Xenograffiti (30 page)

P. L. Travers

Pamela Lyndon Travers, 96, died on Apr. 23, 1996 at London. She was born Helen Lyndon Goff in 1899 at Maryborough, Australia, and began writing poems and essays while still a teenager. She settled in England in 1924. Her best-known creation was
Mary Poppins
, first published in book form in 1934 (Gerald Howe), which was followed by several sequels, including
Mary Poppins Comes Back
(L. Dickson and Thompson, 1935),
Mary Poppins Opens the Door
(Reynal and Hitchcock, 1943),
Mary Poppins in the Park
(Peter Davies, 1952), and
Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane
(Collins, 1982). The Walt Disney Studios film version of her original book, released in 1964 with Julie Andrews, was enormously successful, but Travers refused to sell the rights to a sequel, saying: “The film lives in its own world, and the books live in theirs. They’re not quite the same worlds.”

Elleston Trevor

Elleston Trevor, 75, died of cancer on July 21, 1995 at his home in Cave Creek, Arizona. He was born Trevor Dudley-Smith on Feb. 17, 1920 in England, later moved to France, and settled in the United States twenty years ago. Trevor began writing at age twenty while serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, and became a well-known writer of suspense, espionage, and war stories, particularly under the names Elleston Trevor and Adam Hall. His SF works include:
The Immortal Error
(Swan, 1946),
Forbidden Kingdom
(Lutterworth, 1955),
The Mind of Max Duvine
(Swan, 1960),
The Theta Syndrome
(New English Library, 1977),
The Sibling
(as Adam Hall, Playboy Press, 1979), and
Deathwatch
(Beaufort, 1984). His eighteenth and last Quiller spy novel (as Adam Hall) was completed just before his death.

Leonard Wibberley

Leonard Patrick O’Connor Wibberley, 68, author of the Grand Fenwick books and a number of juvenile science fiction and fantasy novels, died suddenly on November 22, 1983, in Santa Monica, California, while on the way to an art lesson. He had suffered a major heart attack in 1975, and had been intermittently ill with complications ever since.

Wibberley was born April 9, 1915 at Dublin, Ireland. After World War II he became an American correspondent for the
London Evening News
in New York and Chicago; about the same time, he began writing his first book,
The Lost Harpooner
, which was published in 1947. He moved to Southern California in the early 1950s to take a job with the
Los Angeles Times
, but quit his position in 1954 after finishing
The Mouse That Roared
.
Mouse
, published in 1955 by Little, Brown, established Wibberley as a major writer of whimsical fantasy, and was later made into a popular motion picture starring Peter Sellers. Wibberley followed this early success with four sequels, the last being
The Mouse That Saved the West
(1981); a sixth “Grand Fenwick” novel, started during the Watergate crisis, was never completed.

Wibberley remained a prolific writer until his death, having penned just over a hundred books, some under the pseudonyms Leonard Holton, Patrick O’Connor, and Christopher Webb. Perhaps three-fourths of his output consisted of biographies, adventure stories, and science fiction aimed at the teenage market; but he also wrote adult fantasies, serious historical novels, a popular mystery series of eleven novels featuring a Catholic priest (Father Bredder) under the pen name Leonard Holton, and poignant tales of his native Ireland. In his last years, he returned to his first love, journalism, by writing a series of syndicated newspaper articles on a wide variety of subjects, the last of which appeared just a few days before his death; some of these were collected into the posthumous book,
Shamrocks and Sea Silver and Other Illuminations
, published by Borgo Press in 1992.

He leaves a wife, five surviving children, many friends, and several unpublished books, including two juvenile fairy tales and an adult fantasy novel commissioned by Ballantine Books, but never published by them.

