At 15 Everett was a member of Mrs. Snow Longley Housh's 1929 creative poetry class at Los Angeles High School. An earlier spurt to verse writing occurred with his winning Mrs. Margarett Ball Dickson's book, "Tumbleweeds," as an award for his indian poem, "The Relic." written while a student at Valparaiso High School, Indiana. The silence of widlerness nights during his desert vagabondage was broken by his chant of remembered songs--poems that (in his diaries) he stated lifted his spirits and renewed his courage. Even in the early years the wild called Everett. The ocean's restlessness matched his own; mountains lured him; the desert fascinated him. His poems were of space, wind, sand and sage. And then at 18 his hope-dream of distance crystallized. He wrote his last boyish essay, In part— "On night long ago while I tossed restlessly upon my bed, and idea crstyallized with me . . . My brain was busied with tense imaginings . . In my mind I had conjured up a thousand forgotten cities, left behind by th years; sheer grey mountians; mile upon mile of bare, unfriendly desert; cold lakes . . . jungles filled with deadly snakes, immense butterflies, brilliant colors, fever and death. I swam in coral-tinted waters. Through insufferable heat and incessant downpours I plodded forward.