The Way the Future Blogs

   Eugenie Clark

It’s hard to list the Ipsy’s guests in any sensible order, perhaps because they were not an orderly bunch. It does make sense for me to divide the guests into two classes. To begin with, there was the New York science-fiction crowd, all of whom I had known for some time.

In that group were most of the science-fiction people I have already written more or less extensively about in these pages. Among the ones most frequently present were Lester and Evelyn del Rey, Bob and Essie Bolster, George and Dona Smith, Cyril Kornbluth (first as a house guest of mine, then as a nearby resident on his own). Assorted other house guests of mine included Fritz Leiber from Chicago and Jack and Blanche Williamson from New Mexico.

Ted Sturgeon was definitely a regular in an unusual sense. For a couple of months one summer he never went home at all, since at the time, his finances being anemic, he didn’t have a home to go to.

The Pratts had no objection to Ted’s staying in the house when everyone else was gone. However, they didn’t offer to feed him. That was not a problem for Ted, who enjoyed a good dish of eel. He enjoyed it so much, in fact, that by the time he finally moved out of the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute, he had fished out the entire family of eels who lived by the boat dock. They never returned.

 
Any number of other New York-area sf people visited the Ipsy. Isaac Asimov, for instance, was there I think only once, but it was a significant visit, since Fletcher and Inga had plans for Isaac. They spent a lot of that weekend telling him what a wonderful place the Bread Loaf Writers’ Colony was for anyone with the desire, and the ability, to be a serious writer … and, I’m pretty sure, spent an equivalent period of time with the Breadloaf people telling them what a wonderful prospect Isaac was. The effort paid off. Isaac did give Bread Loaf a try; he loved the place, the Breadloaf people loved him and he became a Bread Loaf stalwart.

The other fraction of frequent guests at the Ipsy basically comprised the non-sf friends of the Pratts, many of them with ties to The Saturday Review of Literature. Some of those were actual celebrities of one kind or another, as for example Eugenie Clark, known worldwide as the “Lady with a Spear,” after her bestselling book with that name. Eugenie, as a child, had been fascinated by the works of William Beebe — Half Mile Down, the story of his adventures hanging at the end of almost 3,000 feet of steel cable in his “bathysphere,” a steel sphere about the size of a pup tent, or Beneath Tropic Seas, about his less spine-chilling but even more beautiful experiences walking through warm-water corals with only a mask for breathing.

I could understand her fascination. I had been turned on by the same books at about the same age. The difference between Eugenie Clark and me, though, was that she then grew up to become an actual ichthyologist, and I only to become a writer.

Continue reading ‘Fletcher Pratt, Part 4: The Friends of Fletcher’ »

   Fletcher Pratt, 1952.

Let me tell you about the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute, which is the name that Fletcher and Inga Pratt gave to their enormous old house in Highlands, on the New Jersey shore. The house had something over thirty rooms. The ground floor, which was embraced by a wide, 360-degree veranda, comprised a kitchen, a billiard room, a dining room capable of seating 20 or more, a room I would call a sitting room, another, slightly larger, which I would call a living room but think should be given a more elegant name.

On the second floor were six or seven bedrooms, a couple of them with private baths and little sitting rooms of their own. And on the third floor there were another half dozen or so bedrooms, with a couple more baths.

Do not make the mistake of supposing these third-floor rooms were servants’ quarters. They all were for guests. There was plenty of room for the guests’ servants, but they were to be accommodated in another wing of the house entirely, essentially a six- or seven-room home attached to the main residence. It had its own kitchen and bath, the only connection between it and the residence being through the two kitchens.

Since the Pratts employed no full-time servants, they rented this attached house to Esther Carlson, a young woman who was beginning to appear regularly in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and her handyman husband, Bob Bolster. They didn’t stay the course, though, and when they left — and when George O. Smith at last succeeded in divorcing his first wife and Dona Campbell did the same for her husband, John W. — the newlywed George and Dona Smiths took over the conjoined space until they bought a home of their own a few miles down the shoreline in Rumson.

The Ipsy-Wipsy Institute was set on something over half a dozen acres of lawn, descending about a hundred vertical feet from the roadway to the ocean. There was a little beach there for swimming and a pier for boating — or for fishing, though about all anyone ever caught was eels. A lot of quite tasty eels, though.

