A bit of historical context for this next article. In the early 1950s, one of the
most renown fan clubs in the world was the Little Mens' club of the San Francisco
area. It wasn't as big as its neighbor, LASFS, to the south, or as friendly as its
other neighbor, The Nameless Ones, to the north, but it had a special claim to fame
that the others couldn't match -- it was featured in a news story that made
headlines in newspapers all around the world. The writer of the following later
became one of the co-chairs of the 1954 Worldcon, and we're happy to publish his
first fanzine article in *decades*; it's the inside story of...  There's been an overwhelming request
-- my wife Es standing in my office doorway, tapping her foot -- to preserve for
posterity the story of the Moon Claim of 1951. I undertake this with no few qualms,
partly because there are a number of interrelated threads that you must be aware of.
I'll try to be as brief as possible.There's one other caveat. (It must
be age creeping in on little cat feet: I find I can't make a statement without
finding several counters to it.) I don't know about your memory, but mine is tricky,
constantly betraying me. So I'll only set down here the things I'm sure of. Mostly.
I think.First, I must mention the Elves',
Gnomes' and Little Men's Science Fiction, Chowder, and Marching Society, known
familiarly as the Little Men. Don't ask where we got the name; it's too long to
explain about the comic strip, Barnaby. The Little Men were an extraordinary
group, based in Berkeley, with the resources of the University of California to call
on. More, we were talented across a broad range of disciplines. We were known as
being contentious, and that's true, but those on the outside never knew we hammered
on each other far harder than strangers. It was a necessary part of the Little
Men's mystique.I had just been forced to be chairman
-- a knowledgeable Little Man didn't run for that office; he usually ran out
the door -- and knew what facing a pit of hungry tigers felt like. So when Don
Fabun discussed his idea with me, I quickly agreed. Working on it gave me a chance
to forget the horror of chairmanship.Let me digress here to talk about the
Fabuns. Don's wife, Gladys, a refreshingly intelligent and humorous lady, owned a
circulating rental library where the Little Men met. Don was never a club officer,
but he had a printing press and was definitely of the power-behind-the-throne ilk.
He also had enough gray matter between his ears to replace three ordinary
mortals.Don's idea? A publicity campaign to
claim a piece of the moon. I guess it represented a challenge to him, to see if he
could pull it off. He'd tried with other Little Men chairs, but I was the first
taker.Try to remember what the world was
like in 1951. No missiles, no lasers, no computers, and John Campbell referred to
in a national article as the 'Chief Slan'! Destination Moon, released about
a year earlier, was the only sf entertainment around. (However, The Thing
was due to be released soon. One day perhaps I'll tell about Es' and my visit to
the studio, but I didn't consider The Thing as good sf.) It was the Little
Men's mission to stir up the sf pot a little, and here was an ideal vehicle that
might have gotten some publicity as far as San Jose, some fifty miles south.Don, who owned the multilith press on
which the club's fanzine, The Rhodomagnetic Digest, was printed... What lousy
syntax! Let me begin again: Don never claimed the idea as his. He got most of it
from Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon." But what Don brought was big knowledge
about publicity. I worked with him because I wanted to know about publicity. I
found out.It was a long effort, something more
than six months. I don't know who in the Little Men it was who'd found a wedge for
us in U.S. mining law. The way it worked in the rough, tough West was a man staked
out a claim, described it, and buried that description in a tin can on his claim.
So long as it was never challenged, he did not have to prove he'd been on the
land. Incidentally, filing a claim on the moon was old hat; the Bureau of Mines had
hundreds of claims on file. But the Little Men's claim was different in two ways:
we would file before the U.N. -- anyone of any sense could see that the U.S. Bureau
of Mines had no jurisdiction on the moon -- and we would file for a very
small piece, not all of the moon; we weren't greedy. Of course, we ran in parallel
to U.S. mining law about actually being on the claim -- but no one ever challenged
us.
I began by finding an astronomer.
This was, after all, Berkeley, and the more exotic professions would drop like ripe
fruit when the tree was shaken. The astronomer laid out a survey of an area
containing the craters Ritter, Manners, and Sabine (a rough triangular shape) in the
Sea of Tranquillity. It was pretty accurate, more than could have been done by a
party actually walking the surface because of the moon's extreme curvature.Given our triangle, I started with a
great dollop of imagination, figuring that if this had happened and then that, we'd
all be rich. Or smart. I plotted the geology, both areal and in cross-section,
coming up with subsurface faulting, a few deposits of lead-silver telluride, and a
lot of theory.My father, who was taking law on the
GI bill at the University of San Francisco, did a fairly comprehensive claim
statement, writing it in nifty legalese. Just to check Dad, I also got a mining
engineer to approve the wording.We were getting close now. Don Fabun
had been a journalism major at Cal and had worked in the profession; he wrote the
basic story, the 'who what where & why' that seems to have disappeared in news
stories today. Don gave me the job of 'slanting' -- writing a lead paragraph to
appeal to the particular slant of the local papers. As examples, the Hearst papers
got leads that told about the horrible death and strangulation of someone caught on
the moon without a space suit; the Berkeley Gazette learned that this claim
was executed on behalf of a Berkeley science fiction group, a home-grown product.