Of my friend, I remember the first time we met, on the occasion of Borgo’s republication of
Beware of the Mouse
in 1978. As we sat around a table at Anna’s Restaurant in Westwood near the UCLA campus, not knowing quite what to say to each other, this gruff, Santa Claus of a man, with his full white beard and deep, Irish voice, suddenly began to regale us with stories of his life and experiences. We sat there utterly enthralled. Unpretentious, kind, well-mannered, a natural storyteller with a broad sense of humor, Leonard was a gentleman of the old school; his very presence reminded one of simpler times and cherished values. Alas, the years were not kind to Wibberley: during his last decade, physical ailments and falling sales brought about frequent periods of depression and doubt—in his church, his life, even in his own ability as a writer. Between these moments of crisis, his basic good nature would always reassert itself. When I last talked to him, two months ago, he was full of plans for the future, for his recently-completed fairy tales, a new departure for him. We talked again of doing a full-length interview book on his life and career, for which his good friend Robert Nathan had already contributed an introduction (later used as the foreword for
Shamrocks
). The end was mercifully sudden, a fatal heart attack on a Southern California freeway. Those who knew him, personally or through his work, will miss him deeply. Rest in peace, Leonard.

Eleanor Cameron

Eleanor Cameron, 84, well-known children’s book author, died on Oct. 11, 1996 at Monterey, California. She was born Eleanor Frances Butler on Mar. 23, 1912 at Winnipeg, Manitoba, and worked as a clerk and librarian in Los Angeles from 1930-1959. Her first book and only adult novel,
The Unheard Music
, was published by Little, Brown in 1950. But it was with her five-book juvenile science fiction series which featured the strange little man, Tycho Bass, beginning with
The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet
(Little, Brown, 1954), that she made her mark in the SF field. The “Mush-room Planet” books were highly acclaimed by librarians and readers alike, and one was included in 1979 on Scholastic Book Service’s list of all-time “one hundred [juvenile paperback] bestsellers.” The sequels included:
Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet
(1956),
Mr. Bass’s Planetoid
(1958),
A Mystery for Mr. Bass
(1960), and
Time and Mr. Bass
(1967). Cameron also wrote the juvenile dinosaur novel,
The Terrible Churnadryne
(1959) and its sequel,
The Mysterious Christmas Shell
(1961), the two “Stone Children” fantasies,
The Court of the Stone Children
(Dutton, 1973) and
To the Green Mountains
(1975), and
Beyond Silence
(1980). Her final book,
The Seed and The Vision: On the Writing and Appreciation of Children’s Books
, appeared from Dutton in 1993.

Walt Burgess

Roy Walter “Walt” Burgess
, 75, of Medford, died Monday (Feb. 16, 1998) at Providence Medford Medical Center. A private service is planned. Interment will be in the Eagle Point National Cemetery. Memorial contributions may be made to Sacred Heart Catholic Church, 449 S. Ivy St., Medford, OR 97501.

He was born July 4, 1922 in Biggar, Saskatchewan, and moved with his family to Oregon in 1924.

At the onset of World War II, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps, serving as a fighter pilot. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with 14 oak leaf clusters. He also served in the Korean War, and retired with the rank of Major in 1963.

On Oct. 15, 1945 in Spokane, Wash., he married Betty Jane Kapel, who survives.

Mr. Burgess moved to Medford in 1969, where he bought the Royal Crest Motel. Later he was a bus driver and Supervisor of Transportation for the Medford School District before retiring in 1982.

He enjoyed camping and fishing.

Survivors, in addition to his wife, include four sons, Mark, Beaverton; Scott, Philomath; Michael, San Bernardino, Calif., and Stephen, Placentia, Calif.; a brother, Osmer, Cottage Grove; two sisters, Mary Cleland and Margaret Jones, both Portland; and three grandchildren. He was preceded in death by a sister, Eva Richards.

Arrangements: Perl Funeral Services-Siskiyou, Medford.

