The last of the American boys

[half-page drawing of JBH walking, by William Kubiak]

He was striding down Front St. in Traverse City (presumably headed for a card game at Jud Cameron's poolroom and barbershop): a tall, lean, outdoorsy man with a rusty handlebar mustache and keen blue eyes set in a weatherbeaten face - dressed in woodsman's boots, ducksback breeches, a red-checked flannel shirt and Stetson hat.

I didn't know who he was, but I knew he was somebody.

Jim Hendryx was the stuff of dust-jacket writers' dreams. His life read better than many of the plots of his Wild West and Yukon Gold Rush novels.

Before he was out of his 20s he had sold hardware and life insurance, bought bark for a tannery, run levels on a proposed electric railway in Ohio, kept books for a sheep-shearing plant, punched cattle on several big spreads in Montana and Saskatchewan, panned gold and gambled at poker in the Yukon.

His longest continuous job was at the tannery in Kentucky. "I stayed there 53 weeks," Jim wrote, "and to this day that remains my record for holding a steady job."

Born James Beardsley Hendryx at Sauk Centre, Minn., in 1880 [December 9] - the son of Charles F. Hendryx, who was owner and publisher of the Sauk Centre Herald - Jim grew up with the town's most famous son, Sinclair Lewis.

Though perhaps not in Lewis' class as a writer, Jim as a boy and man was everything that Lewis was not.

Lewis, in a boyhood diary, describes Jim this way:

"I went with Jim Hendryx on his Rural Free (mail) delivery route this morning. Jim was dressed like a 'pony express rider' - broad sombrero, brown flannel shirt open at neck & arms & belt. His face and hands are bronzed from exposure (Jim will take law at the U. of Minn. next year.) He has always been a great hunter, fisher & and trapper. He hunted birds eggs, fished, hunted, trapped, rode boxcars with Claude . . ."

[photo, caption: "Jim Hendryx", smiling]

[photo, caption: "Sinclair Lewis", looking serious]

Jim was the close friend and chief lieutenant of Claude Lewis, Sinclair's older brother, who became a famous surgeon. "Sinclair was three years younger," Jim said, "and he was a pest when we were kids. He was always wanting to drag along with us when we went anywhere. You couldn't get rid of him."

Homely, lonely, misfit Sinclair Lewis remembered it like this:

"When I was 10 or so, Claude's gang, composed of old, seasoned scouts of 15, were masters of the woods, the lake and the swimming hole in Hoboken Crick. When I tried to swim there, getting no further than bubbling and choking, Claude's more meticulous vandals tied my clothing in knots and painstakingly soaked it. When I climbed out of the mud and found my knotted costume, I rose to precocious eloquence which received from Jim Hendryx my only compliment: 'Gee, Harry musta swallowed the dictionary'!" (Lewis' full name was Harry Sinclair Lewis.)

After a year at the University of Minnesota (he helped pay his expenses by running a weekend poker game, at which even some members of the faculty were regular participants), Jim decided that law wasn't his bag and started out on his travels. His comment on schooling is characteristic:

"Attended public school for a vast number of years during which I learned to fish, hunt and trap, . . . then entered the University of Minnesota where I absorbed so much of the curriculum that even yet fragments of it work to the surface and have to be carefully removed."

In the same autobiographical sketch [???], his account of his surveying experience is worth quoting verbatim:

When I got back from Kentucky and West Virginia without anything to do I ran into a fellow who wanted somebody to run levels on an interurban track they were putting through. I asked him for a job.

'Can you run a level?' He asked.

'Sure', I said, and got the job. Of course I didn't have the slightest idea of how to run a level, so I skipped over to the courthouse and asked a fellow I knew: 'How in the devil do you run levels? Can I learn it?'

He said I could in six months or so.

'Six months!' I said. 'I've got to learn it in two days.'

So he sent me over to a job and two engineers there showed me the difference between a level and a transit. There is a difference as I remember, but I don't recollect what it is.

