Since we've often bemoaned that many opportunities for preserving the history of
fandom aren't being taken advantage of, we'll take this occasion to compliment
L.A.Con for arranging the audiotaping of many of their programming events. This
once was a common practice at worldcons, but is now the exception rather than the
rule. Anyway, here's a tale (reprinted from the apa SFPA) about another such
worldcon that had the foresight to tape some of its proceedings, and of a belated
reaction to it, some 25 years later.
If by some remote chance anyone
needs proof that I'm a rude and ungrateful person, I might as well provide fresh
evidence in that respect. Someone was kind enough to send me, more than two
decades ago, a free two-LP set that contained the proceedings during the Hugo
banquet at a worldcon. And just the other week, I finally played those records for
the first time. I'd been intending to listen to them one of these years, but I
kept putting it off. Ingratitude wasn't really the big problem, but rather the
fact that I hated the idea of hearing one of the participants.
If everything is foreordained ever
since the Big Bang, it must have taken a particularly complicated series of atomic
circumstances to cause me to play these two LPs at this particular time, only a few
weeks short of the night when the banquet was taped, an exact quarter century ago.
Nothing in particular happened to induce me to put them on the turntable at the
start of July, 1996. I dreaded listening to myself giving the Fan Guest of Honor
talk just as sincerely as I had ever since I received the records in 1973 or
thereabouts.
That first Noreascon was not my
favorite event in fandom. I'd originally declined with thanks the invitation to be
Fan Guest of Honor, and only grudgingly did I eventually change my decision and
agree to do it. Early in 1971, I'd spent almost a week in the hospital following
an operation and I was still not feeling altogether healthy by the time the Labor
Day weekend arrived. I was never instructed fully in what a Fan Guest of Honor is
supposed to do, other than to show up for the ceremonies opening the convention and
give a talk during the Hugo banquet program, so I had to improvise all during my
stay in Boston, and was unhappy with my performance. On the second day of the
convention, I got up with a runny nose and a sore throat, which left me wondering
if I would be able to give that talk, but this was apparently a very real
manifestation of a psychosomatic illness which vanished after I'd decided the show
must go on no matter how I felt or sounded. I had never spoken before such a large
and national audience before, although I'd gotten along okay during a few speaking
adventures in Hagerstown to small groups, and I had successfully done a daily
newscast over a local radio station for several years. My main fear of the banquet
talk was that I might be heckled, and I didn't know if I could keep my cool if it
happened.
But I got through the ceremonies
without disaster, and nobody saw or heard about the only unexpected problem I
suffered. I was terribly tense after the program ended, couldn't endure the
thought of spending hours and hours with fans, so decided to go to bed perhaps an
hour after midnight. It was noisy in the hall outside my room and I wasn't sure if
I could sleep, so I took a sleeping tablet I had left over from the supply I'd been
given for my operation recuperation. After I took it, I jotted down a few notes on
what I'd experienced that evening, in case I wanted to write a fanzine article
about it, did a little of this and that in preparation for bed, and suddenly I
toppled over and burst into uncontrollable giggles. I was high, apparently from
the combination of the sleeping pill and the relief that the banquet ordeal was
safely past. I've never been drunk, but I faithfully displayed all the symptoms of
that condition; I couldn't think coherently, everything seemed funny for no
particular reason, the floor was rising and falling and the walls weren't too
stationary, either, and I didn't care a bit. I managed to climb into bed and was
as normal as I ever am when I woke up around dawn. No, nobody had spiked something
I drank that evening, because I had had nothing in any liquid variety from the
hands of any fans.
But the next day and in all the days,
months, and years afterwards, I fretted about the talk I'd given. Had I mumbled
too badly to be comprehended, or had I sounded as singsong as Willy Clinton does
when he tries to read something into a microphone, or had my message been so
simplistic that people had applauded only out of politeness? The more I wondered,
the less willing I was to listen to myself after the records arrived. (The jacket
has a 1973 copyright date, so apparently it took a while for the Noreascon survivors
to get the tape embodied into recorded vinyl.) I reasoned that I would feel severe
although belated despair if I verified a very bad talk by listening to the recording
of it, and if I didn't listen, I could avoid a very nasty aftermath of that
unpleasant evening. Maybe I grew reckless and uncaring in old age, or maybe that
abrupt creation of the universe included time-released instructions for me to
listen to myself, some twenty-four years and ten months after I'd spoken.
And the odd thing was, when I
prepared for the worst and played the LPs, I decided that most of my forebodings
had been unnecessary. Although I'd stumbled over one word in a couple of sentences
of adlib talk at the beginning, I'd gone through my prepared speech without any
mistakes. My diction was no worse than that of most of the program participants
and better than some, and I hadn't sounded nervous. If I were to do it all over
again, the only change I would make would be to slow down slightly, because I did
seem to be slightly under the influence of Walter Winchell. The text of my talk
holds up quite well after all these years. It contained a plea to fandom and
prodom to agitate for continued space exploration, and some of the things I said
have been proven accurate by now.
