  In the late 1930s, Hagerstown had a
remarkably stable population. Generation after generation of a family stayed in this
city to such a great extent that the United States Public Health Service set up a
local office to do research on how health problems in certain families persisted from
one generation to another. So who were the young men, most-ly thin and with a
non-local appearance who showed up in this city from time to time? They weren't
foreign agents or criminals on the lam. They were science fiction fans trying to
find their way to my Bryan Place home.I didn't realize it at the time, but
many of my earliest visits from fans must have been partly impelled by uncertainty
whether I actually existed. This was a time when you never could tell about fans.
A famous fan in the early 1940s, Earl Singleton, lived for decades after his hoax
'suicide' had been publicized. 'Peggy Gillespie', an early FAPA member, turned out
to be Jack Gillespie's cat. 'John B. Bristol' turned out to be an ingenious hoax
created by Jack Speer. Neofans weren't absolutely sure that 'Hoy Ping Pong' was Bob
Tucker's pen name because he might possibly be a Chinese fan using 'Bob Tucker' as a
pseudonym. Forry Ackerman wrote under so many bylines like 'Weaver Wright', 'Fojak',
and 'Dr. Acula' that any unfamiliar contributor to a fanzine might really be him. I
had appeared in fanzine fandom rather abruptly; I had had several letters of no
particular distinction in prozine readers' sections and had corresponded with various
readers of science fiction who weren't otherwise active in fandom. When the first
issue of Spaceways fluttered into fannish mailboxes in the fall of 1938, that
was the first time some of its recipients had ever heard of me. So there was an
excellent chance that I wasn't what I seemed to be, a new fanzine publisher who had
seen very few fanzine issues and had never contributed to one.My first wave of visitors from fandom
to Hagerstown came around the time of the first worldcon, in the summer of 1939. As
far as I can remember, none of them had announced their imminent coming before they
knocked at the door of the house where my parents and I lived. I'm pretty sure that
the very first fans to see and talk with me were Fred Pohl and Jack Gillespie, just
few days after the very first worldcon. They rode to Hagerstown on their thumbs and
looked a bit bedraggled but otherwise chipper after a long day on the road. The
thing I remember best about their visit was the moment when Jack dug into a pants
pocket and pulled out a badly-rumpled little pamphlet. He presented it to me and
thus I had my first knowledge of the celebrated Exclusion Act at the worldcon which
resulted from the refusal of several New York Futurians to promise to behave
themselves during the convention. This was the document that Dave Kyle had printed
for the Futurians explaining their opinions of the way the worldcon had been
organized. I imagine it's one of the rarest documents in the history of fannish
publishing by now, and I should still have that copy somewhere in my attic. As you
might expect, I also heard from Fred and Jack a detailed verbal account of their
opinion of Sam Moskowitz, Jimmy Taurasi, and Will Sykora, the main adversaries of
the Futurians.Three days later, the fan visitor
jackpot came up. No fewer than six individuals clambered out of an auto in front of
303 Bryan Place and introduced themselves. They were Dale Hart, Walter Sullivan,
Julius Pohl, and three others whose names I seem never to have chronicled. At that
time, Dale was a good old country boy from the Southwest, although he became a very
different sort of sophisticate a few years later in Los Angeles. Walter was a nice,
quiet fan who was to die a few years later in the service of his nation. Julius
never became a big name fan; I seem to remember he was a Texan and shared my interest
in classical music.These half dozen visitors were very
tired after a long day of driving and threw me into complete consternation by asking
if they could spend the night sleeping on my front porch. The Warners didn't have
nearly enough square footage of bedding to offer them indoors overnight hospitality,
but 303 Bryan Place was one side of a double house, in whose other side was the
landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Fritz, resided. They were an ultra-conservative couple,
extremely strict about proper decorum on their property; bedding down on a front
porch just wasn't done in Hagerstown. My parents offered to attempt the impossible
by requesting permission for such wild behavior on their property, and to our
astonishment, Mrs. Fritz loved the idea and insisted that three of the visitors
spend the night on her front porch, since all six on one porch would be quite
crowded. The other thing I remember best about this visit was Dale improving his
appearance the next morning by what he called a 'dry shave'. I had never heard of
such a thing, but he got rid of most of his whiskers by using a safety razor without
water or any other preliminaries.Some time later that same summer, Jack
Speer and Milt Rothman paid me a visit. They were the closest active fans because
they lived at that time in Washington, D.C. They were more dignified in bearing and
conversation than most of my fan visitors, but I had never heard anything like the
way they challenged almost every opinion one or the other stated and indulged in
non-emotional discussions of these matters.
