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in the spring of 1936 earned a B. Then in a subsequent attempt to take more advanced Latin, during the spring of 1937, he dropped out of the class, receiving no grade. The only other class he failed, also in the Spring 1937 semester, was Geometry. In other Geometry classes he received Cs each time. In English, where he would one day write prose read by millions, he had two Bs, a C, and a D. He received his only A in the Fall 1936 semester, in World History. His grade point average for the first two and a half years was a meager 2.05.
    When he began his senior year in the fall of 1937, he was behind in the credits needed for graduation, so he took one extra class, and passed everything, with slightly better than a C average. He took a journalism class that semester, receiving a B. As part of this class, he was on the staff of The Lincoln News , a high school newspaper that was run according to professional standards by Homer Post, an ex-reporter and educational legend. The paper was a perennial national award winner.
    Frank Herbert, who would later spend many years in the newspaper profession, was sixteen when he began the journalism class, and turned seventeen during it—an impressionable time of life in which to fall under the influence of a master. Earlier my father had been influenced by an ex-newspaperman living in Burley, Henry W. Stein, who regaled him with tales of life on a big-city newspaper.
    Working out of the school news shack under Post’s tutelage, Frank became a “general assignment news chaser,” a reporter doing school and community stories. It was like a real newspaper, and he learned the importance of deadlines, how to copy-edit and how to find the most interesting angle on a story.
    He often wore a blue serge suit, a light tan shirt and a tie to his classes—rather neat, though inexpensive, attire for high school. By all accounts Frank Herbert was well-liked on campus, a young man with a buoyant attitude and boundless energy. Another student remembered how blond he was, and his pink and white “peaches and cream” complexion. One day he burst in the door of the news shack and shouted, “Stop the presses! I’ve got a scoop!”
    In the spring of 1938, Dad took two extra classes, still trying to catch up on the credits he was behind. This workload, combined with problems he was experiencing at home, proved too much for him. In May 1938, he dropped all of the classes, earning no credits for that semester. Among the classes he dropped were Journalism and Public Speaking—areas in which he would excel in later years.
    In the summer, he earned extra money working for a newspaper, The Tacoma Ledger . He performed copyboy and other office duties, and was sent on some reporting assignments when the regular reporters were on vacation.
    The following semester, in the fall of 1938, he took a normal class load, including Journalism. All that year, he excelled on the school newspaper. A number of feature stories appeared under his byline, and he wrote a regular column on page two called “Riding the Rail,” in which he discussed school events, often humorously. His columns were high in political content, reflecting his knowledge of world affairs—a knowledge that was enhanced by his participation in the school debating team, where he starred. The debating experience whetted his appetite for politics, an area of interest that would remain with him for the rest of his life. He was promoted to Associate Editor of the paper.
    In the 1930s there was a great deal of interest in ESP (extrasensory perception), particularly in “Rhine consciousness,” the term for paranormal experiments with cards conducted by Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine of Duke University. He conducted experiments in which subjects were asked to guess what card another person was holding, when the backside was only visible to the subject. The results seemed to prove the existence of ESP.
    One evening Dad