Xenograffiti (29 page)

A month before his passing I told him I’d be flying up to Seattle in October. It had been two years since our last meeting, and we were greatly looking forward to a few days together. Then the conversation took a strange turn, as we started reminiscing about all the good and awful publishing decisions we had made during our respective careers, each trying to outdo the other in a facetious way with bad examples, and noting that, had we only had the benefit of hindsight, we could have both retired long since. It gave us a good laugh: we knew perfectly well, of course, that retirement was never an option for either of us.

Thaddeus Dikty never made much money in publishing. He wasn’t a household name, even in the microcosm of science fiction. He never sought the limelight, and rejected any attempts to be dragged into the public eye. But those who knew the man any length of time came to love him dearly, heart and soul, without exception.

I made my plane reservation for Sunday, Oct. 13th, 1991. Ted kept another appointment, damn him, on the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 11th, sitting at his desk editing a manuscript. It was the way he would have chosen to go: quietly, without fuss, doing the work he loved so well. I think somewhere he’s doing it still. Old friend, dear friend, rest in well deserved peace.

William K. Everson

William Keith Everson, 67, film historian and critic, died of cancer at New York, New York on Apr. 14, 1996. He was born on Apr. 8, 1929 at Yeovil, Somersetshire, England. He came to the U.S. in 1950, where he worked as a publicist, writer, editor, and producer for various film and television companies, and also taught occasional classes at New York University and other schools. Beginning in the 1950s, he amassed one of the largest private collections of classic and obscure films in the world, amounting to over 4,000 motion pictures, which he kept for private viewing in his apartment. He also wrote hundreds of articles and some twenty books on cinema, including
Classics of the Horror Film
(Citadel Press, 1974) and its sequel,
More Classics of the Horror Film
(Citadel Press, 1986).

Herk Harvey

Harold A. “Herk” Harvey, 71, died on April 3, 1996 at Lawrence, Kansas. He was born in Colorado, and later attended school at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, majoring in theater arts. He joined the staff of Centron Films at Lawrence, and produced over 400 educational and industrial films for them. His only feature film,
Carnival of Souls
(Herts-Lion, 1962), was independently produced and directed by Harvey at Lawrence for less than $100,000. This atmospheric and chilling ghost story starred Candace Hillgoss in the main role, with Harvey himself playing the leader of the dead. The move was never given a proper release in the theaters, but slowly gained a following from periodic showings on late-nite TV and at film festivals, finally achieving cult status in the 1980s and ‘90s, and earning favorable reviews in
The New Yorker
and other publications.

Ryerson Johnson

(Walter) Ryerson “Johnny” Johnson, 93, died on May 24, 1995 in Florida. He was born on October 19, 1901, and became a well-known writer for the pulp magazines, specializing in mystery and western stories. In the SF field he authored three Doc Savage novels during the 1930s under the house name, Kenneth Robeson:
The Fantastic Island
(reprinted by Bantam Books in 1966);
Land of Always-Night
(Bantam, 1966); and
The Motion Menace
(Bantam, 1971). In later life he wrote a number of popular children’s books. A collection of his pulp westerns,
Torture Trek and Eleven Other Tales of the Wild West
(Barricade Books), was published just before his death in 1995.

David Lasser

David Lasser, 94, died May 5, 1996 at Rancho Bernardo, Calif. He was born on Mar. 20, 1902 at Baltimore, Maryland. After serving in France with the U.S. Army during World War I, he attended M.I.T. and then worked briefly as an engineer in New Jersey. In 1927 he was hired by Hugo Gernsback for Gernsback Publications and Stellar Publishing Corporation, and edited the pulp magazines
Science Wonder Stories
and
Air Wonder Stories
from 1929 (the two titles were combined as
Wonder Stories
in 1930) and
Wonder Stories Quarterly
, also beginning in 1929; he also briefly edited Gernsback’s
Scientific Detective Monthly
in 1930. He left Stellar in 1933, but not before writing
The Conquest of Space
(Penguin Press, 1931), the first serious attempt to outline the possibility of real-life exploration of the solar system, including a manned trip to the Moon; the book influenced an entire generation of science fiction writers. To promote his beliefs he helped create the American Interplanetary Society in 1930, which metamorphosed into the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In 1935 Lasser founded a Depression-era labor organization, the Workers Alliance of America, but resigned in 1940 when the Communists took over the union; ironically, he was unjustly labeled as a Communist during the Joseph McCarthy era because of his previous association with the group. From 1950-1969 he served with the International Union of Electrical Radio and Machine Workers.

