The first World Fantasy Convention was held in 1975 in Providence, Rhode Island.
A set of photos from the con is posted here.
Among them is a shot of Manly Wade Wellman holding one of the original World Fantasy Awards – a bust of Lovecraft, as ever – presented to him for Worse Things Waiting, the winner in the Best Collection/Anthology category.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]
Skylab 1 patch designed by Kelly Freas.
NASA will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the launch of Skylab, America’s first space station, on May 14.
Skylab hosted a trio of three-man crews — Kelly Freas designed the patch worn by the first, launched in May 1973. Once the third crew was ferried home in 1974, Skylab was abandoned.
Hopes that the forthcoming space shuttle would allow the facility to be reactivated were dashed because in there was no way to boost it into a higher orbit and keep it in space until the shuttle program got going.
Ironically, Skylab’s demise seems better remembered than any work that was ever done aboard.
Broadcast reports about its deteriorating orbit predicted likely places it might crash to Earth, representing another unrealized dream, and one more manmade problem for 1970s America to worry about — and therefore deserving of a certain bitter humor.
In the state of Washington a “Skylab Self-Defense Society” designated Spokane as the “Official U.S. Government Skylab Target.” The society painted a huge red-and-white bull’s-eye target behind its tiny rented office, and sold bull’s-eye T-shirts.
And a fan started his own “Save My Ass!” campaign, publishing flyers that asked people to donate so he could move out of Canada where the giant junk was predicted to hit.
Skylab ultimately re-entered the atmosphere above the southern Indian Ocean in 1979, with pieces landing inland along the south coast of Western Australia.
Several large pieces of Skylab survived, scattered in the Australian outback. Among the largest pieces were the oxygen tanks. One is featured to this day in a tiny museum along the waterfront in Esperance, a port town 450 miles from Perth. Another of the oxygen tanks was sent to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville and is on display there.
[Thanks to Chronicles of the Dawn Patrol.]
The International Costumers Guild is posting a series of short video tributes to the pioneers and superstars of convention masquerades
The trailer “15 Costumers You Should Know” credits Forry Ackerman as the “Father of Convention Costuming” – he wore a “futuristicostume” made by Myrtle Douglas at the first Worldcon in 1939. The series will revisit the historic work of fans Kathy Sanders, Bruce & Dana MacDermott, Karen Schaubelt Turner Dick, Animal X, Jacqueline Ward, Janet Wilson Anderson, Deborah K. Jones, Pierre & Sandy Pettinger, Barb Schofield, Adrian Butterfield and Ricky Dick.
See more at the IGC Archives.
Mark Hamill at MidAmeriCon in 1976.
Luke Skywalker turns 60 on September 25 – can you believe it?
Mark Hamill, born in 1952, began playing the iconic role over three decades ago in the original Star Wars (since retitled Star Wars plus-or-minus 3, if I recall.) And in those days everybody in the production company worked overtime to interest fans in their movie because it wasn’t even a sure bet to be released!
Hamill and producer Gary Kurtz traveled to MidAmeriCon, the 1976 Worldcon, to make the appeal. They did a Q&A together and Hamill posed with the exhibit of art and props from the movie. Nobody knew who he was yet. The convention daily newzine got his name wrong and came back with a correction in the next issue: “It’s Mark Hamill, not Mike Hamill …”
The editors of Rocket’s Blast Comic Collector interviewed Mark at the Worldcon and took the accompanying photo. The interview appeared in their October 1977 issue – six months after the release of Star Wars, by which time every sf fan knew his name.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]
The entire run of the famous fanzine Janus which Jan Bogstad and Jeanne Gomoll originated in the 1970s is available online here. It was a great zine, and the SF3 site explains:
Janus was nominated for three “Best Fanzine” Hugos in 1978, 1979 and 1980. Jeanne Gomoll was nominated for two “Best Fan Artist” Hugos in 1978 and 1980. Janus and Aurora were the most prominent feminist science fiction fanzines of their time. With the exception of Amanda Bankier’s fanzine, The Witch and the Chameleon, which ceased publication in 1976, Janus and Aurora were the ONLY fanzines with this focus.
Just how long it’s been available I don’t know: Bill Burns of eFanzines recently gave the archive a signal boost.
The publicity couldn’t be more timely with Jeanne Gomoll having been announced as a Loncon 3 guest of honor this past weekend.
While revisiting fanhistory for my Worldcon panels I began remembering some of the cool fannish things I once wished to own. Some of them I acquired. Some are still cool. One is still cool and available.
