Robert Barbour Johnson was born on 19 August.  That much we can say with some certainty.  It's the date given on his application for a social security number and on his death certificate.  Beyond that, well, there's a range of possible answers.  His World War II enlistment card says 1905.  His application for social security says 1906.  (Obviously, there are incentives for making one's self older to get social security earlier).  [Later update: there are also incentives for making oneself younger and some suggestion Johnson relished the idea of being a wunderkind.  When his story "Far Below" was chosen as the best yarn ever published in Weird Tales, he was noted as one of the magazine's younger writer.  He said that he harassed his writer friends with that for month, pointing out that lots of people say they are young, but he had written proof.]  His death certificate says 1907 (as does the SSDI).  His recollections for The Weird Tales Story suggests that he was born in 1909.  Edan Hughes's Artists in California has him born in that year as well.

Johnson appears twice in the U.S. census.  In 1930, he claimed to be 22.  That census was taken in April, which would put his birth in 1907.  At the time, he was living alone, in San Francisco, and so could have been fibbing about his age.  Ten years earlier, though, when he was still living with his parents, his age is given as twelve.  Since he was censused in January, that would again put his birth date as 1907.

So, then, he was born in 1907.  But where?  All the public records give his birth as Kentucky, and Johnson himself says it was Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in Christian county, which makes some sense--both of his parents died in Christian county.  The one discordant note is the 1920 census, which gives his place of birth as Ohio.

Perhaps the issue could be settled with a birth certificate?  No doubt.  Unfortunately, Kentucky did not keep good records before 1911, and previous searches for Johson's in Christian county have come up blank.  And Ohio organized them by county until 20 December 1908, and the census gives no indication what county Johnson was born in.  Hopkinsville is in the far southwest corner of Kentucky, nowhere near Ohio, and so it is not even possible to check with bordering counties.

These are the problems inherent in trying to reconstruct Barbour's life.  He once called himself--in homage to one of H.P. Lovecraft's stories--The Outsider.  And there's a lot of truth to that.

Indeed, I am not the first to go in quest of Johnson's history.  R. Alain Everts did before me, and he came up with nothing.  I think I've had a little more success.

It's unknown when Haas first encountered Charles Fort.  Given his reading habits, it could have been as early as 1919, when Fort published his first book, or the mid-1930s, when he reached the acme of his fame and science fiction writers began to take serious notice.  Dating his activities as a Fortean is a little--although not much--earlier.  In 1966, he wrote Clark Ashton Smith's then-widow that he had been collecting Forteana for twenty years.  Generally, in areas it is possible to check, Haas's recollections have been reliable.  So that means he was an active Fortean starting just after World War II, which is consonant his deepening activities in fandom.  Certainly, he was a dedicated Fortean by 1953 when he met Clark Ashton Smith, for the two talked of Fortean things that day he made the trip from Oakland to Auburn.

Around this time, Haas also became acquainted with other Forteans.  Robert Barbour Johnson was one.  The San Francisco writer Miriam Alan de Ford and Berkeley editor Anthouny Boucher were as well, although there is no evidence that Haas knew them well.  (He may have through Johnson, however, who did know both de Ford and Boucher).  Other Bay Area residents interested in pulps, science fiction, fantasy, and weird tales interested in Fort included Kenneth MacNichol, Polly Lamb (who practiced a form of magic very much like Haas's), Anthony and Phe Laws, and Garen and Kirk Drussai.

In the early 1950s, these and several others started to meet at Kenneth MacNichol's writing Studio, Pencraft, in San Francisco, to discuss Fortean things.  Johnson, whose memory is not to be trusted, said in the 1970s that the meetings were at first twice a month, then monthly, and that around fifty people attended.  They called themselves Chapter Two, acknowledging that Tiffany Thayer's group in New York City was chapter one.  The group discussed individual meetings and discussed local Fortean happenings.  (Johnsosn says that there weren't many, because the UFO craze had not yet started, but of course that began in 1947.  Another instance of his poor memory).

The group broke up sometime in the middle to late 1950s.  Johnson says the late 1950s, but he also dates its demise to the death of the founder, Kenneth MacNichol, who died in 1955.  Certainly, by the early 1960s, Haas was telling Smith's widow that the group was disbanded.  And his interest in Forteana seemed to decline until the late 1960s when he started investigating Bigfoot. 

For my interests, the post-War period is the most critical in Haas's life.  It's also the most difficult to document as closely as I would like.

After the War--presumably he separated from the Navy after VJ Day--Haas returned to Oakland.   He became a gardener, experimenting with organic methods.  He was a Buddhist, too, and a sorcerer, although it's unknown exactly when those practices began.  As Herron describes it, Haas's was a visualization magic: he imagined something happened, and often it did.  This was a system that forced one to look at the world from (ahem) an oblique angle, to pay attention to coincidence and serendipity.  For example, Haas saw his going to the South Pacific during the War the result of visualization: he had been reading about the area since his late teens, and had watched ships built while he worked in Richmond, and these two things fated him to be a gunner who sailed the Pacific.  Because it is unknown whether Haas believed in magic before the War, it is also unknown whether he actively applied his magic to make those things happen, or retrospectively explained them as resulting from magic.  In either case, the point still stands, his system of magic had him look for obscure connections between events.

It was also during this time that he became more active in the world of modern Romance--in Weird Tales and fantasy fandom.  He befriended the Portland artist and fellow Buddhist Ralph Rayburn Phillips, who did the illustrations for fanzines.  He met Robert Barbour Johnson, a pulp writer who lived in San Francisco.  He also wrote Richard Matheson his first fan letter, for "Born of Man and Woman" in the summer 1950 Magazine of Fanatsy and Science Fiction.  Matheson visited Haas in 1951.

