MY LIFE IN FANDOM
by Walt Willis


They say the Golden Age of science fiction is round about eleven, and that must have been when I was reading the issues of Modern Boy containing a serialisation of The War of the Worlds by HG Wells. It was my first experience of real science fiction. It's all like a dream to me now, and I'm no longer quite sure that the magazine was Modern Boy but I remember vividly the sense of wonder communicated to me by HG Wells's introduction and his description of the confrontation between the three-legged Martian invaders and the Royal Navy. And the fact that I pestered the newsagent for copies of the latest copy of the magazine from Wednesday onwards, though I knew quite well that it didn't come out until Friday. To me there was always the dreadful possibility that it would come out early and be sold out when I looked for it.

The discovery of science fiction led me on a quest for more of it in the Public Library, starting from HG Wells and going backwards and forwards from there. I read everything by Wells, including Ann Veronica and The Bulpington of Blup, much of which was disappointing, but I fell for his notion of the World State and it still colours my views on the Common Market. On my quest for science fiction, however, I didn't hit pay dirt until I came to Olaf Stapledon and his Last and First Men.

The next major development was when I left primary school and was sent to a secondary school situated in central Belfast. I was given the money for my tram fares and lunch. While waiting for the tram home, I called in at Woolworths and found to my astonishment a counter piled high with back numbers of American pulp magazines, including sf prozines. As I recall, the ordinary monthly issues were sold at 3d each and the large quarterlies at 6d each. I bought as many of them as I could afford and walked home. Next week and thereafter I spent my lunch money for the week as well. (It was given to me on Monday and I was supposed to buy a week's supply of lunch vouchers with it. In fact I staved off my hunger with, appropriately, a bar of Mars and spent the rest on science fiction. I can claim to have actually suffered hardship for the sake of science fiction.)

You may be wondering what my parents were thinking of to ignore my lateness in coming home from school. In fact they knew I was employed as school librarian. The payment for the job was any book I chose. I picked the collected short stories of HG Wells, which amazingly include The Time Machine, and is a treasury of lesser known science fiction.

I read avidly the readers' letters in the back numbers of the sf prozines I bought in Woolworths and I remember being amused by letters about staples from some character called Bob Tucker, but it never occurred to me to take part in the correspondence. That would have to await the end of the War.

In 1947 I came across in a second hand bookshop a copy of an American version of Astounding. Until then, I had thought that the British reprint was complete. Madeleine has alluded to the occasion when we both went into the same shop to purchase a copy of the BRE ASF, which was the first we knew of our secret vice, adding that she first realised my intentions were honourable when I let her read the serial first. The truth was that the BRE did not run serials at all, and was incomplete in many other respects. For the next few years all my life was devoted to acquiring copies of the wartime US editions of Astounding.

I wrote to James White, whose address I had gleaned from the correspondence of the British prozine FANTASY. That was the start of Irish Fandom, and together we joined Ken Slater's organisation Operation Fantast. Apart from his own catalogues for his own dealer's business Ken Slater had taken to distributing fanzines produced by his customers, including one called Alembic, produced by one Norman Ashfield. Surely you could do better than that, said Madeleine.

We agreed, but how? By coincidence a friend of mine mentioned that in the loft of a shop where he worked there was an abandoned printing press. We liberated it, and I bought a font of type for it, and we were in business.

I wrote most of the first two issues myself, and can still not re-read them without shame. However they seemed to go down well with the readers. As for the real reason for the enterprise, the advertisement of our want list for American editions of ASF proved quite effective, until there was only one we needed, the April 1943 issue.

The amount we could print was limited by the time it took to set type and break it down again, so there was always extra things I wanted to say, so when a new fanzine called Quandry appeared, which seemed congenial, I volunteered to write a column for it. It was called The Harp That Once Or Twice, after a phrase in James Joyce's Ulysses. It was so phenomenally successful that Shelby Vick started a Fund to bring me to the Nolacon in 1951. Of course it was far too late for that, but nothing daunted, Shelby changed his goal to the Chicon in 1952. Neither Lee Hoffman, editor of Quandry, or myself gave it any chance of success... the only previous example we knew of, Forry Ackerman's Big Pond Fund to import Ted Carnell ... had been rescued from failure so far as we knew only by a hefty grant from Forry himself ... but we were wrong. Shelby's project was successful. I sold off my painfullly acquired stock of ASFs and bought a steerage passage on a Greek liner, the Neptunia.

