserable tool with the teeth.”
Clive’s quick wit and personality made up for his less than stellar performance in the classroom. “Clive was usually the instigator of our adventures,” Felix Dupuy says. “He never seemed to run out
of new ideas, and always seemed to be living a little closer to the edge than the rest of us. Clive was an only child, and I always felt he got away with things my parents would have really come down on me for.”
Dick Klein agrees with Dupuy’s assessment. “Clive has always been a real character, and ever since I’ve known him, he has always been coming up with some new scheme.” Klein remembers a conversation with his father: “For some reason, Dad and I ended up discussing the qualities, positive and negative, of my friends. When Clive’s name came up, my father told me, ‘Of all the guys you hang around with, that Cussler kid knows how to work the system. He will probably be the guy who makes the most money without having to do a lot of hard work.’”
Under Clive’s picture in his high school yearbook, it simply states, “College Prep.” However, leafing through the pages of the 1949 Alhambran, Clive, in his leather jacket, white T-shirt and cuffed jeans, slouches nonchalantly among the members of the Senior Council, Spanish Club, German Club, Latin Club, Varsity Track Team, Scholarship Society, and Chemistry Team. One of Clive’s friends happened to be the yearbook photographer.
On June 16, 1949, Clive Eric Cussler strode across the stage in the Alhambra High School auditorium and was awarded his diploma. When he and parents got home, Eric presented him with a wristwatch, while Amy, close to tears, beamed proudly. Later that evening, Clive and several friends, “drove around, just goofing off. We stopped at a drive-in, had a hamburger, and that was about the extent of our celebration. I think we were all just glad to be finished with high school.”