 
Fletcher Pratt was a dear man who had a few eccentricities. One of these was his inclination to run the Ipay-Wipsy Institute as a sort of road-show version of an English country home. Weekend guests were expected to arrive early enough on the Friday evening for a few drinks and a modest dinner, generally prepared by Grace the Cook and followed by a drink or two and conversations in the billiard room, until the guests began retreating to their rooms. (There was, by the way, no billiard table in the billiard room, only the report that once there had been.)

Saturday began with a Grace-made breakfast buffet whenever anyone came down for it, after which Fletcher would set up his typewriter in the billiard room, and sometimes I would set mine up as well. For both of us, the procedure was that we would type a few words, or a few lines, as they occurred to us, then chat a bit with whoever else was there, then maybe another line or so of copy. When there was no one else to talk to Fletcher might divert himself by tossing playing cards into a hat and I by getting myself a cup of coffee and glancing at the morning papers.

Others might sit in the sunny porch and read, or play cards or an African board game called K’bu that the Pratts fancied, or explore the neighborhood, or make the trek down to the water’s edge for a swim. At some point, Grace would set out the materials for a pick-up lunch, to be eaten, probably in small groups, in one of the first-floor rooms or on the porch. Then more of the same until five.

Then the more structured part of the weekend began.

Someone — preferably someone who could play, or at least get some sort of a sound from, a bugle — was given the bugle and a homemade flag bearing a drawing of a martini glass and instructed to march around the porch, tooting the bugle and waving the flag, in order to notify the guests, and a few of the neighbors as well, that the cocktail hour had arrived.

 
I should say, right about here, that although there was a lot of drinking at the Ipsy-Wip, I almost never saw anyone really drunk. (With one exception that I’ll tell you about later.) But the drinking was steady, from the beginning of the cocktail hour at five until dinner was served at seven. With the dinner there was wine for those who wanted it, of course, and then, when Grace had picked up the plates, Fletcher brought out the bottle of port.

The thing about the port was that it always had to be passed clockwise around the table. Fletcher, sitting at twelve o’clock at the head of the table, would start the service by giving the bottle to (say) Essie Bolster, at the one o’clock position to his left. Who would help herself to as much as she wanted of it and then pass the bottle to, say, Fritz Leiber to her left at two o’clock, and so on, always passing to the left, until the bottle finally made it back to Fletcher, at the head of the table, who at last was allowed to help himself to the port.

 
To be continued.
 

 
Related posts:

• Fletcher Pratt, Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
• The Ipsy-Wipsy Institute

Brooklyn Tech: The fabled new building.

In New York City, the school year, up through the end of high school, came in two parts, fall term and spring term. I had entered Brooklyn Tech in September 1932 — fall term — which would end in February 1933. By then, rumor whispered, we might move over to the new building.

That is not what happened. We moved to a different building, but it wasn’t the shiny Amazing-Stories kind of construction I’d been hoping for. It was not only not new, it was the very opposite of new. Our home for the next term had begun life as P.S. No. 1, the oldest school building still in use in the Brooklyn system. Actually, it had been retired as no longer inhabitable a few years earlier, but then it had been resuscitated when Tech had to have space.

That must have been a tough call for some Board of Education office-holder, though. By any sensible calculation, the old ruin was uninhabitable still. The internal architecture had been up-to-the-minute when built, but that had been a lot of minutes ago. Many of the vertical room dividers were movable partitions instead of fixed walls — so they could be shifted around to make space available for special purposes — but the little wheels they rode on had long ago stopped turning. Some ceiling panels had collapsed baring patches of snowy (but not healthful) asbestos insulation. There were toilets in plenty. But not all of them worked, and in some a student would have to be really hard pressed to use them.

Or at least patient, because the best thing about having P.S. 1 for a homeroom was that you didn’t spend your whole day there. There was a whole constellation of bits and pieces of Brooklyn Tech there where Flatbush Avenue Extension ended at the East River. Ancient P.S. 1 was the farthest northwest of them, not far from the neighborhood called Borough Hall, where Brooklyn Bridge jumped the river en route to the financial district. In the other direction, that area was a tangle of transportation lines and decrepit poverty, a perfect home for decrepit P.S. 1. A few blocks east of there was P.S. 5. (Perhaps you might suppose that a P.S. 5 — or for that matter my old P.S. 9 — would have to be almost as much of an antique as a P.S. 1, but they weren’t. They were as ageless as any other school building I had attended, and I don’t know why.)

P.S. 5 was yet another annex of Brooklyn Tech at almost the end of Flatbush Avenue Extension (which is to say right as it crossed over the river on the Manhattan Bridge.) And just across the Avenue from Annex 5 was the last piece in the collection of three buildings that completed Tech: the old Main Building. (Well, actually no, perhaps it wasn’t quite the last. I believe there was yet another annex somewhere in Queens, but I never happened to attend it.)

