The Way the Future Blogs

 

The first sign of something called “Occupiers” was in an ad in a little Canadian — that’s right, Canadian — magazine called Adbusters and published in Vancouver, British Columbia. It displayed a picture of the bronze figure of a bull which decorates Wall Street, with a ballet dancer posed on it. The only text said, “What is our one demand? Occupy Wall Street. September 17th, Bring tent.”

And on September 17th, a hundred and fifty people showed, then each day more and more until it peaked at 20,000 physically present on Zuccoti Park in lower Manhattan, and similar demonstrations were spring up all over the country — indeed in other countries, too. What do these crowds do at these meetings? Many of them listen to speeches. Who are the speakers? Anyone who wants to. If you are standing in the crowd for a while and have a sudden urge to support — or opp — something that’s been said, you go to the “stackkeeper,” who adds it to the stack of those who got there before you. When all of them have said their piece, you get to climb up onto whatever they are using for a soapbox.

That is the freest of free speech, but there are handicaps. The police won’t allow electronic microphones. Therefore, when you speak you have the same range as the famous orators of Athens and Rome, and not an inch more. What the Occupiers do when technology is forbidden and the crowd stretches more than a couple of yards away is to use the same technology as was available to Marc Antony eulogizing Caesar. That is, the human voice. Those nearest the speaker turn around and repeat what he said, then the job is repeated by those farther away. It isn’t perfect. People in the fringes are unlikely to get a reliable understanding of what some of the speeches are about. But it is certainly democratic and the police can’t take it away.

The tents and sleeping bags were hauled away in a midnight raid, so that technically the NYPD is not violating the Bill of Rights’ Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly, though clearly the police are going out of their way to make it tough. Still, New York police have been markedly less hostile than those of, say, Berkley, California, where one policeman was filmed strolling down a long line of seated and unresisting Occupiers and methodically directing his pepper spray into their eyes and faces.

(Simultaneously, though not connected, FBI agents in Connecticut moved in and arrested four local police, allegedly for discriminating against Latin-Americans. The policemen were described as “bullies with badges.” Some police certainly deserve that name.)

(Most of this data was gleaned from reports published in the monthly newsletter The Washington Spectator. Each issue features a different subject. $18 for a year’s subscription, at The Public Concern Foundation, P.O. Box 241, Oregon IL 61061.)

King of the Comics and Agent, Editor, Faaan

Julius Scwartz, 1945.

The thing about Julius Schwartz is that, while I myself did many things in that Early Paleozoic Era when there were no jet aircraft or nuclear submarines and people didn’t even have TV sets yet, Julie Schwartz was doing the same things even earlier than I did.

For instance, I joined my first science-fiction fan club, the Brooklyn Science Fiction League, in 1932, but Julie had joined the first science-fiction fan club that ever existed, the New York Scienceers, years before that. I edited my first fanzine (we didn’t call them that yet, just “fan magazine”) when I was twelve. So did Julie. But he was twelve before I was, due to his unfair advantage of having been born four or five years earlier.

And both of us had set ourselves up as literary agents, specializing in trying to sell other writers’ stories to the science-fiction magazines, and both of us coasted from that to actual full-time jobs editing —

Hey, wait! I was going to say that we then coasted into full-time jobs as professional magazine editors. And that did happen for both of us, but I’m getting the facts wrong, because that was the one time that I led the way for Julie.

I broke in in 1939, when I lucked into the job of editing two science-fiction magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, for Harry Steeger’s giant pulp house of Popular Publications. Julie not only was still making his rounds as a literary agent at that time, I actually bought a number of stories from him for my magazines. He didn’t get the chance to make the jump to an editorial job, with an actual salary, until 1944. Then he was hired as an editor by a company that published comics magazines which ultimately mutated into the mighty DC Comics.

Oh, and there was another significant difference in our careers. By 1944, I wasn’t working for Popular Publications anymore, anyway. A war had come along and it required me to get into uniform so I could give it my full attention. I never did go back to working for Popular Publications, either.

Julie, on the other hand, knew a good thing when he had it. He stayed with DC Comics, in all of its convolutions and growth problems, until the day when — by then as its editor in chief! — he retired.

That was in 1986. However, you mustn’t think that his retirement from editorial duties took Julie off the payroll. Although he didn’t have to worry about deadlines or sales figures any more, but now he was reborn as DC Comics’ “goodwill ambassador to the world of comics and science-fiction fandom.” That meant he was given a fat expense account and charged with showing the DC Comics flag at as many cons and other events as he could find the strength to go to.