Well, that was on a Friday and during the next two days I completed my engineering course and went to work on Monday. I got along all right until I learned that in each town you had to tie in from the last station to the Government bench, which you'd always find somewhere about the courthouse. I'd never heard of it before, but my rodman was a third-year engineering student, so I told him to do it; said it'd be good experience for him. He was tickled to death, and took care of it in every town. I don't know yet how you do it.

I stayed on that job for four months and didn't do any harm, as the company went broke and couldn't pay us - so we quit.

From there Jim wandered west and got a job punching cattle on a ranch near Chinook, Mont. While riding the range, be became friendly with two notorious outlaws, Kid Curry and his brother, Lonny, and kept them supplied with coffee and tobacco in their mountain hideout.

The Curry brothers were members of the Wild Bunch, the train-robbing gang of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. A posse was formed to go after them and Jim was asked to join. He got out of it by damaging his saddle.

"There was an unwritten law that you couldn't be forced into a posse without your own saddle," Jim said. "The Currys were neighbors and I didn't want any trouble with them."

In 1898 Jim and a cowpuncher friend took off for the gold fields of Alaska and the Yukon, with a stake of $1,400 they'd won playing poker. They spent the next 14 months in the Yukon country, Jim said, "chopping cordwood, gouging gravel, playing poker and chopping cordwood and chopping cordwood.

"We didn't make much," he explained. "Got there too late and our claims were poor. And living was too high. In Dawson, in '98, eggs went to $2 apiece and flour to $100 a sack."

After making his way to Vancouver on a salmon boat and another year of punching cattle, he drifted to Cincinnati where his father was editing a newspaper, the Cincinnati American. Jim got a job with the Enquirer writing feature stories, then sold his first piece of fiction and "quit punching time clocks forever."

His parting with the newspaper is a classic story. Assigned to cover the hanging of a criminal named Jenkins at Joliet, Ill, Jim witnessed the execution and wrote the story. But he was disappointed with the headline they gave it, so he wrote his own and slipped it past the sleepy copy editor as the paper was being put to bed.

Next day Jim's headline, in all its alliterative glory, blared: "JENKINS JERKED TO JESUS AT JOLIET." Jim was quietly asked to leave.

Soon afterward, Jim married Hermione Flagler, a gifted pianist and music teacher in Cincinnati. In 1921 he bought 300 acres of forest land on Grand Traverse Bay a few miles north of Traverse City and the couple settled down in a big rambling house that had once been a resort hotel.

[photo, caption: "The Hendryx home on Lee Point, Grand Traverse Bay, is now owned by Dr. Fred and Hermione Swartz, Jim's son-in-law and oldest daughter, of Grosse Pointe."]

[photo, caption: "Jim appeared on Ralph Edwards' "This is Your Life" in 1956."]

There were a mile or more of Lake Michigan shoreline and, at that time, no neighbors within rifle range. Jim had fallen in love with the Northern Michigan country while on a fishing trip with Harold Titus, another Traverse City writer.

Here they started their family of two girls and a boy - Hermione, Betty, and James B. Jr. Here, too, Jim embarked on an astonishingly prolific writing career that produced in the next 30 years more than 70 novels and innumerable short stories of outdoor adventure.

His tales of Connie Morgan, Black John Smith, and Corporal Downey of the Royal Canadian Mounted - many of the serialized in "The American Boy" - brought delight to at least two generations of American boys (and girls). The locale of many of his stories was Halfaday Creek, so named because the sourdoughs panned gold half a day and played poker the other half.

Claude Lewis once asked Jim what was the difference between his writing and Sinclair's.

"The difference," Jim said, "is that Red gets a dollar a word, and I get a penny a word."

Nevertheless, in the 1920s he was earning from $40,000 to $50,000 a year from his writing - a very considerable sum in those days.

Many years ago on the "Information Please" program, Clifton Fadiman asked the panel, "What author is noted for hunting and fishing six months of every year?"

Sinclair Lewis raised his and and said, "James B. Hendryx."