Continue reading ‘Early Days at Brooklyn Tech, Part 2’ »

Cyril Kornbluth’s death came as a very bad thing that had suddenly happened to all of us, but it wasn’t really a surprise. Cyril’s doctors had told him, definitely and explicitly, that his heart had been worn out in the Bulge. It was barely able to continue to pump blood around its system.

It wouldn’t go on doing it, either, unless Cyril made some revolutionary changes in his lifestyle. Step One: no more cigarettes, coffee or alcohol — ever — for the rest of his life. Very, very limited amounts of spicy foods, and even more limited amounts of salt. Any deviation from any of this, ever, would have about the same effect as putting a gun to his temple and pulling the trigger. He would very quickly die.

Cyril took what the doctor told him seriously. He even tried to follow the doctor’s orders. When he came out for a brief stay with Carol and me, Carol baked him salt-free bread and cooked him fully dietary meals. Cyril ate them, without showing any signs of pleasure — I could see why, because I had tasted them for myself.

We didn’t do any writing, though. We didn’t even do any talking about writing. When I tried to get something going by showing him a section from my current work that I wasn’t feeling good about, Cyril took the pages from me and scanned them. Then he handed them back to me. “Needs salt,” he said.

And he went home, but, of course, Cyril just couldn’t live that way.

He stuck it out as long as he could, perhaps as long as a couple of months, and then he decided that he’d rather be dead than living like that. So back came the booze and the cigarettes and the salt shaker and all the other things that made Cyril’s life worth living and sure enough, next thing you know, his limbs were jerking and his eyes were rolled up in his head and he was busily dying on the train station platform.

 
All right. End of story for Cyril. The new major characters were Mary and the boys.

Cyril and I had had our ups and downs, but we had been through too much together for me to even consider walking away from their needs. I got dressed and jumped in the car and drove, as fast I could, through the hundred miles or so of rush-hour traffic between Red Bank and Levittown. Mary was waiting for me at the door, quite distraught — but, blessedly, sober.

First thing, we had to decide what on that list most urgently needed doing. There were a lot of contenders for the top need. She needed money for buying stuff, mostly food, for the kids and herself that day. They needed money, lots of it, to keep on providing for herself and the kids for the rest of their lives.

They needed to know what to do with Cyril’s corpse, which was, if I remember correctly, at that moment in the back of a station wagon borrowed from somebody in the Levittown Fire Department and parked at the curb in front of the house. They needed to know if there were documents to file, as there surely were, to properly record the fact that Cyril was now one with the ages.

That wasn’t the end of the urgent needs, but it was sort of at least the end of the easiest ones. We had some big, big breaks. What I had been dreading as the toughest of problems to deal with turned out to be the easiest. Mary wasn’t the first widow of a GI to fine herself in exactly that situation. She might’ve been about the one millionth. The government itself had set up the Veterans Administration to make sure that everything a veteran needed was available to give and, since negotiating with even a friendly government agency can curdle your blood, a horde of new veterans’ organizations produced a ton of smart, energetic, can-do volunteers to get the widows and orphans all the help they needed.

“What you’re entitled to, Mrs. Kornbluth, is so much for yourself and so much for each of your sons. It takes a little while to get started, though. Do you need money right now? Of course you do. There’s a special emergency lump-sum package we can get for you. I’ll start on that right away.”

They were, in short, wonderful. They almost made me cancel my intention to never join the beer-bellies of any veterans organization. But not quite.

The last disposition we had to deal with that day was Cyril himself. Happened my maternal grandfather, that bald and stone-deaf old man who had lived with us for part of the last years of his life, had been cremated near by. I checked some addresses and made a few calls.

And then Mary and I went to the front door of the crematorium, the station wagon with Cyril’s body tagging along behind. Somebody took the wagon and Cyril to the back entrance, while Mary and I were seated in a small auditorium, maybe fifteen or twenty seats, facing a drawn curtain. Music was playing. It didn’t take long. The drawn curtain rolled back. There was Cyril, looking very grave but otherwise about as he always looked, in a shirt, tie and jacket in one of those cardboard “coffins” they use for cremations.

They gave us a few minutes to look at him. Then Cyril and his casket began to roll away, into a pair of double doors that had rolled open behind him. I think we actually saw flames. I know we definitely felt heat. Then the double doors closed and the curtain came back down, and that was the last I ever saw of Cyril.