Was that what you would call a dream job? For a grown-up faaan who still loved cons and fandom in general, you bet it was! But it wasn’t unwarranted. More than any other single human being, Julie was responsible for returning DC Comics, and indeed the whole comics industry, to the money-making powerhouse status it achieved in the mid-1950s. in what was called “the Silver Age Revolution.”

Continue reading ‘Julie Schwartz’ »

I commissioned this illustration from Hannes Bok after seeing his work in 1939.

The Futurians had any number of members who won awards for writing, but we only had one who earned his Hugo by the beauty of the things he drew and painted. That was Wayne Woodard, as his parents called him when he was born in 1914, though he became better known to fans and to art-lovers all over the world by the name he chose for himself when he needed something to sign to his artwork, Hannes Bok.

Most magazine illustrators get their start with the magazines by visiting their offices, a bunch of samples under their arms, and showing them to whoever on the masthead would look at them until somebody showed up who liked the samples well enough to use a few in their magazines. That wasn’t possible for Hannes. He was a West Coast kid and he had no possibility of affording a bus ticket to where the magazines were. But he had a stroke of luck.

When he moved to Los Angeles — which he did early in 1939 — he met a kid fan named Raymond Bradbury — “Ray,” for short — who was almost as badly off as himself. The kid wasn’t aiming to be an artist; his dream was to become a writer, but he was as unsuccessful at it as Hannes was with his art. However. he belonged to a group of people who, like Hannes, were interested in science fiction and fantasy. The group, the Los Angeles Science Fiction League, would later become the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. They met in an upper room of a place called Clifton’s Cafeteria.

LASFS was a welcoming group for Hannes. Among the people he met there was a writer named Emil Petaja, who did get some of his stories published in the prozines and became Hannes’ best and lifelong friend. Another was a fan, or actually a kind of superfan who knew everybody involved in making of sf films, named Forrest J (No Period!) Ackerman.

The big news in science fiction, at least as far as the LASFS was concerned, was what was going to happen in New York that summer. The city was planning a huge show called the New York World’s Fair, and the fans in New York had uncharacteristically abandoned their blood feuding to work together to create a wonderful new project, a World Science Fiction Convention. It was the chance of a lifetime, they reasoned, because they could take advantage of all the foreigners who would come to New York for the Fair. Some fraction of them, they calculated, were sure to be fans who would be likely to stay for this Worldcon.

It was every last LASFS member’s dearest dream to be among them, but for most they knew it was only a dream. The Depression was dwindling fast, but its effects were not altogether over. And LASFS was made up mainly of teenagers with few resources to draw on.

But one resource was Forry Ackerman. A small inheritance had left him with money in the bank, so he was going to the Worldcon himself. So was a female fan named Myrtle R. Jones — or, as you would say it in Forry’s favorite second tongue, Esperanto, “Morojo.” And, when Forry had had a couple weeks of exposure to the woebegone expression on Ray’s face, he figured out a way of solving one problem. He could lend Ray Bradbury the bus fare. So he tapped the bank account a little harder, and pulled out enough cash to lend Ray Bradbury the price of a ticket to New York.

That was not a risk-free investment on Forry’s part, because the only source of income Ray had to pay him back was what he earned as a newsboy, selling papers on the streets of Los Angeles. But it wasn’t just a kindness to Ray. To Forry’s generosity, Ray added on a kindness of his own. He was going to do his best to meet every sf editor in the world, or at least every one who made it to the Worldcon, and while he was introducing them to himself there was no reason — assuming Hannes would lend him some samples to take along — why he couldn’t introduce them to the work of Hannes Bok at the same time.

 
And that is how it all fell out. Ray wheeled and dealt with such good effect at the Worldcon that, if I’m not mistaken, some of Hannes’ samples were actually bought and published by an editor, and several other editors asked him to do work for them.

One of this latter class was me. I met Ray Bradbury, and heard of Hannes Bok, for the first time at (or, more accurately, near — but that’s another story) the Worldcon, and shortly thereafter commissioned a set of illustrations for a story of my own from Hannes. (I still have one of the drawings on the wall of my office at home.)

That expedition worked so well for Hannes that it gave him the funds to make the move to New York, and that too worked pretty well. Well enough, at least, for Hannes to enjoy some years of relative affluence — affluence enough, that is, for him to pay the rent and have enough left over to eat regular meals.

I think he must have been a pleasant person to be around then. Unfortunately, I wasn’t around him for most of that period, because I had received an employment offer — the kind of an offer that you just can’t say no to — from the Armed Services of the United States of America.

 
Watch for Part 2, covering how all this worked out, coming soon — provided “soon” is when I write it.

 
Related post:

• Hannes Bok, Part 2

If you live in Brooklyn, or go there now and then, please be advised that there’s going to be a giant Book Festival there on September 18th.