That same year, Haas christened his hom "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis."  It was an allusion to the title of story by Clark Ashton Smith, which appeared in the May 1932 issue Weird Tales.  The vaults were the ancient ruins or a Martian town that were infested with terrbile creatures--leechlike things that, once attached, could possess a person.  The story was one of Smith's most famous and, in time, Robert Barlow, a fantasy fan and acolyte to H.P. Lovecraft, appropriated the name for his closet, in which he kept his collection of fantast magazines.  Barlow killed himself in 1951, and Haas then christened his own library with that name.

Where were these original vaults?  Not sure.  But, within a couple of years, at least, Haas was living with his mother Bertha M. Boyd, at 2915 Hillegass Avenue.  It may be that he was living there in 1951, too.  (His step-father, Daniel Webster Boyd, died in October 1944, and so it seems possible that Haas had been living with his mother since returning from War.)

Haas's devotion to Smith became more than allusory at this time, as well.  The poet-author lived in Auburn, California, just across the Central Valley and into the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.  Haas wrote to Smith, and the two met in September 1953, beginning an intense relationship that each would remember later as their closest friendship.  Haas also became something of a patron to Smith, buying his books and sculptures so that the author could continue to eke out a living.

Haas enlisted in the U.S. Navy on 26 August 1942, as a Seaman First Class.  This was his second attempt to join the Navy.  Haas had tried to enlist just after Pearl Harbor, but had been denied because he wore dental plates.  [Update: He then went to work at the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, California.]  A bit later. the US Army sent him notice he was to be drafted.  And so Haas returned to the naval recruiter; this time, he was assigned to the Naval Armed Guard, given four weeks of boot camp and four weeks of gun training.  (Although Don Herron notes that when Haas was assigned to operate a 20mm. gun on a ship, he had never yet fired one, so--he reports half-seriously--learned to use "his weapon with one hand while holding the operations manual in the other.")

Hass did three tours, the first a six-month stint on the Aleutians, the second 18-months in the South Pacific, and finally, a four-and-a-half month trip around the world.

He saw some action, but also had a chance to fulfill his long-time Romantic urge to explore the South Seas.  Whether he had been in years past, or developed it while in the military is unknown, but Haas was a collector, and he spent much of his time gathering material that would later be ensconced in the Vaults.  Among the things he gathered were tapa clothes, a tapa club, pressed leaves from the tree under which Captain Cook first landed in Tonga, elephant statues, butterflies, sandalwood.

He also carried sandalwood seeds.  Haas was infatuated with sandal wood.  Perhaps it was the tree-man in him.  Probably, Haas already then knew of the romantic associations of sandalwood.  Certainly, he knew it was precious and difficult to come by--he only found some to buy in New Caledonia and Tonga (where he also purchased some seeds).  Later, he met Meti, from New Aitutaki, who told him that his homeland had no sandalwood.  Haas made a gift of the seeds to Meti.

Later, the famed fantasy author Clark Ashton Smith would say, "That carrying of sandalwood seeds from Tonga to an island in the Cook group is about as romantic and poetic as anything I have heard of in ages."

And it was--Romantic and poetic.  Especially through the mists of memory.  No doubt that Haas experienced days and nights of terror, struggled with the heat and humidity and bad food, got sick, headaches, bumps and bruises.  But as he looked back on his life and recounted it to Smith and Herron, those things fell away, and what he remembered was the Romance.  Haas was creating an image of himself--and of the world--in which the fantastic was mundane, but no less wonderful for its ubiquity.

In 1932, Haas was out of a job, presumably because of the Great Depression.  And so he spent the next six months hitch-hiking across the country, covering, by his count, ten-thousand miles and thirty-five states, as well as Manitoba.

The next year, he hitchhiked to Big Trees State Park in Calaveras.  He worked there--voluntarily, for cash, for room and board?  This is not clear--and so impressed officials that he was named the park's lead ranger in 1934.  While there, he wrote A Guide to Calaveras Big Trees, the only copy of which is now at the California State Library in the California History Room.

In 1935, Haas moved to Yellowstone National Forest, where he ran a reforestation nursery--presumably drawing on his earlier experiences--until 1940.  His title at the end was "CCC Foreman, National Park Service," which suggests that he was benefiting from New Deal programs and may help explain how he came to be employed at Calaveras Big Tree State Park in the first place.

During this time, he also took up mountain climbing.  As Don Herron reconstructs this era in Haas's life, the mountain climbing and exploration was part of Haas's quest for Romantic experiences: he tested his body to its limits (and sometimes beyond), going places no human had been before--or so it was said--once getting drunk on altitude sickness, once witnessing the Specter of Brocken, once discovering a "Shangri-la" in Yellowstone that was so arranged that, Haas imagined, it had never in all of history been touched by the foot of humans and that had not been found again after he and his traveling partner departed.

 According to Haas's application for a social security account number, his job at Yellowstone ended two days before Christmas, 1940.  By 30 July 1941--when the application was signed--Haas was unemployed and living in Oakland, at 1228 59th Street.  Why he moved to the Bay Area is unknown.  It was here that he was inducted into the U.S. Navy.

Update: the move to the Bay Area may have been familial.  His father, Daniel W. Boyd, died in Alameda in 1944.

Haas continued to live along the northern coast of California through the 1920s, working at redwood tree reforestation nurseries after his graduation from high school in 1924.  Around the same time, he also read Frederick O'Brien's White Shadows in the South Seas, which fired his romantic imagination.  Over the years, according to [corrected: Don] Herron, Haas would go on to read over 1,000 books on the South Pacific.  It seems safe to assume that Haas also started reading Weird Tales in these years.  The magazine started publication in 1923.

[Update: According to Don Herron--I missed this sentence before--Haas did indeed start buying Weird Tales from the beginning.