As we mentioned, LoneStarCon had a significant amount of fanhistory-related
programming. Next year's Bucconeer will have even more, as it incorporates the 1997
FanHistoricon which will be, in effect, a 'convention within a convention' where
Baltimore fandom itself will probably be one of the topics. In
Mimosa 20, we presented the first part of a mini-history of the
Baltimore Science Fiction Society by one of its founders, Jack Chalker. Here is his
concluding installment.  Now, about those business
meetings...The truth was, we didn't have all
that much business to conduct. BSFS was held in members' homes; there were minor
dues and a 'BYO-Everything' atmosphere. The very purpose of the club was to provide
a way for like-minded people to get together and have fun on a regular basis.
Because of this, by the mid-1960s BSFS eclipsed its neighbor, the Washington Science
Fiction Association, in size and in being the 'in' place to be for parties and such.
This was not only due to BSFS's own growth and lack of interest in anything but fun,
but also because WSFA itself lost Elizabeth Cullen and thus her wonderful house that
had been the focal point of its meetings for more than a decade.The BSFS business meetings, having
nothing whatsoever to do, tended to be long and complicated affairs. There were a
lot of people who were so in love with procedure and business that they only showed
up at those sessions; other than announcements, which were important, the
most frequent activity was revising the BSFS constitution. It happened dozens of
times. Committees were formed and came back with revised constitutions; they were
debated in detail (with anyone ruled out of order commanded to be keelhauled under
the U.S.S. Constellation down at the harbor) and ultimately adopted. A new
committee to revise the constitution was then immediately appointed.However, in 1966, the club actually
tried to do something serious. It bid for the 1967 World Science Fiction Convention,
going to other conventions, throwing bid parties, distributing flyers, etc. We had
a reputation for never closing a bid party at a con so long as even one person was
there, so we were always the last hangout -- an obvious outgrowth of our never-ending
weekends {{ed. note: for more on that, see part one of
Jack's remembrance }}. Ed and JoAnn Wood met at a Baltimore `67 party at the
1966 Midwestcon, for example, and there were other such relationships formed in the
wee hours as well, most others best left unmentioned because they didn't work out
as well.The schizoid club meetings showed
how little club members really felt about all the formalities of a club. This was a
social group that liked to party and existed entirely for its own sake because its
members liked getting together. This meant that the club offices weren't all that
important, either, although they sounded important to other clubs. The elections
became just as silly as some of the rest of the party-oriented stuff, often involving
passionate mock campaigns (although BSFS almost always re-elected everybody who
wanted to run again in the end). The elections then became excuses to throw even
more grandiose parties, and became so popular that fans from New York, New Jersey,
and Pennsylvania (as well as a fair share of WSFA) often came. This quickly made it
impossible to hold election meetings in members' homes, and so, in 1964, we wound up
renting a function room for the night at the Holiday Inn downtown. The attendance
for that all-night election party was so large and had so many out-of-towners, we
decided to have a relaxacon-like convention the next year that wouldn't be limited
to a mere room with its various restrictions.
Balticon 1, as it is now known, was
held over President's Day weekend in 1965, at the Emerson Hotel in downtown
Baltimore. The Emerson was across the street from the theater district, and so it
was the hotel where visiting performers usually stayed. The entire top floor was an
elaborate and ornate penthouse suite with a central master bar and tons of room.