Addendum November 2003

My father was a good man, an honorable man, an intelligent man, sometimes a hard man. To say that I understood him well during his life would be a lie, for we walked very different paths in this world, almost diametrically opposed. He started with absolutely nothing during the Great Depression, and made a good life for himself and his family. I regret very much indeed that we could never seem to get closer to each other than we did. I hope that he was proud of what he had produced in me, but I was never quite sure of his feelings on that subject—and he could not express them himself. I loved him dearly and miss him tremendously. Even our endless arguments on politics and people and life in general were, in the end, something that I think both of us relished. He died five days after my fiftieth birthday, but I can still feel his presence with every breath I take, with every word I utter. I hope I always will.

Art Nelson

Arthur Edward Nelson
, 76, died on September 25, 2003 at San Bernardino of a stroke. He had been ill for many years.

He was born on June 19, 1927 at St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of Arthur Edwin and Violet (Riley) Nelson. He married (Mary) Katherine Leahy on Jan. 29, 1949 at St. Paul, and they had five children, all of whom survive: Evelyn (Senior), Richard, Julie, Mark, and Michael.

Nelson enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1944, serving for two years on the hospital ship, U.S.S. Samaritan, staying with that vessel through its decommissioning in 1946. Upon returning home, he obtained a B.A. in history at St. Thomas College, St. Paul, and an M.A. in history and M.A.L.S. at the University of Minnesota.

He came to Los Angeles in 1954, when he took an entry-level position at Loyola University. He accepted a post as bibliographer and cataloger at California State College, Hayward, in 1959, serving there for four years.

This was a time of great expansion in higher education in California, with new campuses being opened at rapid intervals, and Nelson was approached at the beginning of 1963 with an offer to become the founding Library Director of the as yet unnamed state college planned for the Inland Empire. This was the institution that would later become California State University, San Bernardino.

He officially started his new position on April 1, 1963, working out of a warehouse on South Lugo Street in San Bernardino. His initial charge was to build the core collections of the new state colleges then being established at San Bernardino and Dominguez Hills. Two copies were purchased of every book acquired, and then processed and boxed for shipment, with one set destined for each campus. Both colleges opened their doors in the fall of 1965, each with a starting complement of 50,000 volumes.

The Cal State San Bernardino library at first occupied temporary quarters in the south half what is now Sierra Hall, but Nelson and his staff had already begun planning the construction of a massive, six-story building located at the exact center of the new campus. The structure was delayed for a year by weather and other problems, but finally opened in June of 1971.

Nelson served as Library Director at Cal State San Bernardino for exactly twenty-five years, returning to the ranks on April 1, 1988. He officially retired from CSUSB in 1991.

Art Nelson will be remembered for his intelligence, his wit, his energy, and his acumen, but his memory is forever enshrined within the great library that he built for the university.

It was he who picked the initial complement of librarians and staff who helped develop the collection—and he chose wisely. It was he who planned and constructed a beautiful yet utilitarian structure for the library that also anticipated the future needs of the university—and he designed well. But most of all, it was he who understood that the very heart and soul of the university must be comprised of a broadly-based collection of superlative books and serials that would strongly support the curriculum thereof—and he bent all of his strength, all of his energy, towards achieving that goal.

His spirit lives on within the hallowed walls of the University Library that he loved so well. Walk down any aisle, examine any shelf, and his name echoes and rebounds from the richness of the volumes so boldly arrayed there. Generations of students and scholars will forever remain in his debt.

We are all in his debt.

(
DECEMBER
7, 2003)

“A date that will live in infamy....”

A date that is today almost forgotten, as the veterans who survived the conflagration at Pearl Harbor have themselves gradually faded away.

The truth is, we all fade away sooner or later, and mostly, we’re not much remembered thereafter. It doesn’t take long. My mentor as a librarian, Art Nelson, died earlier this year, twelve years after he had retired from his position at California State University, San Bernardino. Most of the librarians there only know him as a name. Of the eleven library faculty on our staff, six were hired after he left. In twenty years, no one at Cal State will recall who he was or what he did, or anything at all about the founding Library Director at CSUSB, a man who built the original collection of monographs and journals at the university over a twenty-five-year period and who hired all of the original staff.

