 Do You Know the Way to ConJosé?  Doesn't seem that long ago, but the
last time we had been to California was back in 1999 when we were the fan guests at
the Anaheim NASFiC. We didn't get to see very much outside the Anaheim Marriott
then, so the last time we actually got to do a bit of vacationing in California was
back in 1996, just prior to L.A.Con III when we spent a weekend in San Francisco,
then drove down to L.A. via Ventura.That was a pleasant week, so we
decided to do it again, more or less, but in the opposite direction (starting in Los
Angeles this time), since the 2002 Worldcon was in San José, not Anaheim.
Things did not get off to a good start. The United Airlines flight from Baltimore
was more than an hour delayed due to some kind of mechanical problem with the
airplane (they ended up using a different airplane for the flight), so we missed our
connecting flight from Chicago. Luckily, there was another flight to L.A. about an
hour later, but it turned out our luggage didn't make that connection and arrived at
LAX about another hour after we did. And when we finally tracked down the luggage,
one of the suitcases had been badly damaged en route (the zipper had been mostly
torn out).By that time, it was about 8:30pm, so
we decided to take it up with United after we got to San José; we needed to
find our hotel in the Van Nuys area then meet up with Craig Miller and Genny Dazzo,
who were going to give us directions to their home for dinner the next evening. Due
to more problems with the rental car, we didn't make it to the LASFS clubhouse until
only the last few hangers-on were still there, but one of them, the writer John
DeChancie, offered to lead us to the after-the-meeting restaurant where LASFS
members often went. For once the timing was good -- most people were just getting
their food orders, and Craig and Genny were there. They told us they weren't too
worried, as they figured we'd find a way to contact them if we didn't show up. We
told them they have more trust in our people-finder abilities than we did!Genny and Rich had been talking about
lasagna recipes at Midwestcon earlier in the year, which had led Craig and Genny to
invite us to their home for a lasagna dinner. And, since you can't bake lasagna for
just four people, they also invited some of their friends (all of whom were involved
in some way with the television and film industry). Since the Washington area SF
fans' career interests tend to revolve around government, it was interesting to
listen in to a totally different topic that was the main interest of a different
part of the country -- the movie business. There were many interesting stories that
night, and we had such a good time listening to them Rich never did get to tell any
of his Eastern Europe adventures.It turned out that Genny had been
preparing the lasagna for about three days! (Some things, including a good lasagna
meat sauce, you just can't rush.) She also collects teapots, something we'd known
for a few years (we've contributed several, in fact), but this was the first chance
to see the collection. It was huge! She must have at least 500 of them, probably
more, and they are all on display on shelves and bookcases in her dining room. They
range from the large to the tiny, from the prosaic to the ornate. On the way north
to San Francisco, we found her a teapot shaped like a pumpkin in a second-hand
consignment store in Ventura. It was different enough to be interesting, but after
seeing her collection, we weren't entirely sure she didn't already have it!