Andrew Lytle

Andrew Nelson Lytle, 92, died Dec. 12, 1995 at Monteagle, Tennessee. He was born on Dec. 26, 1902 at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1925. There he became associated with the Agrarians, a group of writers (among them Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom) who railed against the effects of technology on modern society, and who advocated a return to a simpler, farm-based way of life. He had a long and distinguished career as an author, lecturer, and teacher of creative writing at the University of Florida and University of the South; his many students included well-known writer Flannery O’Connor. Lytle’s first novel,
The Long Night
, was published in 1936. His only fantasy novel was
A Name for Evil
(Bobbs-Merrill, 1947), a psychological ghost story with gothic overtones, which was later reprinted in the omnibus
A Novel, a Novella, and Four Short Stories
(Obolensky, 1958), and separately by Avon Books in the 1970s.

Og Mandino

Og Mandino, 72, died of an aneurysm on Sept. 3, 1996 at Antrim, NH. Augustine A. Mandino was born on Dec. 12, 1923 at Boston, MA, and briefly attended Bucknell Junior College before entering the Army Air Force as a 1st Lieut. during World War II; he received the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal for his valor. Following the war, he became a successful life insurance salesman and manager, retiring in 1965. He then founded the magazine
Success Unlimited
to promote his motivational ideas. His first book,
A Treasury of Success Unlimited
, was published in 1966, but he was best known for such inspirational classics as
The Greatest Salesman in the World
(1968) and
The Greatest Secret in the World
(1972); his nineteen books sold more than thirty million copies in aggregate. His only venture into SF was the novel
The Christ Commission
(Lippincott & Crowell, 1980), in which a disillusioned 20th-century time traveler returns to the Jerusalem of 36
a.d
. to determine for himself the truth behind Christ’s resurrection.

Annette Peltz McComas

Annette Peltz McComas, 83, died on Oct. 7, 1994 at her home in Oakland, CA. Annette Peltz was born on June 26, 1911 at San Francisco, California, daughter of Alfred and Jennie Peltz. At age five she moved with her family to a small Jewish community in Hutchinson, Kansas, where she lived until 1929. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, during the early 1930s, and her master’s degree from Cornell University a few years later. She then worked for several years in New York as a stage manager and short story writer, and later taught at UC Berkeley and at a community college at Oakland, California. She married Jesse Francis McComas (later co-editor of
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
) in 1943, and had one son who died at the age of thirty-seven; they were divorced in 1961, and he died in 1978. In later years she wrote, directed plays, and traveled extensively until losing much of her sight. She edited the SF anthology,
The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas’s The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1949-54
, for Bantam Books in 1982. She is survived by her grandson, Tony Stoughton, and a great-granddaughter. An autobiography,
Kansas and Me: Memories of a Jewish Childhood
, was published by The Borgo Press in 1995.

Christopher Milne

Christopher Robin Milne, 75, died on Apr. 20, 1996 at London. He was born on Aug. 21, 1920 at London, the son of well-known writer A. A. Milne. In 1924 the elder Milne published a book of light verse called
When We Were Very Young
which was inspired by the antics of his four-year-old son, and soon had produced the classic children’s book,
Winnie-the-Pooh
(1926), based upon Christopher’s love for a bear of that name at the London zoo. Milne Junior spent the rest of his life trying to live down the fame that
Winnie
and its sequels engendered, finally publishing his own examination of his own life and those of his parents in
The Enchanted Places
(1974), which was followed by two sequels,
The Path Through the Trees
(1979) and
The Hollow in the Hill
(1982).