After some eight days it landed me in Hoboken Docks, where I was met by two rival groups of New York fans, represented by Dave Kyle and Will Sykora. Later that day I got a bus to Chicago, where some 24 hours later I was welcomed by Lee Hoffman and Bob Tucker.

The Convention which followed was to me the epitome of Sixth Fandom, which was the name given to the fandom based on Quandry and my mimeographed fanzine Hyphen, which was replacing Slant. Its luminaries included Tucker, Hoffman, Max Keasler, Rich Elsberry, Robert Bloch, and Shelby Vick, all of whom were prominent at Chicon '52, and I represented the European aspect of Sixth Fandom, who includedd Chuck Harris, Vince Clarke, Ken Bulmer and the rest of Irish Fandom. For me, its epiphany was the last night, when Lee and Max and I sat in a window seat in the penthouse until the sun rose over Chicago.

After the Convention, and a visit to Raymond Palmer's home in Amhurst, Wisconsin, I set off by car for Los Angeles, via Salt Lake City, with Forry and Wendayne Ackerman, Mari Wolf Phillips and her husband Rog. I stayed with Forry Ackerman in L.A., addressing the LASFS and meeting AE Van Vogt and Ray Bradbury and Rick Sneary.

Then I left LA by air for Kansas City, to visit with Manly Banister, and then by bus to Flirday to say with Shelby Vick and then by bus again to Savannah, Georgia, where Lee and I visited the Okefenokee Swamp. Then back to New York, where I stayed overnight with George O. Smith and his new wife Donna, fomerly Mr. John W. Campbell.

All this I wrote up in detail, after which I developed a sever case of pneumonitis. Which wasn't surprising when you consider I had lost over 14 lb. in weight during the trip. However by May, 1953, I was at the British Convention, as witnessed by the following announcement on the inside back cover of Hyphen No. 4:


THE TRANSATLANTIC FAN FUND

On the second day of the Coroncon I convened an informal Committee of all the available leaders of British fandom to discuss the offer by Don Ford and the Cincinnati Group to help a British fan (Norman Ashfield -- who couldn't come) attend the Philcon. The committee consisted of myself, Ken Slater, Vince Clarke, Chuck Harris, James White, Fred Robinson, Fred Brown and representative s of the Liverpool and Manchester groups. It was decided that a permanent Two-way Transatlantic Fan Fund be set up to help both British and American fans to attend each other's Conventions ... I was delegated the job of arranging the voting procedure, but I'd like to get at least the tacit consent of British Fandom to what I propose, so I'm publishing my suggestions now in time for you to register any objections you might have."

There were no objections worth mentioning and the rules became substantially what they are now.

After the demise of Quandry, my column The Harp That Once Or Twice continued in Gregg Calkins' OOPSLA, until 1959, and then in WARHOON from January 1961. In April of the same year there appeared the first issue of a bi-weekly fanzine published by Larry and Noreen Shaw called Axe, which was dedicated to raising the money to import Madeleine and me to Chicon 3 in 1962. By December of 1961 the Fund amounted to $1548.45, and I wrote "It seems inadequate to say I'm delighted, and I can't really admit to being as surprised as I am lest it seem uncomplimentary to the organisers of the Fund ... though it still seems to me the most fantastic thing. I can't even say I'm overwhelmed because I'm determined not to be. I was overwhelmed last time and it wasn't comfortable. I kept thinking of things like Shelby Vick's teeth and Ian McAuley's bike ... you know that Ian, the primaeval Atlantean Ian, that is ... sold his bike for Shelby's Fund and Shelby himself delayed getting his teeth fixed ... and spent so much time wondering what sort of impression I could make or had made, that I didn't enjoy myself as much as I could have. For years afterwards I couldn't look at the list of contributors without a pang of guilt. But this time everything has been done so gracefully and apparently painlessly that I'm determined to accept it in the same way. I shall even try not to feel inadequate, realising that most sensible fans won't expect anything but an ordinary friendly fellow fan, intensely interested in everything and enjoying himself. This I think is what they want, and this I can promise."