The Acoustic Modem
Plenty of fans in the 1970s were engineers, programmers and science grads with legitimate access to the ARPANET, the early computer network and forerunner of the internet. LASFS party hosts with accounts, of course, appreciated that the highest and best use of the system was calling into M.I.T. to let their guests play Zork.
Connecting to the net involved placing a regular phone receiver in the cradle of an acoustic coupler modem linked to the home PC. Those early modems were as big as a combat boot – the one my friends had must have been even bigger than the one in the picture, still, you get the idea.
It would have been heavenly — for some values of heaven — being able to call in and play Zork for endless hours with no other fans waiting breathlessly beside me for their turns. However, they soon clamped down on access to ARPANET accounts, and I could not have afforded however many hundred dollars that gadget cost. But it was cool!
The Ellison Index
Leslie Kay Swigart had been an active LASFS member of the era right before I joined the club, which is one reason Bruce Pelz had a copy of her magnum opus, Harlan Ellison: A Bibliographical Checklist. The 1973 first edition was printed by Williams Publishing of Dallas and I don’t know if that was a publishing house or just a printer. In any event, he showed off his copy during one of the card games at his place. The intricate cover by Leo & Diane Dillon made it look awesome. (Gosh, did I just write awesome?) And bearing in mind that Harlan Ellison in 1973 was at the pinnacle of his popularity, it’s understandable why Bruce’s offer to sell us copies was irresistible. You can’t read what you don’t even know exists, and in those pre-internet days Swigart’s checklist was the simplest way of discovering everything our hero had written.
Team Banzai headband
In 1984, Twentieth Century Fox hired a crew to travel around the country promoting The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension at conventions. They were the only source for the Team Banzai headband. The over-the-top title and the movie’s implicit coolness struck the right note with fans, which made the headbands popular. A few did wear them as headbands, others as armbands or thighbands, or tied to some piece of fannish paraphernalia.
Glow-in-the-Dark Bid T-Shirt
Fans sure did like the glow-in-the-dark LA-in-90 bid t-shirt (the yellow shirt in this picture). It may have been the most appealing thing about our bid. I’ll bet plenty of fans were wearing these shirts while happily marking their ballots for Holland.
Heinlein Blood Donor Pin
Robert Heinlein suffered two years of extensive illnesses and received many pints of his rare blood type in transfusions. He was determined to pay-it-forward, publicizing the National Rare Blood club and blood donation generally. Fans organized a blood drive at the 1976 Worldcon, MidAmericon, where he was guest of honor and Heinlein said he would only sign autographs for people who donated blood. Part of the package deal was a RAH blood donor pin (commissioned by the LASFS) and copies of his “Are You A Rare Blood” offprint which many of us had him autograph.
Commemorative Heinlein blood drives continue at conventions to this day, an unlike some of the other cool things mentioned in this article you can still get a donor pin.
Future Ray Bradbury branch library?
At their August 9 meeting the Los Angeles Public Library’s Board of Library Commissioners approved the first step in a process that will lead to renaming its Palms-Rancho Park Library after Ray Bradbury. (See the supporting documents here [PDF file].) It’s the branch closest to his Cheviot Hills home and already houses the “Ray Bradbury Meeting Room and Terrace,” dedicated in 2007 at the request of the Friends of the Palms-Rancho Park Branch.
The city’s process for naming a branch library after an individual begins with a written recommendation to the Board of Library Commissioners about the person’s contributions to humanity, the city, the library or the community:
The justification…should demonstrate that the character and achievements of the individual set standards of excellence, served as a role model, and reflected the principles and ideals of American democracy, its diversity and plurality.
Now that it has been approved by the Board, the recommendation will be posted for three months in all LA city libraries and on the LAPL website. The staff will consider public comments, then submit a report to the Board for its consideration.
Bradbury’s LA city councilmember, Paul Koretz, and the Westside Neighborhood Council have already thrown their support behind the idea.
Koretz is also working with the Bradbury family to name the Central Library Plaza (in downtown LA) after the late author.
Coincidentally, the Palms-Rancho branch adjoins the park where LASFS was meeting when I joined in 1970. We met in a low-slung community building (not the library) on Thursdays, the same night kids came to the park to race their moto-cross bicycles — one memorably riding his bike across the roof of our building during a LASFS meeting.
The club soon moved.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]
Harry Warner Jr.’s Best Fan Writer Hugo from 1972 is part of a fanhistoric lot on the auction block through June 28. The high bid at this writing is $700.
Part of Warner’s collection acquired by the late Jerry Weist, the Hugo is in an archive lot with a –
printed bound working draft proof and dust jacket mock-up (folded over a reprint copy of All Our Yesterdays hardcover) for A Wealth of Fable: An Informal History of Science-Fiction Fandom in the 1950, [and] the second edition of All Our Yesterdays in VG condition….