Somewhere I must have gotten a little sex into it, but I'm darned if I remember for
what paper. Don and his multilith printed a four-page foldover that included the
map of the area and the mining claim.And then came The Letter. Don and I
worked on that one at some length. It was to be sent to the head of the U.N. Legal
Department, and in it, we offered to cede back 85% of the mineral rights, all of any
radioactives found (this was 1951, remember, and the romance with them had not yet
fizzled), and perpetual U.N. rights to a presence in the triangular area. All the
U.N. had to do was recognize our claim.Since I, as chairman, acted on behalf
of the Little Men, I had to prepare the packages and mail them. Plural packages
there: one to Oscar Schacter (of the U.N.) with the letter and the claim, one to
Harry Truman (of the U.S.) with the letter and the claim, and ten or so to Bay Area
papers with the slanted story and the claim. I think we sent one to the San Jose
Mercury, figuring if news was slack, it might run a story on a Bay Area
event.One thing Don cautioned about: we
needed luck. If a juicy axe murder happened at the same time, our story would
simply disappear. And it looked like the axe murder cameth -- the day after I
mailed the stories, nothing.But the day after that ... !! I
worked for a San Francisco oil company in the drafting department, and about
10 AM (February 17, if I recall, 1952), I got called to the phone. It was the
Berkeley Gazette, and did I know the story had appeared on the 'A' wire of
United Press? They were tearing up their front page and substituting the moon claim.
They interviewed me about the Little Men and the claim.The phone started ringing like
there's no tomorrow, and my boss, who'd originally enjoyed what I was doing, got
testy. But it kept going and going and going...I can't remember all the calls. One
that sticks in my mind came from New York, and in those days, a long-distance call
was pretty hot stuff. The call was from the American correspondent of the London
Daily Mail, and he asked intelligent questions. Why, for instance, had we
filed before the U.N. instead of the U.S.? (We'd discussed this but never seriously,
and not even in our wildest dreams: what would we do if they actually granted
the claim? But we weren't interested in land grabs. At the time, everyone and his
brother who ever landed in Antarctica had claimed it. This brought about lots of
disputes and very little scientific progress. Given the mess, we hoped the U.N.
would grant the claim and immediately revoke it; it would show that the U.N., and
not a welter of earth nations, had jurisdiction over the moon. We had not the
slightest doubt that a moon landing was coming.)
It was a feeling of the roof falling
in. The afternoon papers, the morning papers, Atherton, and yes, San José,
L.A., St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Boston, South America, Paris, Sydney -- we even
heard it was treated fairly in Moscow.I remember one other neat occurrence:
I was still more than two years away from my first professional sale. And
Startling Stories ran an editorial called "Les and Es Claim the Moon." It
was my first appearance on a contents page, and if that appearance were a little
outré, it'd have to do until the real thing came along.In those days remember, radio was the
big medium, and we got three minutes on a national news program, ahead of
Winston Churchill's latest pronouncement. TV too: an eastern chain sent a crew to
film one of our meetings; we hastily set one up, and Tony Boucher did the speaking
honors (I was too nervous), pitching for a space program. (When the cameras weren't
shooting, the Little Men jumped all over each other, one faction supporting the
claim and the other indignant about it!) The film did not show on the west coast,
but someone in the east wrote they'd seen us.Oh, yes, the claim and the U.N.? It
took me two or three letters to Oscar Schacter to get a reply. By then, the news
was old hat, but he did mention that the U.N. had no jurisdiction and therefore
couldn't do what we asked. A couple of months later, Collier's magazine had
a lead article that discussed ownership of the moon in terms of terrestrial nations.
Its author was one Oscar Schacter, head of the U.N. legal division. After we got
through cursing and laughing, we decided that he probably didn't crib the idea; but
it also seemed likely that he had already written his article and must have sweated
mightily when our story broke.In retrospect, it was an incredible
three days; Es and I got our 15 minutes of fame. More important, I learned how
difficult it is to do a publicity campaign and how one must be lucky enough
to have the cooperation of all axe murderers. I'll never cease being grateful to
Don Fabun and the Little Men! # # # #
P.S. Harry Truman never did answer. P.P.S. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, Es wanted to bill NASA $0.90/hour for parking... All illustrations by Ray Allard |
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