Lisa Ashton and Sandy Swank in “The Letter.” Photo by Leonard J. Provenzano. Used by permission.
Sandy Swank, an active member of the International Costumers Guild, passed away June 13 of lung disease.
He was President of the Greater Delaware Valley Costumers Guild. He also was a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, participating in an early 17th century persona.
Before he retired, even his day job allowed him to appear in costume, as a historical re-enactor at Philadelphia’s Cliveden museum, sometimes playing an 18th century German farmer and sometimes the Grandson of Pennsylvania founder William Penn.
After retirement he moved to Charleston, South Carolina. There he co-chaired Costume-Con 33 (2015) with his husband Robert M. Himmelsbach.
And Swank and Lisa Ashton won Best in Show at Philcon as well as multiple awards at Costume-Con 29 in 2011 for ”The Letter” (scroll down for video), a meticulously researched presentation of the famous Sullivan Ballou letter. Lisa Ashton recalls:
We were on a panel together about a year earlier, at a Philcon, on a Sunday morning, and only about 1 person showed up, so we all just talked about things, and the subject came around to the Ken Burns Documentary about the Civil War, and the very poignant letter written by Sullivan Ballou to his wife Sarah, about two weeks before he was killed at First Manassas. This led to Sandy and I doing this on stage, and people telling us, “The hair stood up on the back of my neck” among other comments. I am smiling as I remember our planning and presentation and how touching it was. We were so in character we barely felt we were ourselves. I still cry watching this presentation on video.
Swank is survived by his husband, and two sisters.
By John Hertz: Among our astounding developments – our amazing, stellar, thrilling, wonderful developments – is the Masquerade at science fiction conventions. Once a dress-up party as the name suggests, pioneered by Forry Ackerman and no less than Jack Speer, by the 1960s it had come to its present form, an on-stage competition with lights, sound, judges, outdrawing anything except Hugo Night at the Worldcon. Marvels appear. Jokes. It’s been called a cross between kabuki and Little Theater.
Fans and pros have been involved, and of course some people are both. Larry Niven wrote the script for “One Night at the Draco Tavern” with himself as a helpless man who never quite understood what was going on, and included it in a 2006 collection. Mike Resnick has been very fine as costumer and as a Master of Ceremonies. Karen Anderson at Nolacon II the 46th Worldcon was given a costuming Life Achievement Award. That was the predecessor of the current (since 1990) award given by the International Costumers Guild at Costume-Con.
With the widening appeal of SF, our general-interest Worldcon and its local and regional kin like Westercon, Boskone, Archon, spawned special-interest conventions. Filksinging, our home-made music, got filkers’ cons. Gamers’ cons. Fanziners’ cons. Costume-Con XXIII (15-18 May, Charleston, South Carolina) gave the 2015 Life Achievement Award to Kathy Sanders.
First as Kathy Bushman, then as Kathy Sanders, she was for decades a compelling vibrant force in Masquerades, including Worldcon Masquerades, working alone, in groups — sometimes large groups. She understood beauty, drama, strangeness, and time.
She co-chaired Costume-Con IV and XIV. I judged for her when she was Masquerade Director at L.A.con III the 54th Worldcon.
The Masquerade is ephemeral. Video records are difficult. Some photographers have learned to make good stills of Masquerade entries. Run-time footage showing the actual events of the stage, particularly alas for the great decades of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, even into the Nineties — not great because they’re past, just great — is scanty and often rough. The ICG Archive much to its credit did manage a Sanders posting for YouTube. It’s worth your while.
So is the list of Life Achievement winners. You can get it elsewhere, but I give it to you here — in chronological order. These names are worth recognizing, men and women who have enriched us, in this artform we seem to have invented.
