Bill Mills (1952-2022)

Bill Mills

Las Vegas fan Bill Mills died January 9 at the age of 69, less than a week after coming home from the hospital.

Mills was a musician, filker, collector of sf movie props, and a masquerader. He was a prolific maker of videos featuring his singing.

As a young actor Mills had an uncredited appearance in the Disney movie Follow Me Boys (1966). Later in life he had acting roles or stuntman credits in a half dozen low-budget film productions.  

First meeting at the original LASFS clubhouse in 1973. Back row, L to R: Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Jerry Pournelle, A. E. Van Vogt, Forry Ackerman. Middle row, L to R: Unknown, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Wendayne Ackerman. Front row, L to R: Unknown, Bill Mills, Ron Cobb. Photo by Stan Burns.

After Mills found his way into fandom he joined LASFS in 1970. He and his friend Robert Short were the self-proclaimed world’s biggest Man from U.N.C.L.E. fans and amassed a fantastic collection that they displayed at Westercon 23 in 1970, filling an entire room with props, scripts and other materials used on the program, plus merchandising items from around the world.

They also were part of the T.H.R.U.S.H. squad put together by David McDaniel, an LA-area author of several U.N.C.L.E. media tie-in novels. He had obtained some T.H.R.U.S.H. logo patches from the studio, and everyone in the group sewed patches on dark suits and showed up together at a local theater where U.N.C.L.E. star Robert Vaughn was playing Hamlet. After the performance they stood politely in line to greet Vaughn, and equally politely insisted they were from the “Public Relations” department of T.H.R.U.S.H. There were several more “T.H.R.U.S.H. runs” to places where they could startle people who weren’t expecting a group of fictional villains to show up. The group included Barry Gold, Robert Short, Bill Mills, Evan Hayworth, Gail Knuth, and Charles Lee Jackson II, many of whom had been Tuckerized in McDaniel’s novels.

Years later he moved to Las Vegas and became active in the Vegrants. Around 2006 he created a new website, The Voices of Fandom, which hosted fannish podcasts, historic soundbites and classic filk music. An oral history page played short testimonials by various Las Vegrants in April 2006 about how they discovered fandom. Much of the material has been saved to the Internet Archive and can be accessed here. Bill’s tech expertise also led to him being part of the Corflu 25 committee in 2008.

In recent years, Bill has been active creating music videos for his YouTube channel.

He is survived by his wife Roxanne Mills.

4 thoughts on “Bill Mills (1952-2022)

  1. Very sorry to hear this. During my 2012 stay in Vegas, Bill offered to take me on a tour of his favourite strip clubs, and the journalist in me regrets not taking him up on that.

  2. One thing omitted in the File770 obit that, so far, only I seem to think should be noted:
    Bill Mills pioneered livestream video coverage of s-f convention programming events and awards (as well as video “virtual chat” from the consuite), through the Ustream teleconferencing system. The coverage at Corflu Silver in 2008 was the first of its kind. Worldcon smofs were impressed by this and eventually picked up on Ustream to broadcast Hugo Award ceremonies — although the limited functionality and bandwidth of Ustream soon led them to try other services — just as Corflu wound up doing after Bill and Arnie Katz’s initial brilliant innovation.

  3. I am so saddened to learn that my good friend Bill Mills has passed away. May God be with his family at this very difficult time.

    Sincerely,

    Tom A. Pennock
    Battle Creek, Michigan

  4. Bill was an old and dear friend and I am very sad to learn that he has died.

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