Henrietta Hay's Column

The name of Dalton Trumbo still causes blood pressure to rise here and there in Grand Junction, although he left here some seventy years ago and, I am told, has never been back.

Next month the University Memorial Fountain on the campus of the University of Colorado will be re-named the Dalton Trumbo Fountain. This particular area of the campus has been known for years as the free speech zone, or the Hyde Park of Boulder. It is there that speakers of all political stripes can orate and shout and defend their opinions against those who shout back, and over the years there has been a great deal of shouting. I can't think of a better name to put on it than Dalton Trumbo's, since very few Americans have suffered more in the defense of free speech than he did.

Trumbo got in Grand Junction's doghouse way back in 1935, eleven years after he graduated from Grand Junction High School. He wrote a novel called "Eclipse," sort of the Peyton Place of Grand Junction, roughly based on some of the more scandalous activities of the town in the twenties. It was not a great novel, and was published in England. Very few people outside of Colorado ever heard of it. But Grand Junction took umbrage - serious umbrage. People were hurt and angry and deeply offended and didn't forget. For many years the two public libraries were unable to keep copies of the book on their shelves. They disappeared mysteriously as soon as they appeared, lost or stolen depending on the point of view. Not too many years ago the Mesa County Library had a phone call from someone somewhere who was doing research on Trumbo. That person asked whether there was a plaque on the house where Dalton Trumbo had lived. When the librarian quit laughing she replied, "Hardly. It's lucky they didn't burn the place down."

Boulder is somewhat more progressive than the Western Slope in these matters. Not only are they honoring Dalton Trumbo, but they even honored Alferd (sic) Packer, the infamous mountain man who presumably dined on his fellow climbers, by naming one of their eating halls after him. At that point Western State students, who claimed Al as their own, threatened to sue to get the name back.

Dalton Trumbo wrote several novels, including one of the saddest and most powerful of all anti-war books, "Johnny Get Your Gun." He wrote more than fifty screenplays, including the epic, "Spartacus" and "Roman Holiday," which won an Academy Award. Perhaps his major claim to fame is that during the McCarthy era he spent a year in jail for contempt of Congress was blacklisted by the film industry for eleven years, during which time he was forced to write under various pseudonyms.

From his youth he was a political person, and he had the misfortune to be young and rebellious, as I was, in the years when the word "Communism" did not conjure up the Evil Empire, but rather a war ally and an interesting if impractical political system. He became, according to his biographer, a member of the Communist Party.

In its Communist witch-hunt after the war, the House Un-American Affairs Committee probed into the private lives of public citizens all over America, and concentrated on Hollywood. Those of us who remember the McCarthy era with shame, remember the question asked of thousands of Americans, "Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" Trumbo refused to answer it.

His defense was the First Amendment and its guarantee of the right to free association. His steadfast and eloquent refusal to answer resulted in his being jailed for contempt of Congress. There was no doubt about his contempt. He said, "You have produced a capital city on the eve of its Reichstag fire . . . there is the smell of smoke in this very room." His son, Christopher, says, "He was a maverick American who believed that neither the government nor anyone else could tell him what to think."

We have moved beyond the McCarthy era, and Dalton Trumbo is dead. But the First Amendment is still alive. At the dedication next month, I hope the old hurts will be forgotten and people will go on into the future speaking or shouting their ideas - whatever they may be - around the Dalton Trumbo Fountain at C. U.