Following his graduation and commissioning in 1929, he served aboard the Lexington under Captain E. J. King, who later became commander in chief of the U.S. Navy during World War II. When his tour of duty on the Lexington was about to end, Captain King asked that he be retained as a gunnery specialist. However, Robert was given duty as gunnery officer on the Roper, a destroyer. xiii
Destroyer duty was difficult because of the rolling of the ship, and seasickness was a way of life for him. He lost weight and came down with tuberculosis. After he was cured, the Navy retired him from active duty.
At twenty-seven years of age, he found himself permanently ashore, with a small pension. It was necessary for him to find some way to augment that money. He tried silver mining, politics, selling real estate, and further study in engineering. One day, he found an ad in a science fiction magazine for a contest. So he sat down and wrote a story (“Life-Line”). He felt it was too good for the magazine he had written it for, so he sent it to the top magazine in the field-Astounding Science Fiction. John W. Campbell, Jr. bought the story,
The next several stories he wrote were less salable, and it was only on his fifth or sixth try that Campbell again purchased one. The second and following stories eventually sold, but Robert was hooked for life on writing. Originally, his purpose in writing was to pay off a mortgage on a house which he and his wife of a few years had purchased. After that mortgage was paid off, he found that when he tried to give up writing, he felt vaguely uncomfortable, and it was only when he returned to his typewriter that he felt fulfilled.
During World War II, Robert left his writing to do engineering work for the U.S. Navy. For three years he did such work in Philadelphia. The war over, he returned to his writing. By this time, he was looking for wider horizons. He was persuaded to begin the juvenile line, and he sold stories to the Saturday Evening Post. His second juvenile was picked up by television, in a series that ran for five years. He also wrote the classic film, Destination Moon, and he began to think about writing serious adult novels to open up that market to science fiction.
Robert thought that the possibilities of mankind going into space were sufficiently important and feasible that before he left Philadelphia, he wrote two letters urging that the Navy begin space exploration. One letter went through channels as far as the head of the Philadelphia Naval Air Experimental Station, who killed the proposal. The second went (also through channels), via a friend, through Naval Operations, and got as far as a Cabinet meeting. It was reported that then-President Truman took it seriously enough to ask whether such a rocket could be launched from the deck of a ship. No, the President was told. And that killed the project. In 1947 Robert was divorced from his wife, and when he received his decree nisi, he married me. During World War II, I had gone into the Navy, as a WAVE, and my second tour of duty was in Philadelphia, where I met Robert; we worked in the same section.
One day Robert spent hours searching for some tear sheets for an anthology. In an effort to help, I decided that his files needed to be organized. So I set about that, setting up a system which I still use today. This began my involvement in the literary business.
By the time Robert found himself too busy to do more than overhead work (keeping up correspondence with his agents, keeping records, answering fan mail, and all the other chores attendant on being a literary figure), I was well enough acquainted with his business that I could take over those chores for him. We worked together as a team, discussing what to do about offers, and I would answer the letters for him.
With the juvenile series well launched, and selling many copies primarily to libraries, Robert became the darling of librarians. He was asked to give endless speeches, and when his annual books for boys came out, he did a special program for general radio distribution on each new book.