And the organizers are going to be distributing some 40,000 bookmarks all around town containing my picture and some biographical notes to explain why I am a true son of Brooklyn — born and bred there for the first twenty years of my life — although I haven’t lived there since 1942. Not only that, if you visit Brooklyn’s gorgeous Botanic Garden there’s supposed to be a lane, walk or ramble in the Garden named after me.

What a pity that I can’t visit it myself!

Keith P. Graham asks if I will do a post on The Trap Door Spiders, a New York City luncheon club for sf writers and people like them, but I have to recuse myself. Although Wikipedia appears to think I was a member, I never was.

The TDS was started by Fletcher Pratt in 1945, that being a time when he and I were not much more than recent acquaintances. Wikipedia says the club was formed because Fletcher and other male friends of John D. “Doc” Clark couldn’t stand Doc’s new wife, Mildred, and hit upon the idea of a men’s-only luncheon club so they could spend time with Doc without Mildred.

That sounds plausible. I didn’t know Mildred well, but she obviously didn’t care much for Doc’s old drinking. buddies. Two of the TDS stalwarts were among my closest friends, Lester del Rey and Isaac Asimov, but neither they nor anyone else ever invited me to join. The fact that I had said in public that that sort of thing didn’t interest me may have something to do with it. Or maybe not; I don’t know.

Isaac wrote a bunch of mysteries about a club modeled after the TDS, which I think give a good idea of what it was like.

Popular Publications ’ Super Science Stories, No. 1 &mash; yours truly, Editor.

If you made a right turn at Jane Littell’s door you found yourself in the business wing of the company’s offices, where people took care of distribution, billing, advertising and all the other grubbier parts of the publishing business. At least I suppose that’s what they did. In the four years I worked for Popular Publications I never once went there. Turn to the left. though, and you were at the pulsing heart of the pulp-paper experience.

Turning that way meant you were then heading north, paralleling the adjacent East River. On your right would be an expanse of blank wall, then two sets of office doors, then another several yards of blank walls before you came to any normal-sized office. At that point you would have passed the two king-sized offices that were the private lairs of the two makers and shakers who owned and ran Popular Publications, Harold S. Goldsmith and Harry Steeger.

What, exactly, either of them did in their throne rooms each day I can’t imagine. I am quite sure that neither of them read any appreciable number of the stories their editors bought.

Goldsmith did sign checks, I knew, but that accounted for no more than twenty or thirty minutes a week. Steeger. I thought, did carry a heavier burden, mostly because he had decreed that he personally had to approve every last cover of every painting of a cover for any of the Popular magazines before it went to the photo-engraver. (“My theory,” he told me, “is that if I just okayed covers I personally liked sooner or later I would attract enough people who agreed with me for the covers to work.” Probably it did. He never changed his tastes, and over a period of some twenty years his pulps kept returning a profit.)

The other thing that I know Steeger’s office to have been used for was conferences with his editors, generally to tell them that their newsstand sales figures were unsatisfactory and to discuss what to do about it. (Which was usually to fire the editor and give the work to someone else. Or, alternatively, to give the editor under discussion a little more money, in salary or budget — or both — in the hope that that will encourage him to make the magazine better. I had all three types of meetings with him at one time or another.)

 
Next, heading northward from the executive offices on that arm of the T, was an office intermediate in size between the White-Pohl-Littell cubbyholes and the grand palaces of Steeger and Goldsmith. This one was the property of Rogers Terrill. Rog’s official title was Editor in Chief, Popular Publications, but actually he had little to do — in a day-to-day sense, almost nothing — with any of the publications I’ve mentioned so far.

My belief is that Rogers Terrill had at one time been much more important in shaping Harry Steeger’s policies than he had become by 1939, when I went to work for Popular Publications … and Harry Steeger had gained a little more self-confidence. (A few years later when White, too, was history, some say that Steeger edited a few manuscripts, anonymously, himself.)

Then, the office next to Terrill’s and the one at the end of the line on the south side of the corridor, belonged to Alden H. Norton, whose work was similar to Terrill’s: both of them had somewhat larger spaces than the rest of us — and needed the space, because they each had a secretary sharing the rooms.

Both of them, in fact, more or less ran their own publishing companies, with ten or fifteen magazines each to get out. They could not, of course, do that by themselves. So they each had a large nearby office packed with three or four junior editors, who did all the scut work: copy-editing the ms, proofreading the two sets of proof for each magazines, writing house ads and features … yes, and reading the slush.

Come back for the story, which we’ll publish as soon as I write it.

 
Related posts:

• Popular Publications, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7