"That's not what I have here," said Fadiman. "My script calls for Ernest Hemingway."

"That's right," Lewis conceded. "Jim Hendryx hunts and fishes twelve months of every year."

For Jim, writing was merely a means to an end. It provided him with the money and leisure to devote much of his time to his two great loves, hunting and fishing.

Nevertheless, he was serious about his work and a careful craftsman. He made at least one trip a year to consult with top authorities of the Royal Canadian Mounted in Ottawa and to get new maps of the wilderness areas.

"I go to great pains and trouble to locate every piece correctly," he wrote. "But I never yet wrote a story of Canada without getting a letter from some constable up on Hudson's Bay or Great Slave Lake saying, 'I liked your story but where the villain sets fire to the teepee and the beautiful Indian girl in the second chapter, the Mackenzie River runs northeast instead of northwest.' Those fellows are hell on their geography."

[photo of Jim, caption: "The author summered on Basswood Lake, a remote resort north of Thessalon."]

Stories about Jim in Traverse City - and up in Canada where the family spent their summers on remote Basswood Lake north of Thessalon - are legion. Some are unprintable, some probably apocryphal. One or two will suffice to illustrate Jim's wild, irreverent sense of fun and humor.

In the early days the Hendryx house on Lee Point was a mile or more from any plowed road, and in winter they often had to use a horse and cutter or sleigh to get to town. But sometimes, when conditions were right, Jim would drive his Model T on the ice to Traverse City, 12 miles away.

He did this one year that was getting on toward spring; loaded up the car with a month's supply of groceries and headed for home on the bay ice. On the way back the car broke through the ice in 20 feet of water. Jim managed to get most of the food supplies to shore before the car sank out of sight.

A farmer came along just then and yelled, "What in the world are you doing, Jim?"

"I'm starting a grocery store, you darn fool," Jim told him. "What'd you think I was doing?"

Jim was an incurable practical joker, but nobody ever took offense because he was such fun to be with. And no one laughed louder when the joke was on him.

Jim often spent his mornings at home pecking out a story on a portable typewriter held on a piece of hardboard in his lap. Afternoons, he sometimes went into town for a card game with the boys at Jud Cameron's.

At least two or three times - according to one of his former hired men - he'd be so wrapped up in the story that he'd absentmindedly jump in his car and back out of the garage without opening the doors. The splintering crash brought the kids running from the house and Hermione to the window, while Jim would be sitting there in the car, laughing at himself.

[drawing of car with garage doors collapsed over it]

About himself he wrote, "For recreation I like good wine, some women - but no song - and never allow work to interfere with hunting and fishing."

He also loved kids, horses, dogs, poker and cribbage, good bourbon whiskey, and his family - not necessarily in that order. He hit the bottle pretty hard in his younger days -- went on a three-day binge once with Jack London - but he swore off on day and never took another drink the rest of his life.

He was a master fly fisherman and a superb wing shot. One old friend remembers Jim as the only man he ever knew who could cast a fly around the bend in a river.

Jim was known for his colorful language. In his late years, he was lured to Hollywood as the star of Ralph Edwards' "This is Your Life." The TV staff had been warned about Jim's language, and when Edwards intercepted him on Vine St. in front of the El Capitan theater, and announced that Jim was on exhibition, one of the crew was able to slip his hand in front of Jim's mustache and muffle the inevitable cuss word.

At a family gathering in the big house on Lee Point, one of Jim's little nieces announced at the dinner table:

"I think Uncle Jim is just like God. But I guess God probably doesn't swear as much."

Jim has long ago gone to the Happy Hunting Ground, and I hope he has found everything he wanted there, including plenty of canvasback ducks and speckled trout. One of Jim's lifelong friends summed him up best:

"Jim was born 100 years too late but he made the best of it. He was at heart a mountain man, a fur trader, an outlaw of the plains. He was everlastingly a boy - not a Boy Scout, more a Huckleberry Finn."

That was Jim - one of the best.