It was just in the last issue of his fanzine Askance that John Purcell wrote, “Personally, I’m in no hurry to become a grandfather, but I know it will happen someday.”
Well, today was that day!
John and Valerie Purcell’s daughter Josie gave birth to Brian Charles James Blevins at 5:21 p.m. on May 26, making them grandparents for the first time. Congratulations.
Golden Atom #10 (Winter 1943), cover art by Rosco E. Wright
Larry Farsace, voted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2012, died of cancer on January 9 at the age of 91. First Fandom’s newzine Scientifiction reported his passing in the Spring issue.
Farsace, who anglicized his name from Litterio B. Farsaci, was a child prodigy who gave lectures at the University of Rochester when he was 9 years old. As a teenager he was an avid magazine collector. He discovered fandom in 1935 after buying a year’s worth of Fantasy Magazine at a local bookstore. In the 1940s he was reputedly fandom’s top magazine collector after buying out the collections of two other oldtime Rochester fans.
He joined the Army and served overseas during WWII.
In addition to collecting, he published small bibliographies for early conventions and a zine called Fantastic for the first Worldcon. For a time he was a member of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association.
In 1939 he started The Golden Atom, a sercon fanzine named for Ray Cummings’ “The Girl in the Golden Atom”. The first ten issues were in letter-sized mimeographed format. Two special issues, appearing in 1955 and 1959, were done in letterpress. Harry Warner Jr. called the 1955 issue “the most expensive fanzine in history: 100 printed pages and lots of art in an edition of 1,200 copies at a cost of some $1,500.” Farsace’s 1959 issue had an identical budget and sold to fans for $1 a copy. Sam Moskowitz praised the early issues as “arguably the most valuable repository of new research and reference on SF.”
By Taral Wayne: So many issues of The Drink Tank, so little time to fill them. However, as of this issue, I’ve filled 100 of them! To commemorate the event, Chris Garcia and I collaborated on a Special Issue! I began my appearances in DT way back in 2007, with a two part interview conducted by Frank Wu. I was a little slow reappearing, but once I got into the habit, it was a hard one to break. In the 187 issues since, I’ve added to the pages somewhat more often than once every other DT. Most of the pieces I contributed were moderately short, but that’s still a lot of writing any way you slice it. Somebody should have told me it was habit forming.
There has been a lot of careless talk about the zine’s “golden touch,” as though to be a regular contributor was a punched ticket to the Hugo Ceremonies, right up front where the other nominees sit. It has won Chris the Rocket for Best Fanzine, along with his co-editor, James Bacon. It has also won DT’s frequent cover artist, Mo Starkey a Hugo for Best Fanartist. But I recommend caution before throwing around irresponsible theories like that. If it were so … where’s my Hugo? I am the living proof that Chris and Mo earned their Hugo some other way than by merely appearing in Drink Tank. Bribery perhaps?
Drink Tank 340 was finished a couple of days ago, and ought to be posted on eFanzines just before this issue of Broken Toys. Oh … and by the way. As a Special Celebration of the Special Issue, I have ceased writing for Drink Tank.
It is said that the best way to create a demand is to limit supply, you see. Now that my writing in Drink Tank will be in very short supply, perhaps it will stimulate voter interest, so that I may someday – finally – have my very own silver rocket to cradle in my arms!
Two fans have already responded to Leah Zeldes’ plea to help preserve copies of Larry Tucker’s audio and video fanzines. Mike Griffin and Jim Meadows have volunteered to let copies be dubbed from their cassettes of a couple issues of Uncle Albert’s Electric Talking Fanzine. More are needed to fill in a set.
Meadows says he has been making good use of his copies as a fanhistorical resource all along —
I work as a reporter at a public radio station in Illinois (WILL at the University of Illinois in Urbana). A few years ago, when Bob Tucker died, I did a feature story on his death, noting his status as a local author (the Bloomington-Normal area, where he lived for many years, is just one county over from us). I also attempted to sketch in Bob’s reputation in the sf fan community, and used an excerpt of Tucker giving a convention speech that appeared in Larry Tucker’s cassette zine. Much later, maybe a couple of years, I got an email from a son of Bob Tucker (maybe David Tucker?) asking about that speech. I dubbed off the speech and emailed it to him, and he expressed thanks for being able to hear his father’s voice again.