Ah, well. That’s just the nature of things.

If the study of genealogy has taught me anything, it’s that the vast majority of us lose our identities almost completely within a generation of our passing. Very few individuals make any kind of lasting mark in the world. Indeed, very few leave anything behind them to commemorate their lives—good or ill!

Authors delude themselves, of course, into thinking that they’re somehow different from the
hoi polloi
, but who remembers or reads the vast majority of the writers who were published professionally during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Who
was
Morgan Robertson or T. Earl Hickey or Emile C. Tepperman? Nobodies, today. Be honest with yourselves, folks: you’ve never even heard of these penmen.

Even bestselling writers are not immune. Jacqueline Susann faded quickly from public view after her sudden death in 1974, and is scarcely mentioned by anyone thirty years later. I had the pleasure of meeting Irving Wallace at his home about a decade before he died; his books today are mostly out-of-print, and his surviving children, well, they’re nowhere near as capable as their Old Man.

Is this right? Is it fair? Should not writers or artists or musicians be saved from the Deathman’s seemingly universal scythe, which pares all of our withered stalks down to the same, ground-level size?

There are no answers to such questions.

To the extent that a maker of miracles succeeds in putting something of his or her persona into permanent or fixed form—a poem, a story, a play, a painting, a song—and disseminates it into some public forum, he (or she) has succeeded in doing something that 99.9% of the population cannot; and he (or she—or it!) has bought a chance at the golden ring of immortality, to the extent that “immortality” can be defined as an active memory of one’s work on earth.

When I set down my precious verbiage in printed form, it has some chance, however small, of being picked up and actually read by someone a century or two hence; and I may thereby have extended my presence into that future, although I myself, of course, won’t be there in any personal or real way to affect that outcome.

Of course, there’s a real risk that the values that I ascribe to my own work, or the materials that I myself regard most highly among my writings will not be so received by generations yet to come. By all accounts, Conan Doyle had come to detest his best-known creation, Sherlock Holmes, by the end of his long life; but the novels that he valued most highly of his own creations, the historical fictions, plus the serious psychic investigations in fairies and the like that he conducted during his final decade of life, are today held to be minor or even irrelevant to his overall career. He is remembered primarily for one character, Sherlock Holmes, and secondarily for his Professor Challenger stories. And he has nothing at all to say about this.

Which is, perhaps, just as it should be.

Readers ultimately choose what they wish to read. Sometimes they’re influenced by the scholars or the critics or the teachers, sometimes not. H. Rider Haggard’s two classic adventure novels,
King Solomon’s Mines
and
She
, are still enjoyed today, although not much taught in our schools; but the remainder of his vast output languishes, perhaps unjustly, in permanent obscurity. Yet even so, he is blessed beyond most of his contemporary brethren, in that
any
of his works are still read at all.

Of all my books, the one most likely to survive the test of time is
The House of the Burgesses
, my family genealogy, which will be passed down and cherished from generation to generation, and disseminated widely on the future equivalent of the internet. It isn’t my best work—thus far that accolade (at least in my opinion) must go to
The Dark-Haired Man
—but it touches the lives of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of individuals, in an ever-widening circle that will never end, unless civilization itself should someday fall.

That one volume is my primary contribution to the world of letters. I already know this. The thought is even more humbling than my recent heart attack.

And so I say “Amen for now.”

I will write what I am allowed to write in the years I have remaining. I will continue to strive for unobtainable perfection, knowing that it can never be found. I may even produce a third edition someday of the Burgess book.

This series of autobiographical essays which commenced with a look at the history of Borgo Press must now conclude, as I move back into the crafting of “real” fiction.

I feel the juices flowing again. I think I can do this again. I know I can.

To those of you who have borne with me during these reminiscences of my earlier days, bless you all.

And amen for now.