<Begin Segment 7>

[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

AH: So what happened was that I did stop graduate school for a year and got a job teaching American literature at Tustin Union High School in Orange County, California, for a year. I got fired from that job. Well, actually, by the end of the year, I had a choice. I could either resign, or if I didn't resign, I could be fired, and I chose to resign and go back to graduate school in history at UC Santa Barbara. And the reason I was fired was not because I did a bad job as a teacher. I was actually an extremely popular teacher, probably too popular. I mean, as recently as a month ago I had a letter from out of the blue from a student I had back in 1962-1963, in an English class at Tustin High, who's now become a writer. She wrote to tell me about what she's accomplished and to thank me for everything I had done to inspire her, and we've had a nice correspondence since then. But I was rambunctious even as a teacher. I had the administration quite upset about the kinds of word games that I created and the different stories I told. But then, I guess the thing that got me fired was an assignment that I made, and it was an assignment to prove that censorship was a bad idea. In the newspaper, back in the Midwest, I believe in Iowa, Michigan, or someplace, there appeared an article saying that a teacher had lost his job because he had assigned the following books: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell, and Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. And so I followed the newspaper story, and then what happened was when people were aware of this teacher's rationale for assigning these books, and the nature of the books, he got reinstated. So I wanted to show that censorship is stupid. But the thing is, I discovered that people will only read the first stories of those kinds of things. So all they remembered was that this guy got fired because he taught something that was controversial.

So I got hauled into the principal's office. The principal was a guy, a former football coach, who probably hadn't read very much. He told me, "The only thing I've read in literature recently is a serialized version of a novel by Herman Wouk called Youngblood Hawke." He said, "That's all I've read." Well, I'd read a lot of Herman Wouk; Caine Mutiny was the first one I read, but lots of other novels by him, too. So while we were talking, he went up to the blackboard in his office, and he drew a square, and said, "You know, we've got a rule for new teachers. This box represents 'controversial.'" He said, "What you need to do is to avoid finding yourself in this particular box. Unfortunately, you've found yourself in this box because although a lot of parents have contacted us and said that they like Mr. Hansen because he gets their kids to be excited about reading and writing." On the other hand, he said, "You're a person that because of your assignments, among other things, has come to our attention." You've got to understand, Tustin was the heart of right-wing country. It was the home of the John Birch Society. Practically the whole school board consisted of John Birch Society members. But even the John Birchers should have been in favor of assigning 1984. It's anti-big government, anti-authority, and everything else, but they didn't read. It's really just a question of, you know the business about -- the principal was right. As stupid as his box was, his box theory was correct.

John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature that year, 1962. And it was really for The Grapes of Wrath, but they gave it to him for another book that he had written at that particular time, Winter of Our Discontent. But it was for the whole body of his work, but mostly, if it hadn't been for The Grapes of Wrath, he would never have won the Nobel Prize. Well, all of a sudden I'm hauled in to the principal's office again because what I had everybody in my classes do was to read The Grapes of Wrath plus three of the short novels or novelettes by Steinbeck. And kids loved Steinbeck; I mean, they were just eating it up. Whether it's Tortilla Flats or whatever it was, The Pearl, whatever those stories were, they loved reading those. And so I got hauled in again. Well, of course, Steinbeck, in addition to writing The Grapes of Wrath, which disallowed him for many, many years to ever go back to Salinas and everything -- they desecrated the family graves, they didn't want him back there. "Can't go home again" doesn't just apply to Thomas Wolfe in Asheville, North Carolina, but applies to Steinbeck, too. Now, of course, Steinbeck is an icon, he's dead. He's a hero, he's a tourist attraction. So you set up libraries and schools in his name and do everything else to honor him. But the main thing that they in Tustin were against was the fact that Steinbeck had hit the Orange County citrus growers pretty hard. Because what Steinbeck had been doing was writing these proletarian novels, and the proletarian novels, like In Dubious Battle, were pitting the workers, who were largely a multicultural working force, against the growers, who were largely white. And Orange County was a big citrus county and everything. And what Steinbeck had accused the Orange County growers of, which was absolutely true, was that in order to keep the price of oranges and lemons up, what they did was, instead of giving the surplus fruit to people who were starving in Orange County, people who needed the food desperately, what they did was to spray 'em all, put 'em all into these irrigation ditches and then spray 'em with poison so that they couldn't be eaten. And so that's what they didn't like about Steinbeck. It was that sort of -- anyway, it didn't matter too much.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.