When Robert Johnson discovered Charles Fort is not known.  But, recently I had a chance to go through some of the Eric Frank Russell papers, and a letter to him from Tiffany Thayer makes clear that the San Francisco branch of the Fortean Society was in full swing by the late 1940s.  He wrote (in 18 FS, which, according to Thayer's idiosyncratic marking of time is 1949), "Our San Francisco--Chapter Two--is going great guns.  Meetings that last all night and so on."

Johnson, of course, was in San Francisco at the time, and should have been familiar with some of those who had an interest in matters Fortean.  He was not, however, "a 'joiner,' by nature," he told Damon Knight.  "And have always stubborny refused to hold any office in the very few organizations to which I have belonged.  In my judgement, it takes up too much time, for a writer; and distracts too much from his own work."

But, he must have joined relatively soon after its founding, because he was there in 1951 when Thayer excommunicated Chapter Two.

As Johnson has it, his interest in Fort was two-fold.  First, Fort provided a great number of story ideas.  In 1951, he told the Berkeley, California, Elves,' Gnomes' and Little Men's Science-Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society, "It was recently proposed to form a club that would be called, 'Writers Who Have Stolen lots from Charles Fort.'  The idea was dropped, however, when it was realized that such a group would include virtually every writer in the imaginative field, including many now deceased."

Johnson was also interested in damn facts--which, as he tells it, was the cause of Chapter Two's eviction from the Fortean Society sometime in 1950 or 1951.  The group dutifully collected reports of anamolous events and even gathered ice that fell on Oakland in the middle of summer.  These reports they passed on to Thayer, who complained that his Society was more interested in political things ("other rebellions") than traditional damned facts.  Apparently upset over the direction of the San Francisco chapter, Thayer withdrew their charter; the Bay Area Forteans resigned en masse and reconstituted themselves as Chapter Two.

Su upset over Thayer's direction was Johnson, that he never bought any issues of Doubt and publically complained to the Berkeley group.  That complaint was later  published in the groups fanzine Rhodomagnetic Digest, then reprinted in If and Anubius--indicating the continued interest in Fort among science ficiton and fantasy enthusiasts.

According to Johnson's later recollections, Chapter Two continued to meet until the death of Kenneth MacNichol and Polly Lamb.  He dates this as 1957 for MacNichol and 1958 for Lamb--giving Chapter Two a lifespan of eight or nine years--but his memory, as should be obvious by now, cannot always be trusted, and the official records on this matter are still unclear.  Further research is necessary.  Which is perfect, because Kenneth MacNichol is the next subject.

After the War, Johnson returned to his basement apartment at 1443 Montgomery--at least that's what Don Herron's timeline would have--and resumed his literary life.  Not that he took care of his books.  Again according to Herron, the first thing he did with a new book was break its spine so that it was easier to read.  And George Haas once discovered that he had been using a slice of bacon (!) as a bookmark.

In the late 1940s, he signed a contract with Blue Book magazine for six circus stories and novellas each year.  He wrote in The Weird Tales Story that he made "ten times" as much as he did for any of his weird writing.  At the time, Weird Tales  paid about 1.5 cents per word for stories.  According to Paul Reynolds's The Middle Man, Blue Book was paying about 7.5 cents per word--not quite ten times as much, but still a substantial increase.

Blue Book, at the time, was filling a niche between the pulps and the slicks such as Redbook and Saturday Evening Post, offering quality fiction at a lower cost and open to lesser known authors than those magazines.  Its competitor was Argosy.  Argosy was one of the first pulps; it had declined seriously by the end of the 1930s and was purchased by Popular Publications--the upstart company where Rogers Terrill worked.  Eventually, he was given command of that magzine and raised its quality--surprising given his earlier interest in the sexploitation pulps.  One wonders whether Johnson did not avoid Argosy because of his poast associations with Terrill.

At any rate, this seems to have been Johnson's main--if not only--source of income  through the late 1940s and early 1950s.  He published five stories there in 1948, five in 1949, and then three each in 1950 and 1951.  (Kennicott left in 1952).  Johnson continued to publish then, contributing articles to the Fortean-inflected Mystic, Short Story, Short Story for Men, andThe Magazine of Horror.  (There are probably others, too, still yet uncatalogued.)  He even sent a story to Weird Tales--a cursed story, as he was to later remember.  An earlier version had been destroyed--along with the agent--during the London blitz; another had been accepted at some magazine that then folded.  As fate would have it, Weird Tales accepted Johnson's story, but also went out of business before publishing the story.  That was in 1954, a time that generally witnessed the passing or transformation fo all the pulps.