At some point Mary got a cardboard carton, not unlike the packaging that your milk comes in from the supermarket, that contained Cyril’s ashes. I don’t know what she did with them.

Part 3 coming up soon

 
Related posts:

• Mary Kornbluth, Part 1, Part 3
• Cyril

“A kind of Wagon Train in space. . . .”

The Man Who Launched the Enterprise

      Majel Barrett and Gene Roddenberry.

I was pretty satisfied with Tricon, the Worldcon in Cleveland in 1966. When it was over, I had had a chance to hang with many old friends, I had had a few talks with writers I wanted to juice up for the magazines I was editing, Galaxy and If, and I had picked up another Hugo Award — this one a “Best Magazine” award for If. I was aware that there was a lot of stuff going on that I had missed — like the showing of the pilot episode of something called Star Trek — but I had received an information package about it from its producer, somebody named Gene Roddenberry, and he had described it as “a kind of Wagon Train in space.” That didn’t awaken in my soul any desire to see it.

True, Roddenberry himself sounded sort of interesting: A B-17 pilot with 89 missions in the South Pacific in World War II, later a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department, who began writing TV scripts in his spare time. But by then I had had a fair number of dealings with TV people on my own, and they hadn’t impressed me with the breed. I wasn’t enough interested to offer to buy him a drink.

Then, in 1969, I won another Hugo for If and Star Trek won a Hugo of its own, and I got an idea. The most conspicuous thing about television was that their numbers were at least an order of magnitude larger than ours at the magazines. So why shouldn’t I try to get in on some of those large numbers, perhaps by obtaining the rights to publish an occasional story based on a Star Trek episode in one of my magazines? Would any of those numbers rub off on us?

I didn’t know that they would. On the other hand, I didn’t know that they wouldn’t. So I wrote Gene a letter, outlining what I had in mind and suggesting that he and I get together to talk it over. He responded at once with, “Sure, let’s.” And a week or two later, when I had been planning to be in L.A. for the purpose of urging some writers on anyway, I drove my rented convertible up to the gate at the Desilu lot, where Star Trek was filmed, and told the armed guard that I was here to see Mr. Roddenberry.

* * *

Gene turned out to be friendly, smart and obliging. He thought my plan could do nothing but good for both parties, and he thought it should be put into practice right away.

The only thing wrong with that plan, he told me, was that he didn’t have the authority to okay it. That belonged to the higher-ups in the company’s Byzantine Hollywood corporate structure. Star Trek didn’t own itself. It was owned by Paramount Pictures, which would have to approve the plan. Unfortunately, though, even Paramount’s approval didn’t mean I could start commissioning stories, because they, too, were owned, this time by the sprawling Gulf & Western, sometimes called Engulf & Destroy.

“So how long until we get a decision from Gulf and Western?” I asked, as politely as possible.

“Oh, you never know that,” Gene said. “Sometimes not too long. But anyway, as long as you’re here, I’ve got a photographer standing by. Mind if he takes a few pictures?”

I didn’t, and for a prop Gene picked his Hugo from the Worldcon off the shelf and we passed it back and forth for a dozen or so photographs — me awarding it to him for some, and then Gene awarding it to me (but with the lettering on the base carefully concealed) on the rest. And then I went on with the rest of my West Coast obligations.

Gene had invited me to try writing a script for the series. I did try, but without much luck. Perhaps the problem was that I didn’t really like the idea of another barrier between me and the audience — that is, a director and a bunch of actors — or perhaps I just wasn’t into network television, having already had my share of disillusioning experiences with it. Anyway, for some reason I just was no good at it. Still, that — and the hope that Engulf and Destroy might ultimately come up with the okay for us to do some of the stories — meant that I was in the habit of visiting Gene every time I hit L.A., which was always a pleasure. . . .

Well, almost always. There was the time when he invited me up to his home for lunch, high over Hollywood, where he lived with his wife, better known as Majel Barrett when she had appeared as Nurse Chapel in the series. It was a handsome house, with a grand view of the city spread out below. The furnishing was handsome, too, including the deep-pile, snow-white carpeting in the room we were in. Majel asked me whether I preferred white wine or red. I took the red. Then I almost immediately knocked the glass over, spilling the whole glass of that deep red wine onto the still deep-pile, but no longer snow-white, carpeting.

Majel was a sweet-tempered woman. The proof of that is that she didn’t snatch up one of the cheese knives and cut my throat on the spot.