Hearing these records for the first
time gave me a good lesson in how badly memory behaves in the course of a
quarter-century. I remembered some of the things on the disks, but other portions
were totally gone from my recollection. I had completely forgotten, for instance,
Lester del Rey's impassioned talk as he presented a posthumous award to John W.
Campbell, Jr., from First Fandom. He was easily the most effective speaker on that
entire program, in every respect. With that voice, he could have gone far in
politics. Then there was the disclosure to me of how time dilation had encompassed
me for a while. After I'd finished my talk and had sat down to try to persuade
myself that it was really all over and done with, Clifford Simak, as Pro Guest of
Honor, gave his talk. I knew I couldn't obey my impulse to get out of there
immediately, so I hoped it would be a short one. I remember how I reacted invisibly
when he went on and on, and didn't ever seem to be approaching the end of his
speech. I would have given anything to look at a clock or watch and make sure it
had already been more than a half hour, but I didn't have my wristwatch in a
visible position, and I knew someone in the audience would see me turn my arm to
stare at it and report it in a fanzine somewhere, so I sat through what seemed like
another half hour of his talk. When I listened to Cliff's talk on the records, I
checked the time at the beginning and again at the end of it: just thirteen
minutes.
A couple of mysteries remain now
that I've heard the recording. For one thing, what happened after Asimov announced
Ted Sturgeon as the winner of one of the fiction Hugos? On the record, Asimov went
on to the next fiction category with no pause and no words indicating that Ted or
someone else had come up to accept the trophy. The acceptance event was audible
for all other Hugos. It didn't sound as if the tape had been edited at that point
(although there are several very audible splices elsewhere during the recording, so
I assume some cuts were made to avoid too much dead air or to remove something
deemed too embarrassing to perpetuate on the LP). Also unexplained is the identity
of the owner of the very first voice on the first side which introduced Bob
Silverberg, the toastmaster. I suspect it was Tony Lewis, the con chairman, but
it's been a long time since I've heard him speak, so I'm not sure. In several
spots there are bursts of laughter from the audience for no apparent cause,
apparently because of a facial expression or a gesture from someone at the
podium.
One curiosity about Bob's
toastmastering is his references to what we now call the Retro Hugos. He evoked a
lot of guffaws by pretending that the convention was going to hand out not only the
1971 Hugos but also those for 1954, which the San Francisco convention in that year
didn't provide. Then he said that they all had gone to Harlan Ellison, who wasn't
in Boston to accept them, so there were more laughs. This encouraged him to bring
up the idea briefly, near the end, with a threat to give out the 1932 Hugos. I
doubt if anyone in that room on that evening would have believed that belated Hugo
Awards would eventually be authorized in real earnest.
It is good evidence of my general
state of befuddlement that evening that I learned only this month via the records
the identity of the woman who had been sitting next to me at the head table: Robin
Asimov. And I think I've already told the story of how after the ceremonies,
Marion Zimmer Bradley came up to me and said, "That was really a wonderful talk."
I thanked her, and she added "Not your talk. Simak's." The world
would never have known quite a few Darkover novels if I'd obeyed my
immediate impulse.
My talk had no perceptible
influence on the space program, but I learned later that it made me a few enemies.
There were fans who had lost money as a result of my talk; they had lost bets on
the question of whether this hermit of Hagerstown would actually show up at the
convention and really give a talk to it. I'm pretty sure I would have been out a
few dollars if anyone had offered to bet me that I would go through with my duty
that September weekend. There was one benefit, however. I was inspired to adopt
a firm policy toward all future invitations to become the Fan Guest of Honor at
cons large and small. I decided I had shot my bolt in this respect and wasn't
going to put myself through the conspicuity and nervous strain again, not even on
the occasion when the committee of one medium-sized con offered to move it to
Hagerstown if reluctance to travel was the only reason why I declined the honor.
Several years ago, I was asked to be Fan Guest of Honor at a worldcon by a bidding
city; I said no, but I learned later that the bidding group had decided to ignore
my wishes and announce me for the post if they won, in the belief I couldn't do
anything about it when it was a fait accompli. As it turned out, that
city's bid lost to another city, sparing me the fate of suffering headaches every
day in the week instead of just most days in the week.
Now that I've played the records,
I wonder when I'll be moved to a subsidiary activity; hunting up the batch of
souvenirs I brought home from that Boston worldcon. They include, I remember, a
beautiful tiny painting on my identification badge by Bob Shaw, a plaque proving to
any doubters that I really was Fan Guest of Honor, and a scorecard from the Red
Sox-Indians baseball game I attended when I sneaked off from my duties one
afternoon. I haven't had the urge to inspect them again during the quarter-century
that has intervened, fearing they will reawaken my nerves and maybe even create
another psychosomatic cold for a day or two.
All illustrations by Kurt Erichsen
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