Portland author quietly moseyed into the sunset

EUGENE - With a few choice keystrokes, Portland writer Ernest Haycox forever changed the face of motion pictures.

History doesn't record what it was about Haycox's "Stage to Lordsburg" that seduced director John Ford into turning the two-page Collier's magazine story into a major motion picture.

But archivists do know that Ford's brilliant 1939 motion picture, "Stagecoach," rescued the Western genre from the doldrums, showed others its profound possibilities, inspired imitators, won awards, started the drugstore-cowboy craze, made a star out of lanky ex-footballer John Wayne and became possibly the most important Western film ever made.

All that because Haycox put on his suit and tie every day and went into his office to knock out adventure stories that thrilled the nation.

"Stage to Lordsburg" was part of a magical career. Haycox supported his wife and two children by selling stories first to pulp magazines such as Western Story and Detective Story, then later to Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post.

Although Westerns were his specialty, he also wrote detective, African adventure, sports, military, Revolutionary War and seafaring tales. And he wrote them so well that almost every one of them sold; several were made into motion pictures.

Over a 28-year career, this slight, dapper man, who learned his craft at the University of Oregon and treated writing more as a job than an art form, would emerge at the pinnacle of his profession.

Writers such as Frank Grubner, D.B. Newton, Nelson Nye, Wayne Overholser, Luke Short and Richard S. Wheeler have acknowledged Haycox's influence.

Ernest Hemingway, who cared little for the fiction of his day, read the Saturday Evening Post whenever it ran a serial by Haycox. Another fan was expatriate writer Gertrude Stein.

Forest Pyle, an associate professor of English at UO, rates Haycox at the top, along with "Zane Gray, Owen Wister and Luke Short. He's much more interesting than Max Brand and Louis L'Amour."

To celebrate this local hero, Linda Long, manuscript librarian at the university's Knight Library, has pulled mementos of Haycox's career from the library's collection.

Long scoured some 2,000 volumes of rare books and periodicals about the early history of the West, donated in the 1960s by Haycox's widow.

The letters, manuscripts, photographs, diaries and book-cover illustrations were brought together in a tidy exhibit, "Under Western Skies," at the library.

During Haycox's lifetime, such an exhibit hardly would have been necessary. His name was as well-known as contemporaries Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck.

But time has a way of erasing even a giant's tracks, and Haycox, like the Western genre he traversed and the celluloid-cowboy heroes made possible by "Stagecoach," has moseyed off into the sunset.

Although Haycox's name may not be the household word it once was, his influence remains.

He was an active Republican, thought himself liberal, considered running for public office several times, chaired a Portland draft board during World War II, and was briefly attached to the America mission in Greece.

After 14 months in the Army, training sharpshooters in central France, he spent a year at Reed College and three at the University of Oregon.

Under the guidance of UO writing professor W.F.G. Thacher, he wrote constantly. He was a columnist for the Oregon Daily Emerald and editor of its Sunday literary issue, and he wrote for the yearbook and humor magazine as well.

The older Haycox got, the more he set his stories in Northwest locales, and the higher he set the bar for himself.

Haycox authority Richard Etulain, history professor at the University of New Mexico, notes that, "Haycox once wrote to his mentor, W.F.G. Thacher, that he hoped for immortality as a writer.

"His death at 51 cut off a very promising career, one that might have achieved much more, even if not immortality."