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He was studying psychology, mathematics, and English (including creative writing), but wanted to select classes as if they were arrayed on a smorgasbord. He insisted upon taking a disproportionate number of psychology courses, and tried to skip introductory classes, going straight to advanced material. He already knew the preparatory stuff, he told the registrar, and didn’t want to waste his time. But the bureaucrats running the school said he couldn’t do as he pleased, despite straight-A grades. Besides, they said, he wasn’t taking the classes necessary to qualify for a major, and everyone had to have a major.
    My mother had always thought she would marry a dark-haired man like her father, while her friend Frankie expected to marry a blond. One evening, Frankie and Beverly were talking alone. “Do you like him?” Beverly inquired. “Yes,” came the response. “But he’s so blond!”
    Beverly invited Frank to a Shakespearean play at the university, Macbeth . She was playing the third witch, in heavy makeup. The playhouse was at the corner of 43rd and University in Seattle, on the second floor over a dance studio. Frank went with Howie.
    After the performance, Beverly’s blue eyes teared up and she said to Frank, “I was just acting like a witch and don’t want you to think I’m that kind of a person.”
    â€œOh no,” he responded. “I don’t think that. I mean, I understand.”
    They made arrangements to go somewhere later that evening. While she changed out of her costume, Dad walked Howie to the bus stop on University Avenue. Howie recognized the symptoms he was witnessing, that his friend had “come to life.” As they made their way along the sidewalk, Howie said, “Frank, you’re going to marry that girl, and you’re going to end your days together.”
    In response, my father laughed as only he could laugh. As Howie put it, he let out “a haw haw boom that filled the caverns between buildings.” And Frank Herbert said, “There isn’t a chance in a million, Howie. I have no intention whatsoever of getting married again.”
    But his young companion said again, “Frank, that’s Mrs. Herbert right there. That’s the future Mrs. Herbert.”
    â€œNo,” Dad said, shaking his head. “Once is enough, and it didn’t work for me. That’s it for me.” His divorce from Flora had been finalized some three years before, but the trauma had remained with him.
    The next day, Frank and Howie went to Kingston (on the Olympic Peninsula) by ferry and looked at an A-frame they were thinking of purchasing together. On the way back they were sitting on the beach, waiting for a ferryboat. Dad mentioned a popular song by The Ink Spots, “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” and said, “I don’t want to set the world on fire, Howie. I just want to make the grass wave a little as I go by.” *
    Two weeks later, Frank called Howie and asked, “Will you stand for me (as best man) at our wedding?” Howie laughed, and consented. The wedding would be held in a few months, in June.
    Frustrated with university rules concerning degree requirements, Frank Herbert decided to drop out the following June, in 1946. His wedding was scheduled for the same month.
    My father had a way of springing wild plans on people. Shortly before their wedding, he found an unusual situation in which they could honeymoon and make a little money at the same time. He would be a fire watcher for the forest service atop a 5,402-foot mountain in Washington State’s Snoqualmie National Forest, with permission for his young wife to accompany him. The lookout cabin—similar to the one later occupied by the beat generation icon Jack Kerouac—was perched on rugged Kelly Butte in the middle of a federal forest, thirty miles northeast of Mount Rainier. This was in the Cascade Mountain range,