“Self-Protection”: Film Documents Steinbeck’s Application for a Gun License in New York State

new-york-state-gun-license

The film “Steinbeck: Armed with the Truth (And a Colt Automatic)” came about after Paul Boczkowski and Marie Wainscoat of Longtimers Productions, a California company, viewed a gallery exhibition I helped put together six or seven years ago in Pacific Grove with my wife Nancy and the prominent marine biologist Robert Brownell, a student of Ed Ricketts as well as John Steinbeck. The idea for the exhibition was born when a man sent me a copy of the application for a gun license that Steinbeck submitted in New York State on May 12, 1942. In his application Steinbeck sought permission to carry two concealed revolvers for “self-protection.”

New York State Gun License Fires Interest in Pacific Grove

The person who sent me the gun-license application worked for a museum and felt the application was important enough to be made public. The subject of Steinbeck and guns already had my attention, and I agreed. Some years earlier I had spoken with a Salinas woman who told me that sometime in the mid-to-late 1930s she had witnessed Steinbeck being threatened by a man with a gun, perhaps hired by others, who was upset about what he felt Steinbeck was writing. We called the exhibition—which included artwork, letters, and documentation—“Steinbeck: Armed with the Truth (And a Colt Automatic).” The producers kept the title for their film about the show. “Steinbeck Fully Loaded,” a Sunday magazine feature, appeared in the Monterey County Herald.

I also wrote a piece about Steinbeck’s gun license application for an innovative literary-blog website called Red Room that, unfortunately, no longer exists. Before the site went out of business, Paul Douglass—at that time the editor of Steinbeck Review—picked up on my post. This led to my writing a pair of articles for the journal in the spring of 2008 and the fall of 2009.

Since that time, my account of Steinbeck and guns has appeared in a number of periodicals and books, though no one bothers to notify me before they publish it. The gun license episode tied in with other stories and historic tidbits about Steinbeck I had picked up while writing for the Monterey County Herald, operating a Pacific Grove art gallery with a literary bent, and co-curating the inaugural art exhibition at the National Steinbeck Center in 1998.

Monterey County Sources Inspire Stories About Steinbeck

My sources were often people who had known Steinbeck well, or their descendants. Two were classmates of John in Salinas. Another was the daughter of a Monterey County cop who corresponded with Steinbeck after the writer left California for New York, and who shipped Steinbeck several revolvers via railway express. A fourth was the son of a Monterey County Herald editor who became a good friend to Steinbeck and helped him find a Big Sur mountain lion as a gift for the people of England—an incident I used in a book of stories that I wrote about Steinbeck’s life in Monterey County and New York State.

I call the series “Almost True Stories from a Writer’s Life.” The stories reflect the portrait of Steinbeck painted by my sources: a complex man of great gifts, deep compassion, and capacity for fun, traits overshadowed by very real and very dark threats experienced by Steinbeck in Monterey County. Some of my stories include artists, the secondary theme of the film. Artists were important to Steinbeck throughout his lifetime: he numbered them among his friends and felt not only comfortable, but also safe with them. When you have as many enemies as Steinbeck did, I learned, “safe” becomes important.

Which is why he applied for that gun license on May 12, 1942.

Sample “Almost True Stories from a Writer’s Life” in Steve Hauk’s Archive.—Ed,

Steve Hauk About Steve Hauk

Steve Hauk is a playwright, short story writer, and art expert in Pacific Grove, California. Co-curator of This Side of Eden—Images of Steinbeck's California, the inaugural art exhibition at the National Steinbeck Center, he has written on John Steinbeck for Steinbeck Review and is the author of two CINE Golden Eagle award-winning PBS-telecast documentaries narrated by Jack Lemmon, Time Captured in Paintings: The Monterey Legacy and The Roots of California Photography: The Monterey Legacy. His plays include Fortune's Way, or Notes on Art for Catholics (and Others)The Floating Hat, Reflections of an American Mossad, The Forgotten Computer Genius, and The Cottages, Scenes from Lives Interrupted. Steinbeck: The Untold Stories, a book of fictional stories published by SteinbeckNow.com and based on Steinbeck's life, is available through Amazon and at selected bookstores. His most recent work is Eden Armed, a similarly imagined play.

Comments

  1. Terrific stuff! Thanks for posting.

  2. Bob,

    Thank you very much. “Working Days” has a place of honor on my bookshelf. I am a fan. I hope we can meet some day.

    Incidentally, one of the traps of being filmed unscripted, as several have pointed out, is evident in my error about dates when I said that Steinbeck and Gwyn had a child on the way in 1942.

  3. What a great video – combining a lot of history about John Steinbeck and the threats against him for his honest subject matter in Grapes of Wrath and other books – and wonderful artwork from that time period. Steve Hauk is always a pleasure to encounter, whether on film or in real life at Hauk Fine Arts!

  4. Jeffrey Whitmore says:

    For many years I’ve admired Steve Hauk’s work as a journalist, critic, playwright, documentarian, and writer of both short and long fiction. The stories in “Almost True Stories from a Writer’s Life” break new ground. He’s created a highly readable form—almost biographical/almost fictional—that celebrates John Steinbeck’s life and times. The stories are packed with the humor, tragedy, pathos, and the humanity that infused Steinbeck’s work. The collection is an honest and thoughtful tribute to a great writer and to the Almost Truth of History.

  5. David Elledge says:

    I served in the infantry in Vietnam with Paul Boczkowski. A man of his word, and a
    scholar. Never shirked a duty. His wife Marie is a wonderful person.

  6. David,
    yes, Paul and Marie wonderful people. I’ve worked with them on several projects and their work is always first rate. Their Longtimers series, about groundbreaking artists on the Monterey Peninsula, is an important historical document.

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