A day and evening in Ventura visiting
our friends Lester and Esther Cole was next on our schedule. We first met them back
in 1993, at the San Francisco worldcon, and both of them have written essays we've
published in Mimosa. Ventura's downtown area has been transformed since we
were last there into mostly a touristy area of antique and consignment shops and
restaurants, with a regional attraction of one of the Spanish Missions that were
built along the California coastline back in the 1700s. Definitely worth a day
there, but our schedule didn't allow us to stay any longer than that.Next on our itinerary was a visit to
the Hearst Castle, about three hours drive north from Ventura. The nearest town to
the Castle is San Simeon, but we decided to stay the night instead about 10 miles
south, in Cambria, which looked to be a more interesting place. And it was! The
main street was lined with lots of little craft and antique stores to explore, and
there were also many good places to eat. At one of them, where we stopped in for an
evening snack, we were introduced to a local delicacy, the olallieberry, which seems
to be a cross between the raspberry and blackberry -- chocolate olallieberry bread
pudding with whipped cream is just too good, actually, to adequately describe in
print.As for the Hearst Castle itself, it
greatly exceeded our expectations, and we don't think we've been in a building that's
comparable -- it's a mansion that aspires to be a palace. The building and grounds
now belong to the State of California, and it's not run like a typical state park --
there's an IMAX theater in the welcoming center that shows a 40-minute dramatization
about the construction of the place and several guided tours to choose from to see
the place (you can't just get a grounds pass). We chose the Hearst Castle 101 tour
(or whatever the name of the introductory tour was called), which, after an exciting
bus ride up a narrow, winding road, took us through most of the ground floor of the
main building.And from there, it was on to San
Francisco. The Internet found us a good hotel deal -- a $65 per night double at the
Renoir Hotel, just off Market Street. Unfortunately, the San Francisco Giants were
playing in Colorado, so we didn't get to see the new PacBell Park, but we had more
than enough other things to do to fill the two evenings and a day we were in the
city.One problem with having just two
evenings in San Francisco is that you can only go to two different restaurants for
dinner. One of them was The Stinking Rose, the garlic-themed restaurant, which was
as good as we remember it from 1993 and 1996. We met up there with a fan from the
Washington club who was on her first visit to the West Coast and showed her around
Chinatown after dinner, which was its usual mesmerizing human kaleidoscope. We'd
also intended to go to Des Alpes, a limited-menu Basque restaurant (where we'd taken
Guy Lillian, Teddy Harvia, and some other fan friends, back in 1993 during the San
Francisco Worldcon), but to our dismay it was gone! Where it had been was now
occupied by a Chinese-owned business, proof that San Francisco's Chinatown has
continued to expand in the time since we were last there. Change is inevitable, but
we'll miss Des Alpes -- we'd gone there for dinner whenever we were in San Francisco,
and it was like an old friend.And then, finally, it was time for
ConJosé. This was the 20th Worldcon we've attended (our 15th in a row). We
guess that means we're no longer neos, but subjectively, the 1970s don't seem
that long ago.It was not the most smoothly-run
convention we've ever attended. We'd decided to stay at an outlying hotel, mostly
due to waiting three months after the hotel blocks were opened before booking a
hotel room (we never thought that $130-a-night hotel rooms would sell like hotcakes).
But if we'd successfully gotten into what would have been our first choice, the
Hyatt St. Claire in downtown San José, we'd have most likely have gotten a
rude surprise. Some screw-up with the convention booking service had resulted in a
large overbooking for that hotel, and many people who'd thought they would be
staying in the downtown instead found themselves out at the Hyatt near the San
José airport, the better part of an hour's commute away by the county's
slow-moving light rail.The convention itself didn't do too
much better than that the first day -- the registration people had apparently had
some kind of problem with their membership database which resulted in them not
having membership badges for any pre-registers whose last name began with the letter
N. Pocket programs weren't available until that afternoon, either, which made it
difficult for a while to figure out which events were going on where.Originally the convention was to have
been held in San Francisco, but problems with hotel and/or convention center
availability resulted in the venue shift a few months before the site selection vote
back in 1999. We think we would have probably preferred San Francisco, but downtown
San José is not a bad place to be. Many of the convention attendees took
some time off to visit some of the local attractions, like the strangely-constructed
Winchester Mystery House and the Tech Museum of Innovation. The one we went to see
was the local Museum of Quilts and Textiles, which had a display of quilts on the
topic of "The Last Year" -- some stark images of the elderly during their final
weeks. The quilts were done in a realist style to be almost indistinguishable from
portraiture paintings when standing farther away than about ten feet. But it was
not really morbid; the images were actually quite compelling -- worthy remembrances
of people who had accepted death, and were meeting the ends of their lives with
dignity.Parts of San José itself seemed
rather morbid, but in a dignified way. There were many empty and abandoned
storefronts along the street where the light rail ran, presumably where dot-com
companies had once been located before the bubble burst, awaiting new life when the
economy turns upward again. The local economy had other ways of coping, though --
there was a large street craft fair in downtown San José the weekend of
ConJosé, similar in scope and content to the Sugarloaf Craft Festivals here
in the Washington, D.C., area, with hundreds of vendors. Thousands of people braved
the hot weather to browse, and eat, and buy. We bought a silver armadillo pin for a
friend of ours from a craftsperson who told us he liked to read science fiction, and
who was amazed to find out that the World Science Fiction Convention was taking place
just a short distance away from him. A bit earlier, Rich had talked to another
craftsperson who was selling ornate little wooden boxes of the kind he'd seen during
his Russia trip back in 1994. When he told her that, she asked where in Russia he'd
been, and was rather surprised when Rich mentioned that one of the places was the
Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk -- originally her home. It really is a small
world!
