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Six-year-old Chris and eight-year-old Josh match muscles with their pa
■ It was Christmas Eve, 1935. It would be nice to paint a picture of snow and jingle-bells and fat fellows with white beards and good-will-on-earth — but it wasn't like that at all. It was hot. Very hot. The place was the CaliforniaArizona border, not far from Yuma, and the scene was nightfall, a rambling border patrol station with a dozen uniformed guards.
Out of the dusk, down the dusty road, three men appeared, walking toward the bright star in the distance that was the floodlight above the patrol station. One of them was tall and white-haired, a distinguished-looking gentleman, if you didn't take into account his well-worn clothes and scuffed shoes. The second was a leather-skinned man in his middle fifties in overalls and a broad-brimmed hat. He had the walk of a man following a plow. The third was a youngster, tall, lean and hard. He was wearing a cowhide jacket and levis. His name was Robert Mitchum.
This was in the days of the Depression, and the guards were there to keep the derelict wanderers of the country from overrunning California.
nts. At home, the friendly, humorous side of Mitchum shows clearly.
Each of the three men had a story and a reason for wanting to enter the state. The elder man was a banker, temporarily without a bank. The plowman was a Texan, recently ousted from his hog.ranch near Fort Worth. Mitchum was a boy who wanted to see the land and meet its people.
The banker said he wanted to enter California for the climate. The Texan, to look over the pig situation. And when they asked Bob Mitchum his reason, he squinted up his eyes into cold slits.
"I live in this country," he said, "and I want to get a look at my Pacific Ocean."
The cops thought he was just another smart guy. At any rate, the three were turned back, and they walked a mile off into the desert and built a fire against the chill the night was to bring, and bedded down among the dunes. It was there that Christmas found them. Three men alone, unwanted while the world rejoiced, an open fire of mesquite their hearth and a spindly Yucca their tree.
As Robert Mitchum lay there and watched the Great Dipper