When John Steinbeck died on December 20, 1968, Jimmy Costello wrote his obituary for the newspaper that was then called the Monterey Peninsula Herald. Jimmy was the paper’s city editor at the time, so maybe he assigned himself to do the job.

In any case, it was a good choice. Jimmy knew John well. They had been friends. They had taken part together in at least two great adventures, one darkly tinged.

The first—the darkly tinged one—I heard directly from Jimmy. One night, after a drink at Gallatin’s, a restaurant-bar in downtown Monterey just a block or two from the Herald newsroom at that time, we took a walk and passed the old San Carlos Hotel, now gone.

It stirred memories in Jimmy. There was a Monterey party, he recalled, in the early 1930s, and John and his first wife Carol showed up at this party, celebrating something good that had happened with John’s writing. They were in a happy mood, but that changed when a young woman, perhaps impressed by Steinbeck’s growing fame, played up to John at the party. Carol unsurprisingly reacted negatively and began drinking. When she became what John judged as drunk, he found Jimmy and asked him to help take Carol away.

Jimmy agreed, assuming John would take Carol home to the Steinbecks’s Pacific Grove cottage. Instead, John said they would walk Carol to the Hotel San Carlos, get her a room, and let her sleep it off. Jimmy was a short man, 5’6” at most, and Steinbeck was a six-footer. To this day I imagine them supporting Carol while walking her down Calle Principal to the San Carlos, Carol tilting in Jimmy’s direction.

It was late and the hotel lobby was nearly empty, moths circling the lights, remembered Jimmy, who supported Carol while John got a room. Jimmy thought they would take Carol to the room and put her to bed, as John had said, but John had other ideas. After they got Carol onto the elevator, John pressed the room key into her hand, pushed the button for the second floor, then took Jimmy by the arm and, as the elevator doors closed behind them, left with Jimmy to return to the party.

Later Jimmy came back to the hotel alone, found Carol still on the elevator, passed out, and took her up and put her to bed. I can’t recall his saying either way, but I don’t think he went back to the party. Years later he remained perplexed by what happened. He liked Steinbeck very much, but not that night.

Puma Story Has Happier Ending than that Monterey Party

The other John Steinbeck incident involving Jimmy Costello that sticks in my mind was told to me not by Jimmy but by his son, also Jim Costello—historian, writer, school teacher, and former mayor of Pacific Grove. It happened years later, when Steinbeck had moved East and was traveling in Europe and the United Kingdom. After meeting members of the British Royal Navy, Steinbeck learned that the anti-aircraft vessel Puma did not have a mascot—in the case of other frigates, the mounted heads of the big cats the ships were named for. Steinbeck claimed Monterey County had plenty of pumas. If that were true, wouldn’t the Royal Navy rather have a whole stuffed puma than just a head—especially if the stuffed puma were accompanied by a live one?

Like the night of that party, John turned for help to Jimmy, who saw to it that a stuffed puma was found and flown to England, followed soon after by a live specimen picked up in Big Sur, put in a cage, and driven to the airport in the bed of a pickup truck. This led to various adventures and heartbreaking moments—the puma was given a name, Flora—and Jimmy took the cat’s welfare personally, just as he had Carol’s.

Years later, I wrote short stories about both incidents, of course inventing a bit along the way. But Jimmy’s son remembers other Steinbeck anecdotes as well. One involved coming home from Monterey High School one afternoon and finding an imperious-looking French poodle sitting on the sofa in the living room, staring at this kid carrying books coming through the front door. “It was Charley,” Jim recalls. “John was in Monterey researching what would be Travels with Charley. He was sitting at the dining room table with my parents. They were talking and having a good time. Charley seemed perfectly at home.”

Jimmy Costello had talked about writing a book on Steinbeck in retirement. But he was pushed into retirement before he was ready and it broke his heart and he died shortly thereafter. It would probably have been a hell of a book—likely anecdotal—and truthful. Jimmy always told the truth. His wife, Nancy, outlived him by many years and became a local legend. In an old pickup, she would collect food contributed by donors or thrown out by grocery stores, as well as clothing and other necessities, and drive into the Salinas Valley delivering to poor families, usually fieldworkers. Friends and supporters chipped in gas money and helped out with truck repairs. Nancy Costello did her important work almost to the day she died. Maybe this work was inspired in part by John’s writings. She was certainly worthy of one of his stories.

The Monterey Peninsula Herald is now the Monterey County Herald. Jimmy Costello’s son Jim visits Pacific Grove often from his retirement home up in Port Townsend, Washington. There the Western Flyer—the commercial fishing boat that Steinbeck made famous—is being refurbished for its own important work. When it returns to Monterey Bay as a floating ecology classroom, it will be coming home, too.

Archival photograph of Jimmy Costello (left) delivering stuffed puma courtesy Jim Costello.

The California writer Ruth Comfort Mitchell had no desire for animosity to develop between herself and her Los Gatos neighbor John Steinbeck. To her mind Steinbeck was a “literary lion,” while she called herself a “little Los Gatos wildcat.” But proximity didn’t prevent her from criticizing The Grapes of Wrath when it appeared in 1939, or from responding with a counter-novel of her own the following year. She expressed regret that readers were taking Steinbeck’s migrant story as documented history because she knew better. She felt that Steinbeck’s bleak picture was unfair to Californians, so she did something about it.