The Heritage Auction website misidentifies it as a 1971 Hugo. Harry only won the Best Fan Writer Hugo in 1969 and 1972, and it’s clear from the nameplate this award was given at L.A.Con (1972).
The website’s large image of the Hugo also shows one fin of the rocket and the nameplate are spattered with brown discoloration. That might clean up. On the other hand, the pits on the chrome rocket are quite possibly original – complaints from winners in the old days suggest that was a chronic manufacturing problem before Peter Weston took over making them.
Edd Vick comments, “I feel so conflicted. On one hand I’d hate to see it consigned to the dustbin, but on the other I’d certainly rather it wound up where it will be appreciated. I hope it winds up in the collection of a trufan.”
I expect he speaks for most fans on this subject.
[Thanks to Michael Walsh, Edd Vick and Andrew Porter for the story.]
Jim Young at the 1993 World SF Convention, Confrancisco. Photo by © Andrew I. Porter.
Jim Young, who helped make Minneapolis fandom legendary, died peacefully on June 12 around 11:10 a.m., a week after emergency surgery for a malignant brain tumor. He never regained consciousness. He was 61 years old.
Jim was present at the creation of MN-Stf, The Minnesota Scientifiction Society, in 1966. He “did nearly everything” at the first Minicon in 1968 remembers Fred A Levy Haskell. Even Minicon’s famous blog was rumored to have originated as a punch recipe learned from his mother.
Jim was the original spearhead for the Minneapolis in ’73 Worldcon bid. Having been lucky enough to lose to Toronto, Minneapolis fans never stopped throwing bid parties.
And naturally Jim participated in Minneapa, the local amateur publishing association. Jim appears in the third row of this 1974 photo of Minneapans with a drink in his hand. (Blog, perhaps?)
Jim’s career in the State Department’s Foreign Service took him to Botswana, Russia, Nigeria, and England. After retiring as the U.S. Coordinator for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) he moved to Southern California and worked tirelessly to break into the entertainment industry.
He also made his mark as a pro writer with two SF novels, The Face of the Deep (1979) and Armed Memory (1995), and four stories. “Microde City” inspired the cover of Asimov’s June 1993 issue, which depicted one of the Hammerheads who use their genetic engineering technology to transform humans into sharks. Dave Langford’s eye was caught by a line in Jim’s “Ultraviolet Night” (F&SF, March 2004) – if getting quoted in Thog’s Masterclass is not a pat on the back, I suspect Jim intended the effect he created:
As he stood there waiting for his lower brain to stop broadcasting retaliatory lizard thoughts, it occurred to him that this was a message loaded with semantic interference, a veritable Cadillac of cognitive dissonance.
Jim’s final two published stories were “The Whirlwind” in F&SF (Jan./Feb. 2011) and “Spamhead” in 10Flash Quarterly (March 2011, full text available free here).
In one of my last conversations with Jim he said he had a novel on submission with Tor. And last year we exchanged e-mails as we both hoped to get a story out of his latest role – he played Adolf Hitler in Nazis at the Center of the Earth (under the name James Maxwell). Jim was waiting on a green light from the director, in whose good graces he naturally wanted to remain. For whatever reason we never got that done and the project went straight to video this spring. I’m sorry I didn’t get to write that up, and the rest of the stories that might have come from the acting career he enjoyed so much.
By Bill Warren: I’ve never met someone who was so enthusiastic, ebullient, upbeat all the time.
At the Oakland-Berkeley Worldcon in 1968 (or so), I was sitting in the coffee shop with some friends when we saw Bradbury enter the hotel. He smiled and waved at me — then, to my surprise, made an abrupt turn and came into the coffee shop to talk to me. He said I always knew where the best stuff was going on, so where should he go? We chatted a bit, and he breezed out of the place. My friends stared at me in shock. Ray fucking BRADBURY? Did I know Bradbury THAT well? I said “Evidently so,” but I was quite puzzled myself — yes, I knew him (thru Forry), but I didn’t think I did know him that well. So later I encountered him in a hallway and asked about it. He was ready for me. He said that at an early convention (I figure this was the post-WWII Worldcon in LA), he was with a bunch of friends when Leigh Brackett came up and chatted with him about his work. He was puzzled; they WERE friends, but it seemed out of character for her to approach him like that. So he asked her about it. She said she was trying to encourage his career as a writer, by treating him as a fellow professional — and did it in front of his friends, to give him egoboo. Bradbury said “Now you have to pass it on.”