The modest BSFS treasury covered its rental, but not its stock nor other amenities,
and at that time I was in my last semester of undergraduate college and had very
little money to contribute. Roger Zelazny put up a fair amount of it, but pretty
much got it all back at the end of the convention. That first Balticon was an
enormous hit. There was no guest of honor, but it was a grand time with just the
right folks there. I remember Randall Garrett leading his inimitable filk sings,
and Lin Carter pontificating in another area of the suite, and half the convention
going out for breakfast at dawn. One other thing that happened was that the Emerson
security man got himself fired -- he liked us so much he, er, oversampled our
bar.The next year, we moved a block away
to the Lord Baltimore Hotel. It wasn't our choice -- new owners had bought the
Emerson during the previous year, and had it demolished to make way for a new
downtown parking garage. It was a great loss...The Lord Baltimore wasn't nearly as
well laid out for us, but it was good enough. We used only the lower floor halls
and meeting rooms. The hotel management tended to look the other way on corkage but
did insist on a minimum twenty-five rooms per night for Friday and Saturday. This
time we had a token program and a Guest of Honor. It had occurred to me that our
kind of convention was the right size to invite a single GoH and have him or her not
only do whatever they wanted as program but also to interact one-on-one with the con
attendees. As chairman, I also wanted somebody new who wasn't already a 'regular',
and for this I picked Samuel R. Delaney, whose first couple of books had impressed
me. This was also his first real con experience, and he and we all seemed to fit
rather well.The budget for the convention was
not at all high, so we cut costs as much as we could (to give one example of economy,
I remember Paul Schaubel coming back from Allied Chemical with twenty gallons of
pure grain alcohol, which we then diluted 50-50 with tap water and poured into
Smirnoff bottles -- nobody complained, and we had all that 'vodka' for about ten
bucks). I also rushed down and rented three rooms, which I gave away, when I
discovered we only had 47 room nights. It was expensive, but cheaper than paying
the facilities bill for not making our room night commitment.I wasn't around for the next
Balticon. Back then, with the Vietnam War near its peak, there was very limited
protection from the draft, and I'd received a draft physical. Bill Osten, a local
SF fan and BSFS member who'd wound up marrying my old girlfriend Enid, had gotten
into the 135th Air Command Group, an Air National Guard unit where my cousin, WWII
vet Laurence Volrath (from whom I get my middle name) was a colonel, and tipped me
off that there were openings. I went down there, tested, and on the same day as a
postcard arrived stating that I would be drafted within the next thirty days, I
joined the 135th and went off to basic training on February 3, 1967 -- two weeks
before Balticon 3. Ted Pauls, with some help from Dave Ettlin and Ron Bounds
(both 4Fs), ran it with L. Sprague de Camp as GoH; it reportedly went okay. I didn't
get back into town until late August and remained on active duty for a while after
that. I had gone through special forces training at Howard Air Force Base in Panama
and I also managed to make it to the 1967 New York Worldcon. I often commented that
it was sometimes hard to remember which was which.Having graduated in June 1966 from
Towson State, I'd secured a junior high English teaching position with the Baltimore
City Public Schools -- but my interest was history and that was what I wanted to
teach (preferably at the high school level). I had had a double major, so my
teaching license allowed either one. After coming off active duty, I secured the
high school history and geography position I'd been wanting, and concurrently
entered grad school at Johns Hopkins. I also resumed my social fan activities, but
not my leading position in the club. From the end of 1967 through 1969, Jay and
Alice Haldeman ran the club and Ted Pauls ran the Balticons, with Don Sobwick and
wife Debbie (a Philadelphia fan he'd met at a Disclave in Washington) still doing
the late after-meetings.It was also during the 1960s that
Baltimore and Washington combined on what was to go down as one of the great hoaxes
of that decade, the 'Bermuda in 1970' worldcon bid. This came about because of
conversations with Dave Kyle at the `68 Worldcon in which he evidenced a lot of
worry that the Heidelberg in 1970 committee could stay together or pull things off.
He was on their committee but only in a titular capacity; they weren't listening to
folks who knew worldcons, he said, and spent most of their time arguing with each
other to the point of yelling, screaming, and resignations. Since there was no
question they were going to win, he wondered if there wasn't something that could be
done to scare the hell out of them. Back in 1964, Harlan Ellison and Bob Silverberg
had almost won the worldcon for 1965 by bidding a joke Virgin Islands blast that
would be held on the beach at Saint Croix. I suggested we come up with a more
credible hoax that, considering the near win of the V.I. gag bid, might scare the
hell out of the Germans and give them something to rally around and compete against.
Dave suggested Bermuda because he had a relative there who could do remailings, and
it was on.Bermudacon was never real, and
probably is unique in fannish history in that it was perpetuated through the next
year by both BSFS and WSFA, all of whom knew it was a hoax and none of whom blew the
gag. The Kyles were living in England then, and gave credibility to us by asserting
to the Heicon committee that it was real. Other than that, it was entirely a
Baltowash affair. I remember Charlie Brown actually calling a WSFA meeting in the
early summer of 1969 and, with everybody sitting there and keeping quiet, asking Jay
Haldeman if Bermuda was real. Jay assured him it was and even talked it up; various
'news' items were being passed to him on slips of paper while he was talking with
Charlie. After he hung up there was the longest group laugh I can ever remember.
To this day, I'm told, Charlie insists that Bermudacon was real.# # # #
In 1971, BSFS effectively fell apart
in one of those personality splits, when it was felt that people who had little in
common with the regular club members (and who had never contributed a thing to
actually making the club go) had engineered a coup to take over the club. In
protest to it Not Being Fun Anymore, almost all of the regular members resigned and,
that evening at Don Sobwick's, formed the Baltimore Science-Fantasy Group. To avoid
any more political problems, it was made a private group to which admission was by
consent of the members. There was no constitution and a collection was taken up
each meeting to cover expenses. The BSFG continued into the mid-1970s, meeting
at the Sobwicks and other members' homes; it finally faded out after the Sobwicks
moved away.With the problems at BSFS, organized
club focus for the area returned to WSFA. The insurgent BSFS types never even
attempted to hold a meeting or to see if they could still have a solid club. That
might have been possible if they had really been interested in running the club.
