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The Degler Legend by Dal Coger  
In the autumn of 1942, I attended my
first science fiction convention, at the Otsego Hotel in Jackson, Michigan.
Michicon II had about 30 fans in attendance, and boasted such luminaries as Edward
Elmer "Doc" Smith. E. E. Evans, Oliver Saari (an engineer who wrote a few SF
stories), and a 16-year-old Frank Robinson. Also in attendance was Claude Degler,
an Indiana fan who was soon being referred to in fandom as "Clod."Claude might have been cast as
Ichabod Crane, but only in a silent movie because of his nasal Hoosier accent. He
was unkempt in appearance, unwashed, and (as I found later) traveled by hitchhiking.
His great dream was to unite all of fandom into a single organization which he had
named "The Cosmic Circle." Why this was needed was never clear, since fandom
already had, and was supporting the N3F (National Fantasy Fan Federation). In
pursuit of his dream Claude traveled across the country, incidentally enjoying the
hospitality of fans, all and sundry, and somehow finding the resources to produce
fanzines of various titles, but all promoting cosmic consciousness.Bob Tucker, in Le Zombie
(November, 1943) wrote a piece, "Take to the Woods, Men, Degler's Coming!" An
excerpt: "Cosmic Circle Claude they calls him -- the wandering willy from some place
in Indiana. He's covered most of the 48 states in the last several months, plus
parts of Canada and it is rumored Mexico. He has visited (ouch) and sponged upon
hundreds of fans from Quebec to Live Oak, from Rockland to Los Angeles. He is
busily engaged in organizing an international fan club: The Cosmic Circle. Even if
he has to borrow without permission a half dozen well-known fan names to lend
prestige to the club."My second meeting with Claude was at
the Los Angeles SF gang's clubhouse on Bixel Street. I was a soldier stationed at
Camp Haan, and Forry Ackerman and Morojo had made me welcome. Like all service
fans, I was permitted to flop over the weekend in the clubhouse, and frequently
spent Saturday nights there while on a weekend pass. Degler arrived in L.A. and
stayed for some time, using the clubhouse as headquarters and, I suspect, running
off his various publications on the club's mimeo machine.At some point, Degler was the
'victim' of the great exclusion act. It isn't clear in my memory when this
occurred, but it was probably after I saw him in L.A. Earlier, I believe, Claude
had shown up at Slan Shack and made a pest of himself. This led Al Ashley to
produce an item, The Stefan, a four page mimeo fanzine, "published for FAPA,
March 1943." It is a parody of "The Raven" in 18 verses of 11 lines each.
The next time Degler showed up at
the Ashley place he was simply told to get lost. He had made of himself, Abby Lou
Ashley told me while I was home on leave, an absolute nuisance, consuming vast
amounts of food, which was not that easy to procure since there was food rationing.
I suspect Claude simply tanked up where there was a chance. He was as thin as a
rail. Degler did not take his 'exclusion' kindly, likening it to the great
exclusion act at WorldCon 1939 in New York when Moskowitz and company excluded
Wollheim and the Futurians. Some fans supported him. Most who had encountered him
did not.In L.A., Claude had taken to
referring to himself in some of his writings as "Don Rogers." Mel Brown, a Los
Angeleno fan, promptly nicknamed him "Two Buck Rogers." This was a reference to the
going price of a hooker, allegedly, and was probably unfair to Claude. I doubt he
had time for sex.Claude's publication for FAPA, The
Cosmic Circle Commentator, led to a number of burlesques in one of the FAPA
mailings of that winter of 1943-44. (I left California for military reasons in
April or May 1944 and essentially left fandom that fall, only returning in the early
1970s.) Claude committed such howlers as describing one fan as "stolid and
imaginative," and listing his membership in the Cosmic Circle as "under a
thousand."By March 1944, Claude was back in
Indiana (Newcastle, I seem to recall) and a new flood of material was coming out,
some of it referring to "Don Rogers." Also at that time there was a number of
suspiciously similar publications, but with improved spelling, written by "Frankfort
Nelson Stein," commonly Frank N. Stein.We left fandom about the same time,
apparently. Mine was involuntary, because I went overseas in the U.S. Army and
didn't return for five years. I have often wondered about Claude/Don/Frankfort
since then. Several years ago Bob Tucker swore he saw him outside a convention in
Indiana.The fact is, I sort of liked Claude.
He had a dream and sacrificed everything for it. Certainly, he could have bathed
more often. And used a change of clothes. His writing was crude, but in that as
in much else he might have benefitted by more generous treatment from the fan
community. Fans in their adolescence are fre-quently ugly ducklings, introverted,
poorly socialized, and lacking in social graces, even though Claude was not an
adolescent, being at least in his twenties.Fandom would be a poorer place
without such characters. - - - - - - - - - -
Dal Coger's article about Degler elicited several comments, the most insightful of
which was from Mike Glicksohn, who observed that, "If it were only Claude's rather
naive ideas about the superiority of fans that had passed into fanhistory, I doubt
he'd be the legendary fan he is today. But when his oddball ideas were coupled with
his less-than-savory personal habits, the result was a figure of mythic
proportions." Indeed.It took about eight months before the
next issue of Mimosa appeared, partly because it took us quite a while to
recover from the move north. (We were in a hotel for two-and-a-half months!)
Mimosa 6 was meant to be a "Welcome to Maryland" issue -- among the
contributions were an article from Dave Kyle, the Fan Guest of Honor at the 1983
Baltimore Worldcon, which was the first article in his long-running series of
remembrances about past fan eras, and also an article from Croatian fan Bruno
Ogorelec, which we received a few days before we left Tennessee (a kind of
going-away present?).What really made M6 a "Welcome
to Maryland" issue, though, was an article by Harry Warner, Jr. After we moved to
Maryland we were so excited about the prospect of finally meeting Harry that one of
our first out-of-town trips while we were getting settled in was a visit to 423
Summit Avenue in Hagerstown, which is in a nice residential neighborhood. His
article for Mimosa 6 was about another house in that neighborhood:illustration by Dave Rowe |
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