Clearly Mitchell was throwing down the gauntlet to Steinbeck when she decided to broaden the conversation by taking an opposing perspective on the problems of the migrants descending on California, and their effect on the state and its citizens. She took it upon herself to get things right in every respect that mattered to her by writing her own book—one that would present an alternate narrative of what happens when political, social, and environmental forces collide. Basing her story on what she had experienced as a native, she titled her counter-novel Of Human Kindness.

Unfortunately, the received wisdom concerning Mitchell that appears in the myriad of books written about Steinbeck is mostly flawed. She is typically described in a few dismissive sentences, or a footnote, as a shallow romantic who was born into wealth—a San Francisco socialite incapable of deep thought or social sympathy. Worst of all, she wrote from a woman’s point of view. She couldn’t possibly have witnessed or understood what the migrants had been through in making the arduous journey from Dust Bowl states like Oklahoma to the Promised Land of California.

“That Ranch Never Provided Me a Set of Shoestrings!”

Born in 1882, Ruth grew up in a modest rented Victorian house on the edge of busy Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. Her father was a traveling liquor salesman and rarely at home. As an only daughter and older sister to three brothers, she undoubtedly spent a good deal of her time as a teenager helping with domestic duties that included managing mammoth heaps of the family’s laundry two days a week. Though the Mitchells had a “hired girl”—an Irish immigrant whose presence saved them from the shame of having no servants—they were at best middle class. Their neighbors were mostly blue-collar workers plus a few men with white-collar jobs.

Later Ruth’s father, John S. Mitchell, became the manager and then the owner of the Hollenbeck Hotel in Los Angeles. But he had been working since he was 11, and he was 55 when he finally achieved real success. Sanborn Young, the man to whom Ruth was wed on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon when she was 32, escaped to California after a bitter divorce in Illinois. Eventually Young inherited property from his family, and in 1926 he and Ruth bought undeveloped ranch land near Riverdale, in Fresno County. Far from living in the grand manner assumed by her detractors, Ruth was heard to say of this venture, “That ranch in the San Joaquin never provided me with a set of shoestrings!”

Instead, Mitchell (shown in this undated archival photo) made her own success through a prodigious literary output spanning 40 years and including 16 novels, two exemplary poetry collections, a number of hit vaudeville plays and movie scripts, and countless short stories published in leading magazines of the day. When she died unexpectedly in 1954, at the age of 71, she left an estate valued at more than $300,000. Even her critics admitted that she was a decidedly clever woman who tackled subjects like “flapperdom” in a delightful manner, while also writing sensitive poetry denouncing inhumanity and war to devastating effect.

Like her friends Gertrude Atherton and Kathleen Thompson Norris, Ruth Comfort Mitchell attracted an army of readers largely composed of women who loved her because she created female characters they recognized from their own lives. She understood domestic dynamics, and she displayed deep sympathy for the vulnerabilities and challenges faced by women in rural California between the two world wars. Her description of their lives is still interesting to read, and her young heroines—those who could find jobs— struggled to stay afloat in a world that seems incredibly male-centric today. Some of them marry too early and pay the price. Mary Banner, the heroine in Of Human Kindness, is one of these.

Banner is 17 when she marries a rancher named Ed, unaware that she will be living at close quarters with a fierce mother-in-law in a ramshackle house in the unbearably hot San Joaquin Valley. The family’s plight is typical of that of small farmers in the sagging economy of Depression-era California, struggling mightily to survive on an income that usually failed to meet expenses. They made do and did without. Daily life was hard, compounded by problems with pests and weather and cows that had to be milked 365 days a year if they weren’t down with the bloat. Making matters worse, Mary’s daughter elopes with an “Okie-Dokie-Boy” who has been fired by her husband, and her son is led astray by a Communist-inspired school teacher. Ed blames both calamities on Mary and says he regrets that he married her.

“They Reacted Perfectly Normally. They Became Angry.”

Mitchell resented the fact that Steinbeck ignored the travails of small family-farmers like Mary and Ed in his indictment of corporate agriculture in The Grapes of Wrath. Simply put, she knew that he had not told the whole story—and Steinbeck knew it too, as he admitted during a Voice of America radio interview in 1952. When the migrants were dusted out of their farms back east, Steinbeck said, “they met a people who were terrified, for number one, of the depression and were horrified at the idea that great numbers of indigent people were being poured on them, to be taken care of. They could only be taken care of by taxation, taxes were already high, and there wasn’t much money about. They reacted perfectly normally, they became angry.”

Like others at the time, Ruth felt that one of the biggest holes in Steinbeck’s story was its failure to acknowledge the measure of relief that was offered by local authorities to those newly arriving in California. Kern County, the end of the line for many migrants, provided a measure of free health care, supplementing the rations available from the Farm Security Administration. In emergencies, the FSA could also issue money for clothing, gasoline, and medicine. While some migrants refused help from the “damn government,” others gladly accepted what was offered.

At the end of Mitchell’s novel, Mary Banner turns down an opportunity for personal happiness in order to keep her family together. Like Steinbeck’s Ma Joad, who wields a jack handle to prevent the separation of her kinfolk, she sacrifices so that those who survive may endure. Steinbeck’s migrant mother is the heart her family’s story, like the self-sacrificing heroine in Mitchell’s Of Human Kindness. They are equally sympathetic figures, and their similarities, like their differences, are essential to the kind of understanding that Mitchell, like Steinbeck, hoped readers would gain from reading their books.

Anyone with information about Ruth Comfort Mitchell is encouraged to communicate with Peggy Conaway Bergtold at pcon@cruzio.com.