There were many friends of ours at
ConJosé from all around this small world. Janice Gelb, who lives maybe 15
miles from San José, was trying her best (with mixed results) to stay out of
convention operations long enough to attend much of the convention. Adrienne Losin,
who lives south of Melbourne, Australia, stayed hidden so well that we didn't cross
paths with her until near the end of the convention. One unexpected treat, on the
last day of the convention, was the discovery that British fan Ron Bennett, the 1958
TAFF delegate (and Mimosa contributor), was at the convention for that one
day. He was actually in the States to visit his son, who edits a Silicon
Valley-based computer trade journal of some kind, and just showed up unannounced.
The only reason we found him at all was because of a chance remark of a bookseller
friend of ours who'd sold him a book in the dealers room.It was a chance remark of a different
sort that led to the most-repeated story of the convention. Australian fan Stephen
Boucher, who comes to the U.S. so often that he's become part of midwest fandom, had
been asked, in jest, if he was interested in bidding Australia for the 2005 NASFiC
convention. Stephen replied that if he was going to bid for a convention the scale
of a NASFiC, he'd rather bid for a Worldcon instead. Bingo! Twenty-dollar bills
for pre-supporting memberships immediately began piling up in front of him. Before
another day had passed an 'Australia-in-2010' bid shirt had been produced and a web
site was online. A somewhat dumbfounded Stephen was later heard to remark, when
asked if he was going to be the Chairman, "I'm just the hood ornament on this
bulldozer." And thus are worldcon bids born and fan history created.ConJosé seemed to do a better
job of creating fan history than showcasing it -- there seemed to be fewer fan
history-related programming items than at other recent worldcons. In fact, maybe
the most interesting fan history-related hour (for Rich, at least) of the convention
happened at a room party, where he and Ben Yalow took the opportunity to describe
some of the things that happened in fandom of the 1940s, `50s, and `60s to an
interested fan named Janis Ian. After the convention, Rich sent her a copy of the
1950s fan history book he had edited and she sent back two of her CDs. Fair
exchange.What ConJosé lacked in fan
programming, it made up for in a Fan Lounge. An upper floor of the main hotel had
two large suites -- one was used as the Con Suite and the other became the Fan
Lounge. Depending which way you turned getting out of the elevator, you found one
or the other (and, from the looks of puzzlement, not always the one that was
expected). As the Fan Lounge was the one with all the fanzines and fanzine fans,
that's the one we spent time in. It was a place of relative quiet and good
conversation as well as lots of good food, which made it a preferred breakfast
spot.The Con Suite also had lots of food,
much more than even fans could consume, and they had enough to stock a small grocery
store when the convention ended. Since this was the Con Suite, it was usually very
busy and very, very noisy. It was also a bit dark as, unlike the Fan Lounge, the
window curtains were usually kept drawn. Nicki found out why on our second day
there.While sitting and talking with Dave
Kyle in the Fan Lounge, she noticed an airplane. Downtown San José, it
turned out, was in the landing path of the airport and there was a perfect view from
the Fan Lounge of each airplane preparing to land. Too perfect, actually.
