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Memoirs of a Superfluous Fan, 1944

Page 8

take out the chance in dues to the World Girdlers' International Science League Correspondence Club. I think I gratefully took out change for several months' dues. Promptly thereafter, the W.G.I.S.L.C.C. folded up completely as Harry went to work on a night shift.

SHEP'S SHOP WAS a favourite hangout for SFL members in them thar times. Lucile B. Sheppard did have a fabulous collection of scientifiction magazines up on Hollywood Blvd, and through the endless prying of Ackerman, it was stocked with Esperanto literature, fan magazines, and a general welcome to SFL members. I considered the place to be quite a paradise. I often dropped in after school to enjoy this rapture, this virtual wallowing in vast piles of AIR WONDER STORIES, SCIENCE WONDER STORIES, AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY, and endless piles of later Astoundings and Wonder. I often cursed the cruel fate which had left me too young to read these vast, thrilling magazines in that what seemed to me glorious day when they came out on the newstands each month.

Eventually as a good boy selling newspapers and the Post, I earned from time to time sufficient money to purchase these exotic magazines, and through much effort eventually acquired all of the SCIENCE WONDERS, and AIR WONDERS, some of VOL I AMAZING, and a representative assortment of Amazing Quarterlies, later issue Wonders, and the like. For some reason, early Astoundings held absolutely no fascination for me, and I never acquired any prior to my first newsstand purchase in 1935.

I don't know if fans like Washington, Schmarje, Smith, Lazar, and a host of others who are newcomers to me, have ever seen an Air Wonder, or experienced that thrill that comes to a 'teen-ager of actually owning one. Perhaps it isn't necessary, but the experience of collecting and reading these stories of the future was an integeral part of my earlier political-sociological explorations. I did believe that mankind was capable of following these stories in a few years and making a glorious world of the future, where science and sanity would be governing factors. The primary thing that science fiction did for me as a 'teen-ager was to make me think along sociological lines, and when my friends were all wearing Landon or Roosevelt buttons in 1936, I was looking far beyond mere political party stuff.

The old-style science-fiction novel with the emphasis on science had a definite educational value to the properly attuned mind. Through them I knew that mankind's lot could be better, and while I lacked all the data which subsequent years of study has given me, I at least had a glimpse of what might have been, while the rest of my schoolmates were busy swallowing the official version of the Revolutionary war.

Some meeting between my joining and August 1937, I was frightened by a lurid affair which either Roy Test or Roy Squires brought to a meeting. It was one of the last copies of Morris S. Dollens SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTOR. Since I was taking journalism in school, the idea that people could publish little magazines on a hekto pad was interesting to me. I scanned the Collector at that meeting and was fascinated. Every since I had been given a copy of Van Loon's STORY OF MANKIND in 1935 for my birthday I had been possessed with a desire to write apres Van Loon. In fact, I had written many little booklets which I typed and sewed together by hand for the amusement of my immediate circle of friends. YERKE'S ALMANAC and YERKE'S HIP-POCKET DICTIONARY still evoke chuckles on my part to this day. The possibilities of making fifty copies of such a venture on a hektograph, for only a few dollars, was a sort of tinder that eventually produced IMAGINATION! I went without a hamburger the next day and sent a dime to

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take out the chance in dues to the World Girdlers' International Science League Correspondence Club. I think I gratefully took out change for several months' dues. Promptly thereafter, the W.G.I.S.L.C.C. folded up completely as Harry went to work on a night shift. SHEP'S SHOP WAS a favourite hangout for SFL members in them thar times. Lucile B. Sheppard did have a fabulous collection of scientifiction magazines up on Hollywood Blvd, and through the endless prying of Ackerman, it was stocked with Esperanto literature, fan magazines, and a general welcome to SFL members. I considered the place to be quite a paradise. I often dropped in after school to enjoy this rapture, this virtual wallowing in vast piles of AIR WONDER STORIES, SCIENCE WONDER STORIES, AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY, and endless piles of later Astoundings and Wonder. I often cursed the cruel fate which had left me too young to read these vast, thrilling magazines in that what seemed to me glorious day when they came out on the newstands each month. Eventually as a good boy selling newspapers and the Post, I earned from time to time sufficient money to purchase these exotic magazines, and through much effort eventually acquired all of the SCIENCE WONDERS, and AIR WONDERS, some of VOL I AMAZING, and a representative assortment of Amazing Quarterlies, later issue Wonders, and the like. For some reason, early Astoundings held absolutely no fascination for me, and I never acquired any prior to my first newsstand purchase in 1935. I don't know if fans like Washington, Schmarje, Smith, Lazar, and a host of others who are newcomers to me, have ever seen an Air Wonder, or experienced that thrill that comes to a 'teen-ager of actually owning one. Perhaps it isn't necessary, but the experience of collecting and reading these stories of the future was an integeral part of my earlier political-sociological explorations. I did believe that mankind was capable of following these stories in a few years and making a glorious world of the future, where science and sanity would be governing factors. The primary thing that science fiction did for me as a 'teen-ager was to make me think along sociological lines, and when my friends were all wearing Landon or Roosevelt buttons in 1936, I was looking far beyond mere political party stuff. The old-style science-fiction novel with the emphasis on science had a definite educational value to the properly attuned mind. Through them I knew that mankind's lot could be better, and while I lacked all the data which subsequent years of study has given me, I at least had a glimpse of what might have been, while the rest of my schoolmates were busy swallowing the official version of the Revolutionary war. Some meeting between my joining and August 1937, I was frightened by a lurid affair which either Roy Test or Roy Squires brought to a meeting. It was one of the last copies of Morris S. Dollens SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTOR. Since I was taking journalism in school, the idea that people could publish little magazines on a hekto pad was interesting to me. I scanned the Collector at that meeting and was fascinated. Every since I had been given a copy of Van Loon's STORY OF MANKIND in 1935 for my birthday I had been possessed with a desire to write apres Van Loon. In fact, I had written many little booklets which I typed and sewed together by hand for the amusement of my immediate circle of friends. YERKE'S ALMANAC and YERKE'S HIP-POCKET DICTIONARY still evoke chuckles on my part to this day. The possibilities of making fifty copies of such a venture on a hektograph, for only a few dollars, was a sort of tinder that eventually produced IMAGINATION! I went without a hamburger the next day and sent a dime to