Mayo Mohs

Mayo Mohs, 62, was killed in an automobile accident at Santa Monica, Calif., on August 22, 1996. The son of Lewis Mohs, former owner of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, Mayo Mohs began working as a high school teacher in Los Angeles, while simultaneously pursuing a career as a freelance writer. His submissions to
Time
magazine earned an invitation from that publication to join its staff in 1968 as Religious Editor. Ten years later he transferred to Times Mirror’s companion publication,
Discover
. He retired in 1987. His first book, the anthology
Other Worlds, Other Gods: Adventures in Religious Science Fiction
(Doubleday, 1971), reflected his interest in philosophy and theology. In the mid-1970s he also co-authored two phonograph records,
The God Beat
and
Media and the Church
, plus a well-received political biography of the Prince of Wales,
H.R.H.: The Man Who Will Be King
(Arbor House, 1979), written with Tim Heald.

Frank Riley

Frank Riley, 80, died on Apr. 24, 1996 at Manhattan Beach, California. His legal name was Frank Wilbert Ryhlick, and he is believed to have been born on June 8, 1915 at Hibbing, Minnesota. He joined the
New York Daily News
in the late 1930s, and published his first book,
Dixie Demagogues
(Vanguard Press), in 1939 under his real name. After service with the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II, he settled in Manhattan Beach in the late 1940s. He later became travel editor for the
Los Angeles Times
, and regularly contributed articles on traveling to West Coast magazines. He also wrote three novels, among them
They’d Rather Be Right
(Gnome Press, 1957; also published as
The Forever Machine
, Galaxy, 1958), co-authored with Mark Clifton, which won the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (for the serialized magazine version) in 1955.

May Sarton

May Sarton, 83, died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995 at her home in York, Maine. She was born Eléanore Marie Sarton on Mar. 12, 1912 at Wondelgem, Belgium, and was brought to the U.S. by her parents during World War I. A well-known feminist and lesbian, she penned poetry, novels, children’s books, and (late in life) a series of journals about growing old. Her one work of fantastic literature was the classic cat novel,
The Fur Person
(Rinehart & Co., 1957), which was later reprinted in paper by New American Library.

Stirling Silliphant

Stirling Dale Silliphant, 78, died on Apr. 26, 1996 at Bangkok, Thailand. He was born on Jan. 16, 1918 at Detroit, Michigan, and received a B.A. in journalism from the University of Southern California in 1938. He worked briefly as a publicist for Walt Disney Studios before entering the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war, he worked as publicity director for Twentieth Century Fox in New York, quitting his job in 1953 to become a full-time writer. His first novel,
Maracaibo
, appeared two years later. He is best known in the SF field for his screenplays
Village of the Damned
(1960, adapted from the novel
The Midwich Cuckoos
, by John Wyndham),
Charly
(1968, adapted from the novella, “Flowers for Algernon,” by Daniel Keyes),
The Poseidon Adventure
(1972, adapted from the novel by Paul Gallico),
The Towering Inferno
(1974, adapted from the novel
The Glass Inferno
, by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson),
The Swarm
(1978, adapted from the novel by Arthur Herzog), and
Circle of Iron
(1979), an original creation. He also wrote the teleplay for the TV miniseries
Space
(1985, adapted from the novel by James A. Michener). He settled in Thailand in 1988.

Dan Streib

Daniel Thomas Streib, 67, died at his home in San Diego on March 4, 1996. He was born on Nov. 8, 1928 at Rockford, Ill. He received a B.A. from the University of Iowa, and an M.A. from San Diego State University. He served in Korea from 1951-1953, earning the Silver Star, and later worked as a reporter, advertising executive, and high school and college teacher. His first story was published while he was still a teenager, and his first book,
Operation: Countdown
, appeared from the short-lived Powell Books in 1970. He also wrote children’s books, historical novels under the name Jonathan Schofield, war novels as J. Farragut Jones, and historical romances under the name Lee Davis Willoughby. He was best known for two men’s adventure series published under his own name: a ten-book set featuring Michael Hawk, and an eight-volume series based around a near-future strike group called
Counter Force
for Fawcett Gold Medal:
Counter Force
(1983),
The Trident Hijacking
(1983),
Death Shuttle
(1983),
The Karate Killers
(1983),
Terror for Sale
(1984),
Titans Duel
(1984),
The Mind Breakers
(1984), and
The Bloody Rose
(1985).