Marjii Ellers
Marty Gear
Bjo & John Trimble
Peggy Kennedy
Janet Wilson Anderson
Karen Dick
Byron Connell
Jacqueline Ward
Gary Anderson
Carl Mami
Sandy & Pierre Pettinger
Animal X
Adrian Butterfield & Victoria Ridenour
Pat Kennedy
Ricky Dick
Cat Devereaux
Barb Schofield
Kevin Roche
Betsy Marks Delaney
Dana & Bruce McDermott
Nora & Bruce Mai
Jill Eastlake
Penny Lipman
Tina Connell
Dawn McKechnie
Ann Catelli
Kathy Bushman Sanders
One of Marty’s earliest fannish experiences, when he was 14, was traveling from Columbus, Ohio to Philadelphia for the 1953 Worldcon. Marty was unprepared for what he found there, felt overwhelmed and said he would have gone back to his hotel room to hide but for “a tall, white-haired man [who] came over and began to talk to me about what I liked to read. I had just bought a copy of Skylark of Valeron in the dealers’ room… and began enthusing about this ‘new’ writer that I had just discovered, E.E. Smith, Ph.D.” He soon discovered it was Smith himself he was telling this to, and Doc and his wife took Marty in tow, introducing him to other authors and artists. “For the remainder of the weekend, whenever either of them saw me alone they made a point of checking to see if I was enjoying myself, and of somehow including me in whatever was going on.”
Despite this friendly encounter with one of the field’s most loved writers, Marty did not attend another SF con until 1977 when Page Cuddy and David Hartwell “conned” him into going to a Balticon in order to meet Philip Jose Farmer.
After that Marty rapidly developed into a fannish leader. He ran programming for Balticon 13 in 1979 and became a regular fixture as the con’s masquerade director beginning in 1981. He chaired CostumeCon 3 (1985) and Balticon 21 (1987).
He held major committee posts on 4 Worldcons. Michael J. Walsh, chair of the 1983 Baltimore Worldcon where Marty ran the masquerade, likes to tell the story – “In 1981 when I called him from Denvention to let him know we had won: ‘Marty, bad news!’ [He answered] ‘We won?’”
Marty was famous for presiding over masquerades in costume as Count Dracula. And he was infamous for filling time with terrible vampire jokes such as —
What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire?
Frostbite!
One of his most challenging moments came while directing the 1998 Worldcon (Bucconeer) masquerade — at the start he stumbled against a table of awards and took a four-foot fall off the stage. Quite the trouper, Marty got right back up and did his job without visible problems. He even looked in pretty good shape the morning after at the masquerade critique where he had nothing to say about his mishap except an apology for detracting from the costumers. He did use a cane for awhile afterwards, though.
Marty was a fiery advocate for his beloved event. Even at a Worldcon he refused to concede first place to the Hugo Ceremony, protesting during the Bucconeer masquerade post-mortem, “To the Worldcon committee the Masquerade is not the most important event…. It’s just the best-attended, and has the most people involved, but to the committee it’s a secondary event.”
When he was feeling more mellow he’d deliver the message humorously, saying things like, “Costuming is the second oldest tradition in sci-fi fandom. The first is drinking beer.”
Marty remained an active member of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, and at the time of his death was parliamentarian of the BSFS Board of Directors, coordinator of the Jack L. Chalker Young Writers’ Contest, and liaison to the school for the BSFS Books for Kids program.
Over the years he was a guest of honor at Unicon 87, Disclave 34, Sci-Con 8, Genericon 2, Arisia 9, and Balticon 30.
Professionally, Marty managed his own company Martin Gear Consulting Ltd.
Other than dressing as a vampire, Marty said one of his favorite costumes was “Cohen the Barbarian” a prize-winner at the 2004 Worldcon as “Best DiscWorld Entry.” His Cohen wore a fur diaper, a very long white beard and an eyepatch — and not much else. In one hand he carried a sword and in the other a walking cane.
To the end Marty continually mentored costumers and passed on his enthusiasm for the costuming arts. He told an interviewer, “I probably won’t stop costuming until I am dead, and maybe not even then.”
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See Marty in his Dracula garb start the 2008 Balticon masquerade with a horrible joke.
In this interview at Anime USA 2012 Marty explained how he judges anime and reproduction costumes in terms that would be at home on Project Runway — “Clothes have to fit.”
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.