Larry Tucker, the long-time Michigan fan who has been in a nursing home since he suffered a serious stroke two years ago, was hospitalized at the beginning of April for colon surgery. Reports immediately after the surgery were favorable. He was expected to be returned to his nursing home after a week recovering in the hospital.
Tucker chaired the 1978-1980 ConFusions in Ann Arbor. He is best known for creating Uncle Albert’s Electric Talking Fanzine (on cassette) and a similarly named video edition. He was a fannish video pioneer, as Leah Zeldes explained to readers of “The Clubhouse” on the Amazing Stories blog –
Larry, an avid and talented video buff at a time when video meant U-matic tape, chronicled most of the early cons, as well as making a variety of other fannish videos, notably “Big Bird Eats Moon,” which chronicled a Stilyagi lunar eclipse party as told by a cultural anthropologist; “The Thing That Ate Gorgonzola State University,” real-life interviews with students about the news that the earth was being eaten by a black hole; and the full-length feature “FAANs,” starring just about every well-known Midwestern fan of the period: the ultimate sf con as a parody of “Jaws.”
These days Katherine Becker of Ann Arbor’s Stilyagi Air Corps visits Tucker and keeps up his connection with fandom. She relayed news of his surgery to Leah Zeldes, who in turn would like to encourage people to drop Larry a line at his permanent address:
Regency at Whitmore Lake
8633 North Main St
Whitmore Lake, MI 48189
Leah says –
I don’t think he can read — the stroke he had two years ago was pretty devastating — but Katherine will read the mail to him when she visits, and post them on his wall. It would be nice if he got a bunch of cards and letters, not just now but on an ongoing basis.
Leah would also like to locate more copies of Larry’s videos so they can be digitized and preserved. She obtained a copy of “FAANs” and has someone working on it, but says his other tapes are in an unknown state. If anyone has copies of “The Thing That Ate Gargonzola State University,” “Big Bird Eats Moon,” “Uncle Albert’s Electric Talking Fanzine” (audio tape) or “Uncle Albert’s Video Fanzine,” send a note to File 770 – mikeglyer [at] cs [dot] com – and I will put you in touch with her.
Allyn Cadogan. Photo by Gary S. Mattingly.
Part of the faannish trio who founded Corflu, Allyn Cadogan died of liver cancer on April 16 in Tucson, AZ.
The fanzine fans’ convention was the margarita-inspired idea of Cadogan, Lucy Huntzinger and Shay Barsabe during an evening in 1983 spent lamenting the marginalization of fanzine fandom at the big conventions. They held the first Corflu the following year in Berkeley.
Prior to moving to the Bay Area, Cadogan was an integral part of Vancouver’s vibrant fan community — editor of the local club’s BCFSAzine (August 1976-September 1977), and treasurer of Westercon 30, held at the University of British Columbia in 1977.
In 1977, Allyn Cadogan, Susan Wood, William Gibson and John Park also released the first two issues of Genre Plat, which Cadogan continued to publish solo once she set down in San Francisco.
What seemed a supremely important piece of esoterica in those days was the source of the title, a reference to a box of Kaybee toothpicks with a bilingual label saying “Flat style” in English, and in French, “Genre Plat.” Those of us who knew no French at all felt it added to the zine’s Canadian mystique.
Genre Plat was that rare fanzine able to maintain a faanish atmosphere while paying a great deal of attention to science fiction. The 1978 issue featured Cadogan’s interview of Kate Wilhelm at Westercon 30. Gibson had just sold his first short story in 1977, but was a few years away from hitting the big time, meanwhile wrote sercon for Locus and SF Review. Susan Wood, then a professor at the University of British Columbia, was actually the best known of the editorial quartet, winning the second of her three Best Fan Writer Hugos the year the zine began.
