Dreamer of Dune by Brian Herbert

Where are they?”
    She wouldn’t tell him, and despondent, he left. Later she confided to my half-sister, Penny, “I almost told him, but I thought it would be a mistake for them to be together.”
    Flora obtained custody of Penny.
    Later my father would say that the letter from Flora was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to him, since it led ultimately to meeting my mother. But that remained several years off, and he would go through a painful period of adjustment.
    He moved back to his roots in the Pacific Northwest. From August 1943 to August 1945, he worked as a copy editor for the Oregon Journal in Portland, Oregon. This region, with its familiar landscapes and outdoor way of life, soothed his troubled spirit.
    The copy desk at the Oregon Journal was in the shape of a half-circle. Along the outer rim of the desk, called “the rim,” the copy editors sat, marking up stories that came in over the wires and stories written by staff reporters. On the other side of the desk, inside the curve, sat “the slot man,” sometimes referred to as “the dealer.” He dealt stories to the copy editors.
    The United Press International office in the back had some tape punching machines which were in intermittent use. They were for transmitting stories to other UPI offices around the world. To send a story, it had to be typed on a special tape and held until the designated hours of transmission began. Then the tape was fed through the machine, printing the story on both the originating and receiving machines.
    So, over a couple of days in odd moments, my impish father went back and cut the tape to print so that it would look like a standard UPI story. It was one of the wildest stories you ever heard.
    There is an apocryphal tale about Dad, that the story he faked on the machine concerned a UFO attack on Europe in which the cities were destroyed with “green death rays.” It is not difficult to imagine how this tale came about, since it circulated decades later when my father was the most famous science fiction writer in the world.
    The essence of the actual story he punched out on the UPI machine was that an American flying ace was revealed to have previously been an ace for the Nazi air force, the Luftwaffe. Supposedly when he was a German flyer he was shot down over North Africa, then brought to the United States as a prisoner of war. But he had been an Austrian professor before the war, and with the assistance of academic friends in the United States he secured false identity papers and escaped from the prisoner of war camp. Subsequently he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force under this false identity.
    The last line of the story read, “Any resemblance between the foregoing and anything that may have actually happened is purely coincidental.”
    The slot man at the time of the gag, Fred McNeil, was absolutely authoritarian, without a sense of humor. Behind him sat a copy spike—a sharp steel prong where copyboys impaled stories as they came in from the wire machines and reporters. The copyboy would come and spike a story on it—and without looking back McNeil would just grab the piece and start working on it.
    Most of the people in the office knew about the gag, and Frank even had the UPI people in on it. One dull afternoon they had a machine free so that he could run his tape on it. The tape told the machine what to do, and it printed the story on standard UPI paper…an original and two carbons. It wasn’t transmitted.
    It only took a minute or so—the tape went fairly fast. Then the prankster ripped the story off, walked back to the copy desk as though coming from the john, spiked it and slid back into his seat on the rim.
    Meanwhile, McNeil grabbed the story and put it down in front of him. The staff members watched him out of the corners of their eyes. It was a slack time of day with very little copy, so Frank was betting that McNeil would copy-edit it