People don’t quite seem to realize how VERY unusual he was — not really so much so in his fiction (though nobody else ever wrote like him), but in how he used his fame. He was EVERYwhere in Los Angeles, turning up for many events, always upbeat, always booming and very much there (that stunned me when I first met him; I thought he’d be a shy, quiet poet type, not so much like say Jack Carson or Sonny Tufts). He had a direct, forceful way of talking that still seemed fresh and spontaneous and friendly, dropping in little affirmations (“doesn’t it?” “don’t they?”) of what he’d just said. He was just about the most PUBLIC writer I have ever seen, or will ever see again. He was a very big booster of Los Angeles, so much so that it still seems a little odd that he ever lived anywhere else.
Side note: I read, then heard directly from him, about how he changed his mind about Disneyland. At first, he was highly skeptical of the place, and of Walt Disney. He refused to go to the park for a couple of years, then Charles Laughton, “the biggest child on Earth,” impatiently took him by hand and down to Disneyland, where he showed Ray that the place was not at all what he had imagined it to be. Too bad there are no photos of Laughton leading Bradbury around Disneyland. To me, that’s as wonderful a thought as imagining Ray Bradbury as a grandfather. He would have been the greatest grandfather who ever lived — except maybe for Walt Disney.
Today, I thought further on the strange tale (I think I heard it from Bill Nolan) that in the 1940s, Bradbury had a big bonfire in his back yard, where he burned all his unsold stories–and he must have had hundreds of them. At first, I was horrified — all that great Bradbury stuff, gone up in a gout of fire, undoubtedly burning at Fahrenheit 451. But then I realized what it was: His way of ensuring that he would not be followed around by the ghosts of his past writing, of stories that he knew weren’t as good as what he was turning out by then. He also knew he had become a professional writer; he couldn’t yet have been certain that he could be the sole breadwinner of his (new or about to be) family, but he knew he could write stories that would sell.
I hope someone more skilled than me can write about the habits of Ray Bradbury, Professional Writer. He said he wrote a thousand words every day of his life, and I have no reason to disbelieve him; I’ve heard that he kept on doing it, up until a few months before he died. That indicates a steely, hard-learned discipline — even though he came on like a house afire (which greatly surprised me), even though his reputation at LASFS was that of a practical-joking chatterbox, he was very serious about becoming a writer. Then he was very serious about BEING a writer; he was just about the most public writer I’ve ever heard of. He loved being famous, and he used his fame very wisely, and very often. Okay, so his plays were usually not very good, and his poetry was limp, but long ago he won the right to be judged by his best work. Don’t all writers have a falling-off period?
Take a look at his Internet Movie Database (imdb.com, I think) pages; he wrote for a LOT of TV series in the 1950s, many more than I knew about, some of which seem highly unlikely as a venue for Bradbury material (Steve Canyon???), but he was a pro, and pros sell their stuff. He even wrote 65 scripts for his own Ray Bradbury Theater, which was often not all that good, but by George, he did it, he did it. There’s a whole lot of filmed Bradbury, much more than most people realize–and even more yet when you count all the student and amateur productions of his work. He told me that he allowed any film student who asked to adapt his work, as long as they sent him a print of the finished product. As he said this, he gestured sort of absently toward the darker recesses of his basement office, where there was a lot of room. I hope his family considers collecting the best of those student films into a set of DVDs.
I’ll attach three or so photos. The black-and-white was taken (by Daugherty) at a big surprise party for Forry in 1967, about five minutes after I first met Ray Bradbury. We swapped glasses, and found our prescriptions were similar.
Bill Warren meets Ray Bradbury at the Dracula Society banquet.
The shot of Ray talking was taken at the 2nd LASFS clubhouse in North Hollywood, when it was still under construction.
Bradbury addressing the LASFS.
The odd shot requires a little explanation. Remember the Lytton Center for the Visual Arts? (I think that was the name — the basement of a savings-and-loan place that was at the corner of Sunset and Laurel Canyon) One night, they showed something of interest; Beverly and I, and our friend Jon Berg, went; so did Forry, Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen and his wife. We were there for a movie, but there was also a current display of slightly eccentric wire sculptures. One of them was of an elephant, and was about half the size of a baby elephant. It had a door and a stool inside; you could sit there and waggle the trunk and ears. I did this to amuse Harryhausen (“Is this how you do it, Mr. Harryhausen?”) but Bradbury got all excited and insisted I get out so he could get in. He, too, waggled the ears and trunk and declared “I am the spirit of the elephant!”
Ray Bradbury as the Spirit of the Elephant.