 Let me tell you about a project I'm working
on.Back in Mimosa 10, in 1991, I
described how I'd been persuaded to take charge of the A Wealth of Fable
project. The Los Angeles Worldcon of 1984, it turned out, had been financially
successful enough where there was funds available to cover a number of fan-related
projects. One of their top priorities was getting Harry Warner, Jr.'s history of
science fiction fandom of the 1950s into print in book form.It turned out to be a bigger project than
I thought. When I began, in 1990, all I had to start with was a fuzzy set of
photocopies from the three-volume fanzine published in the 1970s that had been the
manuscript's only other publication. There was much to do, and it took over two
years to finish. The result was a hardcover book of nearly 500 pages, complete with
index and over 200 photographs.By far, it's been the biggest publishing
project I've ever worked on, and I was more than a little pleased that the book won
a Hugo Award for Harry Warner, Jr., at the 1993 Worldcon. But all that happened a
few years ago. Now it's time to get started on the 1960s.Work actually began several years ago.
Back at Richard Brandt's El Paso Corflu, the 1991 fanzine fans convention, I put
together a one-page chapter outline of a book of the 1960s (mostly because of a
challenge by Bruce Pelz), but nothing further happened until the first
FanHistoricon, at Hagerstown in May 1994. It was there in Hagerstown that the
outline, which had languished as a data file in my computer for three years (the
original hand-written outline having vanished into oblivion by then), finally
received some comments.A couple of other things happened at the
FanHistoricon that affected the course of events. Forry Ackerman was there, and he
contributed $300 towards expenses for any copying and mailing costs. This
immediately put the project in the black, so to say. The second was the formation
of Peggy Rae Pavlat's brainchild, the Timebinders. Peggy Rae had organized that
first FanHistoricon (there have been several since then), and had wanted some kind
of umbrella organization created to oversee existing fan history activities, and to
come up with ideas for new ones. In fact, FanHistoricon wasn't really a convention
at all; it was more of a workshop for hammering out the structure for the new
organization, and providing feedback on things that were already going on.Anyway, the upshot from the FanHistoricon
was twofold: the outline quickly expanded to about eight pages; and it officially
because my project. So here I am. In the time since FanHistorion 1, the
outline has greatly increased in size, mostly since June of last year. It's now
over 170 pages, and growing; the size of the ascii computer file has passed a half
a million bytes. But it's still not nearly detailed enough for any book to be
written; there are whole areas where I still have little or no information, and
other areas where the information I do have is only enough to bring more questions
to mind.Luckily, there are plenty of people to ask
them to. One of the reasons the 1960s Fan History Outline (or FHO, as it's come to
be called) has grown so rapidly is because of the Internet. It has connected me
with many other fans not only here in North America, but in Europe and Australia as
well. And to make things even easier, Dick and Leah Smith, who were also at that
first FanHistoricon, set up an e-mail mailing list (a 'listserv', in computer-talk)
exclusively for fan history research and related purposes. Using e-mail has allowed
me to gather information at a much faster rate than I ever could have if I was
limited exclusively to surface mail.By now, you're probably beginning to
believe that the evolution of this 1960s FHO is actually a group effort. You're
right. Many, many people have played a role so far, by providing specific bits of
information on people and events, or by commenting on information that's been
collected in the FHO. Bruce Pelz, in particular, has provided much in the way of
reprinted source material, and Rob Hansen has done much of the work on British
fandom already in his own fan history project. But I'm still quite a long way from
being ready to sit down and start writing -- the FHO will have to be about twice as
long as it is now before that day will come.But I'm not really in a hurry; this kind of
fact finding takes time, and there's not much you can do about it. It will probably
take about another year, at least, before I'm able to fill in most of the gaps in
the FHO. Meanwhile, this kind of research is fun, especially when you run across an
interesting bit of information or an anecdote that's been lost for decades. Here's
an example:In May 1965, members of the Los Angeles
Science Fantasy Society had finally got fed up by the performance of their
secretary, Jack Harness. Harness, who otherwise had performed exemplary service to
LASFS, had become habitually late for the weekly LASFS meetings. So after being
late for seven of the previous eight meetings, the club finally, and perhaps
reluctantly, decided to hold a vote of impeachment of Harness, on the grounds of
non-feasance of his elected duties. At the meeting where his impeachment was voted
on, Harness was once again late again -- so late, in fact, that both the debate and
final vote were over by the time he had arrived. When he asked the outcome of the
vote, he was told the bad news: he had been thrown out of office, the first
successful impeachment of a LASFS officer in the decade. But there's more:
immediately after that, an election was held to fill the now-empty office. The
winner? Elected as the new LASFS secretary, by a sizeable majority, was... Jack
Harness.
Here's another one: At the 1962 Midwestcon,
Bob Tucker brought with him a young fan to the convention, who then proceeded to be
a source of embarrassment to Tucker by walking around wearing a lampshade on his
head. (At the end of the convention, Tucker went around apologizing for him.) The
subject of Tucker's embarrassment was not destined to make much of a name for
himself in fandom, and in fact did not stay in organized fandom much longer after
that. He did have a bit more success in his chosen field of journalism,
however, and went on to become much better known as a movie reviewer; he was Roger
Ebert.The 1960s is turning out to be full of
entertaining little stories like that, and it wouldn't take much to get lost in it
all. The research has been so entertaining, in fact, that I often find I'm
ignoring other priorities, such as  All illustrations by Sheryl Birkhead |
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