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and all that. Or just mostly, ‘Well, your dad’s got a job, so we’ve got to go there.’ And you always hated it, because, you know, you just get to know a few kids on the block and get accepted a little bit and then, all of a sudden, boom, you’re gone.”
    Always tall for his age (he was more than six feet tall when he was thirteen), he was more than usually self-conscious about his appearance, about his family nicknames (“Sonny” and “Junior,” both of which he hated), about his indifferent performance in school. Perhaps because he attended so many schools and was constantly befuddled by new environments and changed expectations, he frequently withdrew into dreaminess. “If I was sitting near the window and the leaves [were] blowing out there, my mind could be a thousand miles away. You sit there, you know, you feel the air … and boy I could go off on a trip.”
    Clint envied the students for whom things came easily. “I had a buddy in school [who] could dump all his books in a locker and go home and the only reason he got a B was through misconduct of some sort. I’d have to go in there and drill my brains to get a passing, decent grade.” From grade school through high school, this remained difficult for him. “I didn’t have a real go-home-and-study-for-two-hours-so-I’ll-get-an-A attitude. It’s like the physicist Edward Teller: He always said a genius is someone who does well with a subject he doesn’t like, and that would certainly eliminate me.”
    He was bad at math, liked history and “could have been all right drawing if I’d pursued it.” Somewhere along the line his natural left-handedness was trained out of him. He read the usual kid stuff—comics and Big Little Books—joined the family around the radio to listen to shows like
Inner Sanctum
and
I Love a Mystery
, saw
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
—probably his first movie—when he was seven and spent a lot of time by himself, often in conversation with “Bill,” a toy soldier, if his mother’s recollection is right. Clint supplied voices for many of his playthings and made up adventures as he sprawled on the floor with them.
    Not close with his sister in those days, he seems to have kept his loneliness to himself. His mother, indeed, was unaware of it. “I didn’trealize how shy he was,” she says. “I’m not, and neither was his father. I don’t know where on earth he got it. But anyway, I guess it was harder on him than I knew.” Her recollection is that wherever they went he always found one or two companions; one of them, Robert Baker, whom he met in Redding, remained a lifelong friend.
    In her eyes, then, he was all right. And perhaps precisely because she saw him so, that’s the way he turned out. Ruth, in Clint’s description, was “with all due prejudice a fabulous woman. She adored her children.” Above all, “she was very flexible. She was a very understanding mother.” Though his father was usually the family disciplinarian, she could be firm if need be. “They weren’t overly strict parents, but if you got out of line they’d swipe you on the behind.”
    And that would then be that; the elder Eastwoods didn’t hold grudges or nurse wounds. Clint describes them as extremely tolerant, entirely free of the bigotry and paranoia that so often afflict the temporarily declassed. “My parents never looked down on anybody. They were always fairly open-minded—conservative in handling their own lives, but liberal in their approach to other people’s existence,” including that of their children.
    They were uninsistent religiously and politically. Ruth and the children quietly attended whatever Protestant church was near at hand wherever they settled. Politically, she and her husband apparently supported Roosevelt for two terms, then broke away to vote for Wendell Willkie in 1940. But there is no defining passion to be found in these commonplace religious and political convictions. It was common sense