As she watched, the airplane got closer, closer, closer, closer, and just as
you could clearly see the landing gear coming down, the plane veered to the right
and receded from view. Every few minutes the performance was repeated; it was all
a bit unnerving. Nicki eventually decided it was time to either sit where she
couldn't see the planes or go watch some programming.Five days for a worldcon seems a long
time, but it usually goes by in a flash and ConJosé was no exception. The
last major event of the convention was the Hugo Awards; we had been nominated in the
Fanzine category, for Mimosa, for the twelfth year in a row, but lost by 19
votes to Dave Langford's Ansible. We weren't really expecting to win, as
it's been a few years since the last time we had, but we were a bit surprised that
Ansible was the winner -- California resident Mike Glyer, who had won the
award (for File 770) the past two years, had seemed the clear favorite.There are many memories we'll keep
from ConJosé. Patrick Stewart's unpublicized event the Friday night of the
convention was one of them; he came to ConJosé primarily to promote the
upcoming Star Trek: Nemesis and X2: X-Men United movies, but the 45
minutes he was on-stage showed him to be engaging and entertaining -- somebody who
was much more than just a talking head. Another was the Bruce Pelz remembrance
event -- Bruce wasn't a religious person and there was no memorial service for him
after his death in May, so instead his friends held informal secular wakes for him
at this year's Westercon and also at ConJosé, where we had a final opportunity
to say good-bye.Saying good-bye to California is
never easy to do, but after two weeks of vacation and convention, we were ready to
come back home. The return trip was uneventful, but it was almost midnight by the
time we got home and we both had to go to work the next day. By the time we'd
gotten fully caught up with the real world, ConJosé had receded several weeks into
the past and the only mention we saw of it was the occasional review in fanzines
and online.It came as a surprise, then, when a
big cardboard box appeared on our front porch one day; when we opened it, we
found... the suitcase! We'd left it with the United Airlines luggage service people
in San José and had almost forgotten about it, but there it was, repaired and
ready to go. Maybe we'll bring it to Torcon 3...# # # #
FIAWOL, or perilously close to it... This, as most of our readers are
aware, is our final issue, and we'll have more to say about why there will be no
more Mimosas as the issue progresses. As for the contents of this issue,
about two years ago we decided on the theme of FIAWOL ("fandom is a way of life");
this last issue is meant to be a celebration of fandom in all its forms and ways.
Sometimes, though, a celebration is a remembrance of a life. It's been about a
year-and-a-half since we published a non-Fanthology issue. Since then much has
happened, including the passing of two fan friends who, to paraphrase Bob Tucker,
never found science fiction or fandom a way of life, but at times probably came
perilously close to it...On May 9, 2002, Matthew Tepper posted
the following to an Internet newsgroup: "I have just returned from tonight's LASFS
meeting. Larry Niven announced that Bruce Pelz died this afternoon." It was
terrible news, and more than a year later, we think we may still be in denial.
Rich's response was the following remembrance:
I am truly at a loss for words, and I
don't want to be because Bruce's friendship has been one of the constants in the
nearly three decades I've been actively a science fiction fan; he was someone I
looked forward to seeing, more than anybody else, at worldcons. Living a
continent-width away, our paths crossed only too infrequently.Bruce's presence over the past two
decades has been a huge influence on my interest in the history of SF fandom. Nicki
and I decided to publish Mimosa, a fanzine dedicated to fan history, in large
part because of Bruce and other fans interested in preservation of our past
enthralled us with entertaining and interesting stories about fandom's past eras.
