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had Jeannie in the basket,” Ruth says, “she was just born, so I was sitting with her … and his father had Clint on his shoulder and he went out and this huge wave came in and washed over both of them, and the next thing I saw Clint was not there at all—little Clint. But I saw this foot coming up, and then it turned and went back again and then everybody that was there started to run toward him, including me, and I caught this foot. He was underwater long enough to be frightened.”
    “It was kind of a big surf, pounding,” Clint recalls, “and I can still remember the greenness of the water, and coming up I remember seeing my mother running into the water. And so it made a big imprint on me at an early age.”
    Once everyone calmed down, his mother sat with Clint at the water’s edge “and played in the small waves for a while, because I was afraid he’d never get over it.” He did, of course; he spent much of his young manhood around the water, as a lifeguard, a swimming instructor and a devoted surfer.
    This was a family determined to put the best possible face on bad times. In this period Clint remembers his father and some friends organizing a garage band—Clinton Sr. played the guitar and also crooned a bit—which performed, usually unpaid, at weddings and other social events. “I don’t know how good he was,” Clint recalls, “but he would have loved to have been an entertainer of sorts.” His mother, who sometimes joined the group, playing a mandolin, agrees; her husband, she says, was an enthusiastic, if untutored, Bing Crosby imitator. “It could have been a good voice,” she says, “but he didn’t sit still long enough to have it trained.”
    There was, undeniably, an impatience in the man, a restlessness about him. It was always there, beneath the genial sociability and the professional adaptability. Some of that eagerness to move on, not to dither unduly over details, is in his son; so is the determination to hideambition under an easygoing and affable manner. The difference between them would seem to be very largely one of self-presentation, with the father much the heartier and more apparently open. Both, not to put too fine a point on it, are Californians, not given to the darker forms of introspection, loyal to friends and family, yet also resistant to rootedness, perhaps because historically their native landscape always seemed so spacious and there was so much of it to explore. Doubtless hard times impelled Clinton Sr. to range freely in search of suitable work. But one can’t escape the feeling that, no matter what his circumstances, it would have suited him, still a young man in his twenties, his wanderlust not entirely quenched, to keep moving on.

    The Eastwoods stayed in the Palisades for roughly a year, then moved briefly to a bungalow in Hollywood (where Clint remembers a stray kitten appearing on their doorstep and becoming a permanent member of the household). Thereafter they moved on virtually an annual basis, first to Redding in northern California (where Clinton Sr. was “the bond man” at a Bank of America branch), then to Sacramento (more bond selling, for a brokerage firm), then to the Glenview section of the East Bay (now he was working in a San Francisco jewelry store), finally back to Piedmont (where they rode out the war with Clinton Sr. working in a shipyard).
    There was never any panic or desperation in these moves. The elder Eastwood always had a job lined up before his family began packing. And Clint never felt unloved or abandoned at any time during this period; his parents were obviously caring and conscientious. Moreover, little as he may have appreciated it at the time, he sees now that they provided him with valuable life lessons unobtainable by the more settled children of his generation, or by the children of later, more prosperous generations.
    When they moved, the Eastwoods would load their belongings into a little two-wheeled cart, which would