I used to see Majel every once in a while at dinners of the local space society, where she was an honored guest. She spoke to me without rancor, which is proof, again, that she had totally forgiven me. (It is impossible that she simply forgot what I did to her beautiful white carpet.)

* * *

Star Trek had a good first year and a somewhat less good second year. For the third year it got canceled.

This sort of event is by no means unusual in the bloodthirsty world of network TV, but Gene wasn’t prepared to take it lying down. So he and some confederates concocted a plan to keep the show on the air for a while.

One of the confederates turned out to be me. To find out more about it, however, you’ll have to wait for the conclusion of this essay. That will be coming up in this blog before long, but not until I get around to writing it.

To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:
Raising Star Trek from the Dead

The Brooklyn Science Fiction League met in the basement of its chairman, George Gordon Clark. He was an energetic fellow. When Wonder Stories announced the formation of the SFL Clark did not waste time, he sent in his coupon at once and consequently became Member No. 1. When the SFL announced it was willing to charter local chapters, he acted instantly again, and so the BSFL was Chapter No. 1, too.

We outgrew Clark’s basement pretty quickly; there was only room for about four of us, in with his collection of sf magazines. We moved to a classroom in a nearby public school. What I mostly remember about those meetings is surprise that I couldn’t fit into the grammar-school desks anymore — after all, it was only a couple of years since I had been occupying desks just like them every school day. I remember we talked a lot about how to interpret Robert’s Rules of Order and spent quite a lot of time reading minutes of the previous meeting. If anything else substantive took place, I have forgotten it entirely.

But, ah, the Meeting After the Meeting! That was the fun part. That was when we would adjourn to the nearest open soda fountain, order our sodas and sundaes and sit around until they threw us out, talking about science fiction.

It was always a soda fountain. Not always the same one; over the years we fans must have staked out and claimed dozens of them, all over the city. But we were addicted to ice cream concoctions, so much so that a few years later, in a different borough of the city, after the meetings of a different club, we finally designed our own sundae, which we called the Science Fiction Special, and persuaded the proprietor of the store to put it on his menu.

We were a young bunch, as you can see. Except for Clark, who must have been in his early twenties, the old man of the group was Donald Wollheim, pushing nineteen. John B. Michel came with Donald; and a little later, down from Connecticut, Robert W. Lowndes; the four of us made a quadrumvirate that held together for — oh, forever, it seems like — it must have been all of three or four years, during which time we started clubs and dispersed them, published fan magazines, fought all comers for supremacy in fandom and wound up battling among ourselves.

The fan feud is not quite coeval with fandom itself, but it comes close. None of the clubs seemed to live very long. The BSFL held out for a year, then we moved on to the East New York Science Fiction League, a rival chapter of the parent organization, which seceded and renamed itself the Independent League for Science Fiction. That kept us engaged for another year, then it was the turn of the International Scientific Association (also known as the International Cosmos-Science Club). The ISA was not particularly scientific, and it certainly wasn’t all that international; we met in the basement of Will Sykora’s house in Astoria, Queens. (The ENYSFL-ILSF had met in a basement, too, the one belonging to its chairman, Harold W. Kirshenblith. I do not know what science-fiction fandom would have done in, say, Florida, where the houses didn’t have basements.)

It didn’t much matter what the name of the club was, or where we met. We did about the same things. We held meetings once a month, mostly devoted to arguments over whether a motion to adjourn took precedence over a point of personal privilege. We got together between times to publish mimeographed magazines, where we practiced our fledgling talents — for writing, and also for invective.

The fan mags (now they are called “fanzines,” but the term hadn’t been coined then) were sometimes club efforts, sometimes individual. I managed to wind up as editor of the club mags a lot of the time, but that wasn’t enough; I published some of my own. The one I liked best was a minimal eight-page mimeographed job measuring 4 ¼ by 5 ½ inches — a standard 8 ½-by-11-inch mimeo sheet folded twice — called Mind of Man. Since it was my own, I could publish anything I liked in it. What I liked best to publish was my own poetry, which at that time was highly sense-free, influenced in equal parts by Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and some of the crazier exhibits in transition.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

• Basement and Empire
• Basement and Empire, Part 3: Lessons in SF
• Basement and Empire, Afterwords
• The Quadrumvirate
• Let There Be Fandom: The Science Fiction League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 2: School Days
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 3: A Brooklyn Boyhood
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 4: New Deal, New Worlds
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 5: The Big League
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 6: The Pros!
• Let There Be Fandom, Part 7: The Crusade