We regret we didn't try harder to get Bruce himself to write more about his decades
in fandom -- Bruce only preserved one of his stories in print for us. [It appeared
in M27].It's getting so that every time that
I meet up with an old friend I haven't seen in a long time, I feel I need to
treasure the moment because there's a chance there might not be another time. I
never thought this about Bruce, though -- he was a rock, a constant, someone who's
presence I always took for granted. I cannot for sure even remember the very last
time I spoke to him in person, though it was sometime during the 2001 Philadelphia
worldcon. It was probably when we went to dinner on the Saturday night of the
convention; he was ailing from leg pain and moving very slowly. I remember that we
shared about an hour's worth of conversation, on topics ranging from places in the
world we wanted to go back to (he was a world traveler in his final years) to what
we thought would make good fan history projects in the future (including my still
incomplete 1960s fan history). It was there that he told me the story that he later
put into print for Mimosa.Bruce's passing is truly the end of
an era. I think he will be remembered as one of the most important and most
influential fans of all time, and certainly as one of the most active. The list of
his activities and accomplishments is enormous, covering almost every activity
imaginable from convention running to costuming to fanzine collecting to organizing.
He was active in fandom in six different decades. He was truly a fan for the ages,
and now he belongs to the ages.I already miss him very much.It was this past October, while we
were preparing the second half of the Fanthology issue when more bad news arrived
via the Internet: "Dalvin M. Coger, a fan since the early 1940s,
passed away on Wednesday, October 2nd, from a post-surgery antibiotic-resistant
bacterial infection." Once again, Rich posted a follow-up:
Dal's activity in science fiction
fandom began in the midwest U.S. about 1942, when he attended the second Michicon in
the fall of that year. He was only active for a couple of years before he went into
the military for World War II, but in that time he became friends with Al and Abby
Lou Ashley and other people in the Galactic Roamers fan club in central Michigan,
and as a result, spent many happy days at the most famous fan abode of all time, the
legendary Slan Shack of Battle Creek, Michigan. Of that place, Dal later wrote that
"fan visitors from far and wide came by to enjoy the Ashley's hospitality." Because
he became stationed thousands of miles away, in California, Dal wrote that "I was
immensely unhappy that I couldn't [often] share in this."It was actually Dal's good fortune to
be stationed at Camp Haan, in southern California, for his basic training, and during
the relatively short time he was there before being shipped off to France, he became
friends with the LASFS crowd, including Jim Kepner, Forry Ackerman, and the enigmatic
Francis Towner Laney. Dal later wrote about that time, mentioning that "I was
permitted to flop over the weekend in the [LASFS] clubhouse [on Bixel Street], and
frequently spent Saturday nights there while on a weekend pass. Forry Ackerman and
Morojo had made me welcome."It was more than 20 years of gafiation
after that, first in the military and then in academia -- Dal became a professor at
the University of Memphis (Tennessee), where he was a notable historian and African
Studies writer. He re-entered fandom in the mid 1970s, and became a sort of
patriarch for Memphis fandom after that.I met Dal not long after his re-entry
into fandom, at a small convention in Arkansas where he was Toastmaster and
introduced me to the convention's Guest of Honor, Bob Tucker. Dal and I stayed in
contact with each other after that; it was probably our common interest in history,
especially the history of science fiction fandom, that helped make us friends. And
even though most of his time was still absorbed by academic interests, both before
and after his retirement sometime in the 1990s, he still found time for some fan
writing; I am pleased that Nicki and I were allowed to publish two of his fan
history-related articles in Mimosa. He was also a great conversationalist,
and the times we met each other at conventions usually resulted in a couple of hours
of shared stories (mostly his), about travels and times past. These were fascinating
to listen to.After Nicki and I moved to Maryland
near the end of 1988, Dal and I crossed paths only every year or two, usually at
Midwestcons we both happened to attend. The most recent time was this past June,
and I remember him looking very energetic and healthy, much younger than his 80+
years. For that reason, I don't think I ever thought that might be the last time
I'd ever see him. Unfortunately, I won't, and I am still trying to come to grips
that. I am going to miss him greatly.Midwestcon 54 is less than a month
away as this is being written, and friends of Bruce and Dal will be there. We will,
too -- we look forward to further celebrating their lives and we won't mourn their
passing. We hope you'll do the same for
Mimosa. Title illustration by Sheryl Birkhead All photos by Rich Lynch |
|