The Fund closed at $1784.66, and I gambled it all on a bet with Terry Carr soon after we arrived in New York. Terry had mentioned a joke I had made at Chicon in 1952. Apparently I had been sitting on the 30th floor of the Morrison Hotel, knocking the ash off my cigarette into the Chicago street below, when someone offered me an ashtray. "No thanks," I said, "This one isn't full yet." I asked Terry how he'd heard of it and he said that it was part of the folklore of US Fandom, but he'd read it in The Harp Stateside. I was awed by the first, but denied the second. "I'll bet you $1784.66," he said. "Done," I said. Terry retired from the conversation with Dick Lupoff's copy of The Harp Stateside. Later he returned, admitting he owned me $1784.66. "Good news for Axe readers," I called to Larry, "Refunds after all." Terry confessed manfully that he didn't have that much money, so I agreed to take it out in subscriptions to Lighthouse. "Make a note," he said to Peter Graham. "Next issue, another check square on the back cover. You are Walt Willis and the price of this copy is $1784.66."

After the convention it was by car to Dean Grennell and then back to Chicago for a couple of days with Rosemary Hickey. Then it was off to Seattle by bus to stay a while with the Busby's. "I always go round America anticlockwise," I had explained to Ethel Lindsay, who was in Chicago as the TAFF delegate. After Seattle we took the bus down to San Francisco to spend a last day with Ethel before her return to Scotland. Then it was Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, the Grand Canyon and back to New York for us, minus a suitcase which Greyhound managed to lose en route from Flagstaff, Arizona. To us it was priceless, containing irreplaceable notes and souvenirs but since we hadn't declared any special valuable, the compensation offered was a derisory $25. After some angry correspondence, Greyhound unexpectedly told us our missing suitcase had been found and was being consigned to us. It never arrived and it gradually became clear that Greyhound had managed to lose it again. It was Madeleine who pointed out that the legal position had now changed completely, in that it was Greyhound themselves who had consigned the case and that we had had no opportunity to declare its value. The Company saw the justice of that and paid us $225.

On 25th May, 1965, our 20th wedding anniversary, we moved house to 32 Warren Road, Donaghadee. I carried Madeleine across the threshold, which was a tribute to us both. Since this was the year of the London Worldcon we had fannish visitors by way of housewarming, including Robert and Ellie Bloch, Terry and Carol Carr, Ted White, Peter Graham and Wally Weber.

In April, 1968 I was commissioned by Terry Carr to write a book about Ireland and finished it the following October. I had quite a few letters from nonfans about it, all enthusiastic. Then in November I had what the doctor described as a cerebrovasular incident but which I decided was a mild stroke, gave up smoking and took early retirement from work. The frustration of my job, trying to cope with the NI situation during Direct Rule, had been getting me down. In the Seventies I made some attempts to regain contact with fandom including attending the 1976 convention, andi in late 1978 Richard Bergeron published Warhoon 28; a 600 odd anthology of my fan writing. In 1987 I published a 40th anniversary issue of Hyphen which sold out so rapidly I didn't even keep a copy for myself.

In December 1988 Madeleine and I were invited Guests of Honour to Tropicon, a small regional Convention in Florida. Everything seemed to go off well, and we hardly hesitated before accepting a similar invitation to the Worldon in Florida in 1992. Unfortunately in 1991 I was struck down with an aortic anueryism, which kept me in intensive care on a life support system for some ten days, and which left me a mere shadow of my former self. We went to Florida anyway and went through all the motions, but I was conscious that life had gone out of me.

Now I am 75 years of age, older than the Pope, or even Harry Warner. It has taken me over a week to write this article and it is probably the last fan article I will ever write. I hope you enjoyed it.

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