Four years later, Johnson was of the opinion--put down in the fanzine New Frontiers--that the heyday of weird fiction was gone.  Certainly, examples of it would still be published, but only his generation was blessed with magazines that provided only weird fiction.

It is tempting to see the end of Weird Tales as signalling an end of Johnson's creative outputs.  The record bears that out--but then the record could be wrong, and the absence of available evidence make this seem a more definitive period.

Be that as it may, by the mid-1960s, he had moved to 2040 Franklin Street, Apartment 803, and only saw Haas occassionally, the last recorded connection between them in 1970, when they discussed the possibility of escaped circus gorillas being mistaken for Bigfoot.  When R. Alain Evarts tracked him down, he did not want to talk about the past or himself.  Johnson's friends reported to Evarts that he had become reclusive and obese.  Rumors abounded; that he was paranoid, told stories of having no social security card, avoided paying taxes, and had moved to Salinas, California.

Not all of this is true.  He did have a social security card, which he applied for in 1971, caliming he was born in 1906 so that he could start receiving benefits in August of that year.  Whether he was paranoid or claimed to have been an intelligence officer in World War II cannot be verified.  But, he seems to have moved to Salinas.  At least, there's a death certificate from there for a Robert B. Johnson, whose birth was listed as 19 August 1907 in Kentucky, and whose death was given as 26 December 1987 (the SSDI has a different date), caused by a heart attack secondary to pneumonia. 

I suspect that there is less to this story than meets the eye.  Nonetheless, it is tres amusant:

Somewhat recently there were multiple mermaid sightings off the coast of Kiryat Yam (near Haifa in Northern Israel) which prompted the town to offer up a $1 million reward for anyone who could prove the mythical creature exists. Once this news traveled all the way to New York, the Brooklyn-based Mermaid Medical Association got involved.

[T]hey're actually suing the town for defamation, because they exist in order to defend the rights of mermaids worldwide.

)Whatever else Johnson was up to in the 1930s, he says that he drifted to San Diego for a time--there's no record of this, but also no reason to disbelieve him--and, while there, started writing for Weird Tales again, producing a letter for the May 1939 issue and three stories, "Lupa," "Silver Coffin," and "Far Below."  Lupa included a nude scene in hopes that it would make the cover--Weird Tales's covers at the time featured nudes.  Apparently, it was acceptable to finesse a nude scene into a story for Weird Tales, by Johnson's reckoning, but not so much for Terror Tales.  "Far Below" was an homage to H.P. Lovecraft, was once named as the best story printed in Weird Tales and was widely anthologized.  ("The Silver Coffin" was also anthologized.)

That ended Johnson's association with Weird Tales (but not weird tales), with "Lupa" appearing in January 1941 (by which time Farnsworth Wright was no longer editor, part of a series of cost-cutting measures that also led to a decline in quality).

In 1940, he published his The Magic Park, about the Golden Gate Park.

He was drafted into the US Army as a private on 6 November 1942 (Serial Number: 39112693).  According to his enlistment record, he was back in San Francisco at the time and gave his birthdate as 1905--making him 37 rather than his (actual?) 35.  If it wasn't a mistake, why he would give a wrong age is not clear.  It's also unknown what he did in the military.

That Robert Johnson Barbour sometimes wrote for Weird Tales's sordid sisters (pseudonymously, of course) did not mean that he was too intimidated to write for it.  "Lead Soldiers" appeared in the December 1935 issue, followed by "They" in January 1936, and "Mice" in November of that year.

Johnson, though, remembers the publication history differently, writing that "They" was both the first accepted and published--which is interesting given what I think is its resonance in the San Francisco Fortean community.  According to Johnson, he based the . . . well, let's call it tale . . . on "a peculiar glen I had discovered down the Peninsula, with a strangely unpleasant atmosphere."  The tale, in Johnson's accounting, "had neither characters, action or plot; but it was definitely weird."  (Note: I have not yet read "They.")

I suspect that this is the same glen that came up in conversation between George Haas and Clark Ashton Smith's wife.  Haas seems to have asked her about such a place near Pacific Grove, where the Smith's were living, and she responded,

 "George, I found your 'magnetic field' as Hazel Dreris calls it, tho she says: Near San Luis Obispo . . . .  She has been there not once but twice with friends."  Hazel Dreis did not feel any sense of oppresion, as Haas (and Johnson?) did--that she experienced near Pt. Lobos, which Smith also had sensed.  Rather, the glen made her feel "magnetized" and her legs "tingle."

