File 770 has a Clipping Service category, however, this may be the first time it has ever featured a literal clipping.
David Doering’s fanhistory searches on Google yielded the newspaper article reproduced below, which inspired him to comment —
First, gone are the days of such colorful journalism. Second, MSFS meetings in Saginaw in 1949 sure were a blast! How come the LASFS didn’t have such fun?
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Here’s a contemporary fanzine account of the explosive incident:
Bob Tucker’s Science Fiction News-Letter from 1949.
I think I learned about this incident from one of the Harry Warner histories and I have a dim memory of a chat about it with some old-time Michigan fans eons ago.
Ken: I went to your link and found a webhosting page. Did you make a typo in the link?
Some part of the editing process mangled the “http” stuff in the URL. Sowwy. Mike, feel free to fix if you can.
The link is: http://www.midamericon.org/tucker/sfnl14f.htm
Your new link works fine.
It’s nice to see that Fannish gatherings and annoyed Fire Marshals have a long and extinguished history…
oh, goodness gracious.
I note a few discrepancies, such as “I have no idea who” as opposed to “It was those two guys”. Also, un-American behavior: it doesn’t say he’ll sue over the property damage and ask for a million dollars! Is that legal?
Also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this particular way of formatting paragraphs.
Arthur didn’t want to take the Rapp.
@Kai Henningsen: “Also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this particular way of formatting paragraphs.” (Referring to the paragraph style of Bob Tucker in the 1949 “News-Letter”)
It was called “nonstopparagraphing” and it was common in the mechanical-typewriter-and-mimeograph era of fanzines. One would create this effect by just tapping the carriage return lever to advance to next line, rather than throwing the lever hard to achieve a full carriage return to left margin. I think I used it at least some of the time in the 1970s and 1980s.
Fancyclopedia 3 link: http://fancyclopedia.org/nonstopparagraphing
I’m impressed by the full justification using a typewriter. That’s finicky work, that is, and requires planning.
Why do non-stop paragraphing?
Cally, I was taught to do that kind of justification in a typing class in 8th or 9th grade. It’s a little bit tedious, but it’s not all that difficult. You just have to do a first draft, and then count extra spaces at the end of each line, and insert them when you’re doing the final draft onto stencil. Unless you’re composing directly onto mimeo stencil, it’s not that big a deal (although it’s much easier to do it now with a single keystroke in emacs).
Mike, it was supposed to be quicker to read. Also, it looked SO COOL (in my early-20s opinion back then).