I believe it was in the fall of that
same year when Willis Conover stopped by on his way from his home on Maryland's
Eastern Shore to begin work as a radio announcer in Cumberland, a city in far western
Maryland. That was a memorable occasion because when I mentioned during our chatter
that the local second-hand store had a large stock of back issues of Argosy,
Willis insisted on going there immediately and buying them. Night was falling and
huge stacks of Argosy were kept in an unelectrified shed behind the store.
Willis and I sorted through them by the light of a kerosene lantern and would have
burned to death almost at once if it had toppled over amid the pulp magazines that
consumed almost all the space in the wooden shed. He arranged to have hundreds of
copies sent to his Cambridge, Maryland home and then left for Cumberland, the first
step on what eventually became a career as a writer and broadcaster on jazz,
eventually becoming internationally famous in this capacity.I don't have the exact date when
another impressive group of fans descended upon me, but it must have been in either
late 1939 or 1940. On their way to Philadelphia came Bob Tucker (and his wife),
Mark Reinsburg, Richard Meyer, and Walter E. Marconette. We did a lot of
picture-taking and, for some reason, Bob insisted on keeping his own camera before
one eye when anyone took a picture of him. Tucker, Reinsburg, and Meyer are all
well remembered, but Walter Marconette is an unjustly-forgotten fan artist. He was
one of the first in fandom to draw pictures that weren't imitations of prozine
illustrations or comic strip panels. He did well-composed and uncluttered lovely
pictures with hectograph inks and in pencil that have faded too badly to reveal
their original splendor. Unlike almost all my early fannish visitors, Walter was
not skinny. He wasn't fat, either, but he still looked strange compared to the
emaciated appearance of the average fan. Not long after his visit, Walter grew
interested in ancient armor and gave up fandom to collect it.After that, I think fans in general
were satisfied that I was what I had claimed to be -- myself and not a conspirator
in some sort of elaborate hoax. But lots of prominent fans continued to appear in
Hagerstown during the next few years: Elmer Perdue, Art Widner, Bob Madle, Julius
Unger, and Russell Chauvenet, to name a few. I also had a visit by a fan of whom
I'd never heard -- R.M. Brown, who surprised and gratified me by purchasing a
substantial part of my stack of leftover back issues of Spaceways. It was only much
later that I learned he was the hoax fan that I had once been thought to be. The
real name of 'R.M. Brown' was Earl Singleton. - - - - - - - - - -
We offer the following bit of closure to Harry's article: After he dropped from sight
in fandom, Earl Singleton went on to obtain his doctorate in Physics from M.I.T. He
became better known as Dr. Henry E. Singleton, one of the co-founders of Teledyne
Inc., and at the time of his death in August 1999, his personal fortune was estimated
at about $750 million. As for another famous name in Harry's article, Ron
Bennett wrote us, "Strangely, I first knew of Willis Conover as a broadcaster and
authority on Jazz before I ever became aware of his being a fan. When I did come
across his name in fandom, initially I wondered whether there might be two people
with the same name. At any rate, a great article. I could read Harry all day. And
come to think of it, on occasion, I have!"Even though M25 had an
"Aussiecon" theme, part of the issue was devoted to remembrances by John Berry and
Joyce Scrivner of Walter A. Willis, who passed away not long after Aussiecon. Walt
was one of the most storied and revered fans of all time; Harry Warner, Jr., once
described him as the "best and most gifted fan of the 1950s, who also might qualify
as the Number One Fan of any and all decades." Walt was a frequent contributor to
Mimosa (we published his very last original fanzine article); we included in
M25 (and again here) a bit of classic Willis -- a narrative from his visit
to the 1952 Chicon, reprinted (slightly abridged) from his epic trip report, The
Harp Stateside:All illustrations by Julia Morgan-Scott |
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