Cadogan would be associated with a more distinctly faanish zine when she co-edited Convention Girls’ Digest with Sharee Carton and Lucy Huntzinger in the 1980s. And along the way she also produced several issues of Bunnies, Zucchinis, & Sweet Basil.
The Cadogan-Huntzinger-Barsabe trio, before founding Corflu, produced the Emperor Norton Science Fiction Hour, a public-access television program in San Francisco during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In the mid-1980s she was married to Karl Mosgofian for awhile and the couple had their own company, Asta Computer Services.
Lucy Huntzinger paid this final tribute to Cadogan:
She was wickedly funny, generous, enthusiastic, artistic, smart as hell. She was a very good friend.
Paul Williams at the 1988 American Booksellers Assn. Photo by and copyright © 2013 Andrew Porter.
Paul Williams, who began publishing fanzines as a teenager and at age 17 founded the legendary rock zine Crawdaddy!, died March 27 at the age of 64. He had been in hospice care since February suffering from early-onset dementia, attributed to the brain trauma he suffered in a 1995 bicycle accident.
Williams published Crawdaddy! from 1966 to 1968, the magazine’s distribution rapidly growing from 500 to 25,000 copies. Those historic issues can be accessed here.
Then, Williams ended the magazine and began a new phase of his life, as described in Billboard:
Following the initial success of Crawdaddy!, Williams closed up shop in New York and moved to Mendocino, Calif. where he traveled with Timothy Leary and “ended up at John and Yoko’s Bed-In for Peace in Montreal.” It was also around this time that Williams struck up a friendship with the influential science fiction author Philip K. Dick, a relationship that continued after Dick’s death, when Williams was named his literary executor. Williams is credited with helping to secure Dick’s literary legacy.
It took a long time for Dick’s reputation to gain its current stature. As Malcolm Edwards explains in his fine appreciation, Williams was instrumental in starting it on the way.
As an sf reader, which I assume you probably are, you should honour him as one of the two principal figures who kept the name of Philip K. Dick alive in the decades following his death. Paul was a close friend of Dick’s, and his 1975 Rolling Stone article “The True Stories of Philip K. Dick” was the most significant piece of writing about him published during his lifetime. (It later formed the basis of a book, Only Apparently Real, which was in turn the first book about Dick.) When Dick died in 1982, Paul was named his Literary Executor, and he worked tirelessly in conjunction with Dick’s long-time literary agent Russ Galen (the other hero of this story) to keep his name alive. Paul founded and ran the Philip K. Dick Society, which attracted hundreds of members in scores of countries. The small publishing company he ran together with David Hartwell published Dick’s novel Confessions of a Crap Artist– the first time any of Dick’s non-sf novels from the 1950s saw the light of day.
Gregory Benford paid Williams this tribute: “He was a stone sf fan from junior high, deflected into rock, but with the instincts of a fan and the smarts to see where rock could go, following the curve of sf and jazz and earlier American inventions. His kind of cross-conversation invigorated all fields he touched, from Dylan to Sturgeon to Phil Dick to all those idiosyncratic visionaries who lurk among us, bless them all in their fevered pace.”
[Thanks to Gregory Benford for the story.]
But Thog does have a website — Thog.org.
“Thog’s Masterclass” started running in Ansible in August 1994 — will the LonCon 3 Worldcon committee celebrate the 20th anniversary?
While Dave Langford has been publishing selected quotes from wretched sf/fantasy since 1979, Thog’s name was put on the marquee after Dave worked with the character’s creator, Paul Barnett, on the Eastercon newzine.
Who is Thog?
Thog the Mighty, a not terribly bright barbarian hero, is the creation of John Grant (Paul Barnett) in his “Lone Wolf” fantasy novels loosely based on Joe Dever’s gamebooks. Thog first appeared in The Claws of Helgedad (1991), and attained front-cover stardom in The Book of the Magnakai (1992)…
Everything’s up-to-date at Thog.org. Find material using the “Search, Loot & Pillage Engine” or just hit the “I Feel Unlucky” button and let the “Thog-o-Matic Random Selector” choose for you…
Filker Sheila Willis, part of the filk music group “Technical Difficulties”, has died, reportedly of a heart attack. (Exact date unknown.)