Instead, they proved why folks didn't want them, and none of them were active in
fandom after that.Balticon continued, however, under
Ted Pauls, although there were increasing complaints that it was rather dull and
automatic and had become mostly a giant weekend fair for his TK Graphics book
operation. Still, it continued, mostly at the Lord Baltimore, and did have some
occasional memorable moments, such as when, at the Chinese restaurant banquet one
year, Harry Harrison leaped across the table and attempted to strangle Ted White
over some dispute about how White had edited Amazing Stories after Harrison
had left it.BSFS was eventually re-started.
Some newcomers such as Sue Wheeler, Shirley Avery, and Martin Deutsch got together
with a few old vets of the original club, like Pat Kelly and Mark Owings, and began
meeting in small rooms at the Johns Hopkins University and other available places.
With another returned member from the 1960s, Charles David Michael Artemus Ellis
(CDMA in print, Charlie to us), they also assumed control of Balticon from Pauls,
whose own business had been having some problems that required a lot of his time and
resources; the club asked Charlie, who had never run a large convention before, to
run a big one.Charlie did. Moving out of downtown
to the Pikesville Hilton on the Baltimore beltway, Charlie started with heavy
publicity, made lots of deals, and went beyond traditional con fandom to his own
contacts with film fandom to create a short amateur film festival to run
concurrently, and, as importantly, he moved Balticon from President's Day weekend to
Easter weekend. Balticon suddenly drew almost 2,000 people, including lots of
writers, editors, film people, artists, you name it... and it was off. The Hilton,
however, was not as good; its franchise holder was in trouble and tried to stiff the
con, forcing a move the next year to The Hunt Valley Inn even farther out in the
suburbs. There it remained for more than a decade, until Hunt Valley management
tired of Balticon and Balticon finally faced the fact that it had outgrown the place.
Since then it's been mostly in the Inner Harbor, at various hotels there. Balticons
had quite a reputation in the early 1970s as fun conventions; Wheeler even arranged
to import a performing group to Balticon that she'd seen at the 1977 Westercon. We
understand that The Flying Karamazov Brothers still remember us fondly.The high attendance brought BSFS
lots of money; in the early 1980s the club found and rented a basement clubhouse on
Charles Street near the Johns Hopkins University. This remained the center of the
club and its activities until, after a decade there, crime had increased to the
point where everyone decided we needed to move. At first intending only to rent,
the club found and then purchased a former neighborhood movie house in the
Highlandtown section of east Baltimore, then began to renovate and rehab the place
even while it was being used as a meeting site. Only two other clubs that I know of,
LASFS and NESFA, own their own clubhouses.# # # #
Sue Wheeler led a bid for the 1980
Worldcon, but was beaten after a good campaign by Boston. Three years later,
however, a renewed bid under Mike Walsh won. ConStellation was held at the Inner
Harbor in 1983 with John Brunner as Guest of Honor, Dave Kyle as Fan GoH, and me as
Toastmaster. Overambitious and underinsured, the convention wound up with money
problems but managed to settle with all its creditors over time with help from NESFA
and Rick Katze in particular. Contrary to popular opinion, ConStellation did not
declare bankruptcy, and those who worked on it simply note that its problems cost no
attendee one dime and that everyone got more than their money's worth. Eva
Whitley's crab feast for 1,200, the first food function at a domestic worldcon in
many years, actually made money and became something of a legend. It was also the
first crab feast she had ever thrown.Today's Baltimore fandom continues
quite active; a mixed WSFA-BSFS bid for the 1998 World SF Convention won, and next
year another worldcon will be held in Baltimore. The World Fantasy Convention has
been to the city twice so far, once at the Hunt Valley Inn in 1981, and most recently
in downtown Baltimore, in 1995, under Mike Walsh. Balticon is still held every
Easter weekend. BSFS continues to thrive and the clubhouse is a center of faanish
social activity in the city; the club publishes a regular fanzine, is a participant
in fan activities all over the country, and is in contact with fans all over the
world. Recently it's again become the center of regional fan activity, although it
is generally acknowledged that the completion of clubhouse renovations will be one
of the Seven Signs of the Apocalypse.Me, I still go to meetings whenever
I can, and, after the meeting, I lead a number of others out to a 24-hour eatery
where tradition is maintained. All illustrations by Joe Mayhew |
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