This sense that the world had uncanny places was central to Weird Tales (and influenced the development of Forteanism in the San Francisco Bay Area).  And so it's no necessarily surprising--but it is a testament to his skill--that "They" was well-received by readers of Weird Tales.  Johnson's other two stories also provoked fan mail, "Lead Stories" even prompting H.P. Lovecraft to write a congratulatory note.

But despite the accolades, Johnson continued to feel "always the Outsider."  He thought that the editor of Weird Tales, Farnsworth Wright, didn't like him.  Wright, he complained, never wrote a personal note of acceptance, always said that the stories would need careful editing (although according to Johnson) nothing was changed, and perpetually complained that a page was missing from Johnson's story--which is either an eccentricity on Wright's part, or something like paranoia on Johnson's.  After "Mice," Johnson had two articles rejected; these, he said, were perfectly good--one was later sold to Weird Tales--but reflected Wright's dislike for Johnson.  And so he stopped publishing there for a few years.

It may be that this is when Johnson started publishing for Rogers Terrill magazines; or maybe he made his money some other way.  Perhaps he was a frequent contributor to the pulps, but none of his remembrances indicate this, and so suggests both the kind of writer he was as well as raising some questions about his livelihood.

Some Weird Tales writers are best understood as literary snobs.  H.P. Lovecraft hated the idea of writing for money--it sullied the art.  There was some of this attitude in Clark Ashton Smith.  Others, such as E. Hoffman Price--another Bay Area fantasy writer and, I think, Fortean--were professional writers.  They paid attention to markets, understood what editors wanted, and created that, selling hundreds of stories over the course of their lifetime.  Johnson, it seems, at least from the bibliography that now exists, was of the former type.  Unknown is how he made a living.  Hoffman sold enough stories to live; Smith supplemented his literary and artistic endeavors with manual labor.  What did Johnson do?

He claims that his paintings sold well enough to keep him in food and clothes, as did writings for local art publications--although he doesn't say which one.  He also wrote a book on Golden Gate Park--The Magic Park--but that wasn't published until 1940. so hardly could account for an income in the late 1930s.  And so the question remains: What did Johnson do?

As he settled into San Francisco, Johnson set about developing his artistic and literary talents.  He developed a gouache process--a water-painting variation--and used it to paint circus scenes.  He showed these at Oakland Art Gallery in 1939, at the Golden Gate International Exhibition--these have been confirmed---as well as other places around the Bay Area, according to Johnson.  (An administrator for the Church of Satan told R. Alain Everts that LaVey owned some of Johnson's circus paintings as well.)  In addition, according to Don Herron, he created a 500,000  [late edit: 50,000] scale-replica of a circus, which was shown at least once, in the display window of an Oakland department store.

 Johnson also began writing around this time, as well--although the exact timing is difficult to pin down because his memory is not great and he sometimes wrote under an unknown pseudonym, making it impossible to confirm.

In his memoirs for The Weird Tales Story, Johnson says that upon making the rounds through San Francisco's artistic community, he had only written a few detective stories, "mostly under pseudonyms"--which would imply that some were not pseudonymous.  But, so far, I have found nothing in the indexes of pulp detective fiction under his name.  An article that he wrote for the fanzine New Frontier also raises some questions about the timing of those stories.  In that article--written twenty years before his memoir for The Weird Tales Story and so maybe more accurate--he says he published in a couple of Rogers Terrill-edited pulps "a couple of times myself, in lean periods, though under such heavy aliases that they have happily never been penetrated"--suggesting that all of the stories were published pseudonymously and in the late 1930s.  (Of course, he could have published in other detective pulps under his own name earlier.)  Even here, though, his recollection cannot be completely trusted.  Among the pulps he credits to Terill's editorship are Terror Tales, Horror Stories, and Ghost Stories.  But, while Terrill did edit the first two, I only know Ghost Stories to be a British pulp that ran from 1926-1931.

Nonetheless, it is still possible to say something about Johnson's literary output at this time, the beginning of his career.

A New Jersey-its, born in 1900, Rogers Terrill attended Columbia University, where he studied to be an actuary.  He became involved with the pulps in the late 1920s, making his way to the new Popular Publications in the 1930s, where he took over a stable of magazines.  Probably his best work, according to pulp historian Will Murray, was done on the Western pulps, widening the genre conventions.  He also involved himself with detective stories, developing a competitor to Black Mask in Dime Detective and took on Weird Tales with Terror Tales and Horror Stories.  Here was the emotional identity for those magazines:

"Terror is the emotional effect produced by extreme fear; it is horror brought home to us personally, that knowledge of something horrible about to happen to us or to someone dear to us, at which menace we are almost powerless to combat."