“Technical Difficulties “ with Willis, Linda Melnick and T.J. Burnside (now T.J. Burnside Clapp) won a Pegasus Award (“For Excellence In Filking”) at the Ohio Valley Filk Fest in 1989. Their recording “Come You Knights” [YouTube] is available online. The group’s legend persists – it even garnered a mention in The Drink Tank #300.
Sheila Willis also co-edited Fifth Season, a Blake’s 7 fanfic zine, and contributed art to other zines celebrating the tv show, including Southern Seven and Vault of Tomorrow.
Sheila Willis illo from Southern Seven.
[Thanks to Susan de Guardiola and Andrew Porter for the story.]
Joe Pilati.
Joe Pilati passed away on June 8 last year. A teenaged fanzine editor in the Sixties, Pilati had been for the past three decades the chief writer and editor for Corporate Campaign, Inc., supporting labor rights, free speech and environmental issues.
He earlier worked for the Boston Globe, the Boston Phoenix and the Village Voice, before joining the staff of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in 1976 to help craft the historic J.P. Stevens Campaign.
Joe Pilati started Smudge, his first fanzine, in 1960 at the age of 14. Jay Lynch, later founder of Bijou Funnies but then only 16 himself, soon discovered the zine and started doing cartoons for Pilati –
Well…In 1960 I was in high school doing cartoons for the school paper and stuff. In an issue of Cracked magazine, which was edited by Paul Laikin back then, I saw a plug in the letter column that Paul gave to a kid in Pearl River, NYnamed Joe Pilati. Pilati had just published the first issue of SMUDGE, a little fanzine printed on a ditto machine that ran interviews and news about the guys who did the professional satire mags of the day…HELP!, MAD, CRACKED, SICK, those mags. So I sent for a copy, and wound up doing illustrations and cartoons for SMUDGE. That plug in Cracked was also seen by Skip Williamson, Art Spiegelman, and several other kid cartoonists. They all sent for SMUDGE and did drawings for SMUDGE. In the back of SMUDGE, Pilati would run reviews of amateur satire fanzines printed on ditto machines and mimeograph machines by kids around the country. Many of ‘em contained original satirical articles on a variety of topics. Kids doing their own imitations of MAD.
Pilati published Smudge on his school’s ditto machine. The zine had a circulation of 80 copies. He also ran news and interviews with the editors, writers and artists of the various Mad-style satire magazines of the era.
A couple years later Pilati shifted his efforts to a new fanzine named Enclave with a focus on science fiction and politics. Enclave attracted new work by Harlan Ellison and Ray Nelson. It had a larger circulation, 150 copies – good coverage in the fandom of those days.
Joe Pilati’s raucous sense of humor – and ability to yank columnist Tom Perry’s chain – was chronicled in a 1965 issue of Hyphen:
But other than that, Joe Pilati is a very pleasant house guest. It’s nice for an isolated fan to find someone else with similar attitudes… for instance, towards the coming of the mail. My wife and the neighbors are practically indifferent to this exhalted event, but Joe shows a proper reverence. My only complaint is he seems to get more than I do.
That, and of course his carelessness about MY mail. I was working from 10am to 6pm recently and had to call home each day to find out what had come. “Nothing,” Garrett said after Joe had brought in the mail. I went home to lunch with my heart down in my socks. When I came back I found a note to call home. Joe Pilati was apologetic. “There is a letter from Bob Lichtman for you,” he said. “It got lost in my letters. I’m really sorry, Tom.” I could hear him chuckling off mike. “That’s OK, Joe,” I said. “There’s also a letter from Germany, he added. Now his laughter was wild, insane. “It must have got, uh, lost among my huge masses of letters,” “Sure, Joe, sure,” I said, senile tears in my old eyes. Fortunately, there WERE letters from Lichtman and Germany waiting when I got home—else you might read in Fanac next year about a sensational fannish murder case in Ohama, Bebraska.
Pilati’s death was brought to fandom’s attention by the February 2013 issue of a political newsletter edited by one of his friends.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]