Johnson saw these magazines as "oversexed."  He wrote in New Frontier, "They were the most lurid magazines of their era--which was not known for its prudery.  Terrill would not buy a story in which, at some point or other, the heroine was not completely nude, and either raped or threatened with rape by some monster. . . .   The magazines were tripe, no other description is accurate."

Johnson presumably brought himself to write for Terrill because Popular Publications paid well, and because the formula was a more twisted version of that in Weird Tales.  Johnson still had a soft spot for Weird Tales and weird tales, having read every issue of the magazine and interested in the odd and uncanny, which was central both to Terrill's tripe and Weird Tales more literary fiction.

Probably not the world's best excuse:

A man who told police he was hunting Sasquatch is in the Benewah County Jail after a high speed chase that ended with his arrest Sunday in Worley.

According to Johnson, he quit the circus in New York, tried to live in New York City but fled the winter and went home again to New Orleans before heading to San Francisco, drawn by its literary and artistic communities.  He says he left the Big Easy for the City by the Bay in 1931, but the 1930 census puts him in San Francisco already, living in a group house on Fifth Street, his job listed as essayist.  In time, he would move to what he called an "artist's shack" at 1443 Montgomery Street in Telegraph Hill, not far from where Coit Tower was built in 1933.  He lived in a basement apartment, but when he came out, Johnson would have been able to track the building of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge from his street.

This was a critical time in Johnson's life, but it's difficult to get an exact handle on it.  It seems clear that he came to San Francisco to make his artistic mark, and in his remembrances for The Weird Tales Story he tells of meeting some of The City's leading literary lights--John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, Herb Caen.  R. Alain Evarts, however, contacted Caen much letter, and the newspaper columnist had no memory of Johnson.  As well, some of Johnson's recollections just don't ring true.  He said that he was welcomed into the literary circle in part because he had read every issue of Weird Tales and corresponded with the editor, he was considered an expert on the magazine--at a time when "every celebrated author in town was trying to get a story into it; and most of them had failed."  It's hard to believe Steinbeck, Saroyan, or Caen were trying to break into Weird Tales, which calls into question a lot of Johnson's memories of the time.


[Late update: Apparently, Johnson lived alone during his time in San Francisco, but for his cat(s?).  In an article for the fanzine New Frontiers Johnson wrote, "I am as interested in sex as the next man," but he never married, and I've come across no evidence that he had girlfriends.  That doesn't mean he didn't have any girlfriends, but his lifelong bachelorhood--like George Haas's--certainly raises question about his sexuality.  That may also explain his feeling of being an outsider.]

Still, he did find a community of sorts.  At some point, he met up with George Haas and, through him, Clark Ashton Smith, and Smith's wife, Carol.  He also knew Anton LaVey, who would later found the Church of Satan.  (Through a church administrator, LaVey told Everts that he had known Johnson since 1947, when both were in the circus.  That's obviously wrong--but then LaVey is known to have fabricated parts of his past when it suits him.)  He seems to have been an important part of the 1956 Westercon--and that might help explain Johnson's recollections.

The San Francisco Bay Area--San Francisco and its suburbs, Oakland, Berkeley, Palo Alto, maybe stretching the definition enough to include the Monterey Peninsula--was a hotbed for science fiction and fantasy writing in the years around World War II.  Perhaps, then, did find a community of writers, and then inflated their literary merit by combining them with Steinbeck and Saroyan in his memories.  (That's not to say some of the science fiction writers--including Anthony Boucher and Philip K. Dick were not excellent authors or, in Boucher's case, editors, but their fame is not that of Steinbeck's.)  Certainly, the pulp writer Garen Drussai has found recollections of Johnson, and Clark Ashton Smith's wife also wrote warmly of him.  It's possible, given his background, he had some of the Southerner's charm.

It was while in New Orleans--presumably living with his family--when Robert Barbour Johnson agreed to be a press agent for a traveling circus, according to his memoir in The Weird Tale Story.  As he recounted there, he passed through most of Canada and the U.S. during his summer stints (he was still enrolled in Tulane otherwise).  Quickly bored by his duties, he "discovered a new talent, that of animal training.  I was soon handling dogs, ponies, goats, horses, and even camels."

Whether RBJ actually worked for the circus is difficult to know.  Circuses performers are notoriously hard to track--circuses are where people run away to, where they go to get lost.  There's no special reason to disbelieve Johnson, and some things which give credence to his story.  He wrote about circuses often for the pulpish magazine Blue Book throughout the 1940s and 1950s, as wel as a few articles for some smaller magazines.  Here's a probably incomplete bibliography:

# The Big Hitch (ss) Blue Book Feb 1948
# Animal Man (ss) Blue Book Apr 1948
# Elephant Boss (nv) Blue Book Aug 1948
# White Horse Pioneers (ss) Blue Book Nov 1948
# Lion-Tamer (ss) Blue Book Dec 1948
# Parade Wagon (nv) Blue Book Feb 1949
# The Man Who Didn’t Like Dogs (ss) Blue Book Apr 1949
# Buffalo Bill Holds Five Kings (ss) Blue Book Jun 1949
# Truck Show Bull (ss) Blue Book Aug 1949
# Liberty Horse (nv) Blue Book Dec 1949
# Grift Show Parade (nv) Blue Book Apr 1950
# The Big Herd (ss) Blue Book Jul 1950
# Zebra Team (ss) Blue Book Dec 1950
# King of the Cage (ss) Blue Book May 1951
# Longneck (ss) Blue Book Jul 1951
# John Robinson Rides Four (ss) Blue Book Dec 1951
# Killer Lion (ss) Short Stories Dec 1958
# The Clown (ss) Short Stories for Men Aug 1959

He was also well known for training his pet cat, "Kitty K."  Clark Ashton Smith's wife, Carol, commented on it.  And at the 1956 West Coast Science Fiction Conference (Westercon), Johnson's pet performed--in the words of the Oakland Tribune--35 stunts you wouldn't normally expect a cat to do.  Unless it was Jueles Verne's cat."

But even if--and it's only a slight if--Johnson never joined the circus but only invented these tales, it is nonetheless true that the circus world meshed with his continued interest in the fantastic.  He met someone, he said, for example, who planned to hunt for the Sasquatch at a time when the creature was not well known outside the confines of Canada.  And in a world of actual freaks, the weird stories he favored seemed a lot more plausible.

Robert Jefferson Johnson was born in November 1869 to a farming family in Holmes, Mississippi, according to the 1880 census.  His future wife, Mary Barbour Legrand, was born about 1865 to a farming family in Kentucky, according to the same source.  I can't find them on Ancestry.com again until 1920 (but it seems as though Ancestry.com has no records for Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1910, so further research is necessary).  Robert Barbour Johnson was born in 1907, which puts his father at thirty-seven and his mother at fourty-two.  At least according to the 1920 census, he was there only child.  This raises several questions: Did Johnson's parents have earlier families?  Did they spend time in foreign countries, jail, sanitaria, or asylums?  Was Johnson in fact adopted?

At any rate, it seems that the trio moved around a bit.  They were probably in Hopkinsville, Kentucky during Johnson's early years.  They were in Louisville for the 1920 census.  They were in New Orleans in 1930, according to the census (and Johnson's memories--although those seem to be quite shaky on actual dates).  Robert Jefferson and Mary B. both died in Christian county later in the decade, 1933 and 1934, respectively.

In the both the 1920 and 1930 census the Johnsons were boarders in group homes.  Mary B. was a housewife.  Robert Jefferson worked for an unnamed railroad company, in 1920 as a claims agent and in 1930 as part of the railroad's secret service, which was responsible for preventing crimes against railroads.

It was in Lousville that Johnson first encountered Weird Tales when he found the first issue on a newsstand near a fire station.  He was an "inveterate reader" of other pulps and was turned off by Weird Tales poor production, but fell in love with the stories.  "It contents!  Ye Gods, its contents!" 

According to Johnson, he wanted to be a writer ("among other things") at least since high school.  He tried a few stories for Weird Tales--all rejected--but was otherwise more interested in journalism.  Supposedly, he took journalism courses at Tulane while the family was in New Orleans, but no record of his attendance has been found (which doesn't mean he lied; it's likley a problem with the records, since it seems that Johnson never actually received a degree).  He also supposedly worked for The New Orleans Item, writing stories first as a summer job and then beyond that--seeing his stories in print quickly and getting paid for them, also quickly, more rewarding than grinding out a magazine story that might not appear in print for months with payment only coming upon publication.  Exact dates for this employment history are hard to nail down, first because of uncertainty surrounding Johnson's birthdate and second because his "specialty in those days" was pretending to be another age--apparently the start of a life-long habit.  "I looked, talked and acted at least five years more than my age, and was able to pass as an adult without question," he said later.

While in New Orleans, he also found another love: the circus.