According to Macnichol, he volunteered for the Canadian military to become part of the Great War.  This would have been before America entered, but after he had established the Eytinge Service, so in late 1916 or early 1917.  He filled out his American registration card in June 1917, giving his residence as Barnstable, Massachusetts.  He listed his occupation as author, his employer as self, suggesting he was no longer connected to the Eytinge Service (although the corporation did not disband until 1929).  According to the registration card, his mother and wife were both dependent on him “partly.”

Later, MacNichol would remember that he joined the American Expeditionary Forces in 1918; other documents suggest that he enlisted in 1917.  He was sent over as part of Harvard Unit 5, for which he was a sergeant assigned as a stretcher-bearer along the front lines.   The horror was too much for him, and MacNichol was re-assigned to headquarters press center and put on the staff of Stars and Stripes.  He was discharged in June 1919, and hoped to continue his service.  He was associated with the American Legion, hoped to start a magazine for that organization, which was organizing just as he discharged, based on others who had served in the AEF, agitated for better treatment of veterans (“Mr. Modell’s Army,” New York Times 22 February 1920), and hoped that the country would organize an army of peace, building on the organizational efforts of the Great War but focused on preventing more calamities (“Will to Serve,” National Service Nov 1919).

But his high hopes were overcome by the memories of his time in France.  He was diagnosed with shell shock.  Louise had to take a job as a secretary—before, one newspaper article noted, he had made enough that they had five maids—and he had a confession: a bit of beauty and guilt, encysted in the horror.

MacNichol admitted to Louise that in August 1918, while he was stationed in Mehun-sur-Yevre, he had met and fallen in love with Miss Leonie Winckel, a French woman in her mid to late twenties (she was estimated to have been born in 1891).  Amazingly, Louise accepted this information and agreed that the pregnant Leonie could come to their home at 15 East Park, Newark, New Jersey.  Leonie Winckel arrived in August.  She bore a daughter in December.

In March, Louise, MacNichol, and Leonie agreed to an adoption arrangement: the child would be supported by the MacNichols and bear the MacNichol name but be raised by Leonie until it was seven, or other arrangements could be made.   But Leonie soon left; according to news reports, she was homesick, but that seems a weak description.  The daughter was left with the MacNichols.

According to Louise, however, the child’s presence made Kenneth angry—again, one thinks the situation was more complex—and Leonie wrote to say how much she missed her baby.  In quick succession, the daughter was sent back to France and Kenneth was declared mentally ill—shell shocked—and sent to a sanitarium in Belle Meade, New Jersey.  Louise sued for and won guardianship over Kenneth—helped by the American Legion—so that she could receive his veteran’s pension while he was locked away.

During this time, Kenneth continued to write.   In addition to his war-related writing, he wrote two plays, Pan, which was performed in New York in 1917 and 1918 (no copy of the play exists) and The Faerie Fool, produced in 1918.  He published “Enough is Plenty” in The Argosy (26 January 1918), “Home for Breakfast” in the same magazine’s 20 September 1919 issue and “That Kind of Man” in the 8 May and 15 May 1920 issues as well as “The Twenty-Seventh Story” in the 20 June 1921 The Popular Magazine.   (He says that he wrote “The Night Shift” in 1919 but I cannot find any record of it.)

Apparently, however, the trauma of the situation overcame the couple—or so I imagine—and they left for greener pastures, sailing for England in the spring of 1921.  They settled at 68 Belsize Park, London, and Kenneth resumed his writing career, turning out the short stories “He Missed the Train” (Telling Tales September 1922), “The Nose of Papa Hilaire” (Blackwood’s February 1923), “The Devil’s Assistant” (Blackwood’s May 1923), “The Affair Mouchard,” Blackwood’s June 1923), and the books Freight (1923), Between the Days (1925), The Nose of Papa Hilaire (1925), and The Piper of Kerimor (1927).  He also may have had another job, since after they moved to 60 Gloucester Place, London, his place of employment was given as 43 Shoe Lane, London.

And then things got bad.

On 16 April 1923, Kenneth moved out.  Louise didn’t know where.  A month later, she sued for the restitution of her conjugal rights—which is to say, she tried to get the law to force him back home.   She withdrew that petition on 31 August and on the 11 September—ten years and ten days after their marriage—started divorce proceedings.  It turned out that Kenneth had been cheating on Louise, though she did not know who the other woman was.  It must have been a terrible blow to Louise, after all she had accepted from her husband, to be tossed aside in a foreign land.  Certainly, one can imagine that Kenneth was in pain, too, dealing with the after effects of the Great War, but that hardly excuses his behavior—in fact, barely explains it.

Louise seems to have taken some time in Europe, finally reaching America from Naples, Italy one day before her thirty-sixth birthday, having survived enormous heartache.  The divorce finally went through in 1927.

By that time, MacNichol was looking to change his life.  Again.

Louis V. Eytinge was an Ohioan, too, and like MacNichol had a lot of energy, but his was spent illegally and horribly.  Born about 1879 to an inveterate gambler, Louis’s family broke up by the time he was three, the boy raised by his mother.  During his childhood years he seems to have been in trouble often, mostly for writing bad checks, a tendency even time in the Navy could not cure.  Released from another stint of prison in 1907, relatives collected money for him if he agreed to leave Ohio.  He took the one hundred dollar monthly stipend and went to Arizona—in part, presumably, because he had contracted tuberculosis during one of his prison stays and the dry air there was supposed to be good for those with consumption.

On the train trip West, Eytinge met John Leicht, who was leaving from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.  Once in Arizona, they became roommates.  On Sunday morning, March 17, the two went out; only Eytinge returned, trying to pass off a check by Leicht as his own.  Leicht was later found dead, and Eyting was convicted of his murder.  He didn’t expect to live long—just before his arrest had a tubercular abscess removed from his leg, and the disease was also active in his lungs.  His family gave up on him, reducing his stipend to 10 per month.

Ending up in prison, in Arizona, in the early part of the twentieth century, though, was an opportunity that Eytinge could use to make his declining stipend seem of no importance.  In consonance with the Progressive ideals of the time, the governor, George Hunt, encouraged prisoners to become, as much as they could, active citizens, and Eytinge took this to heart.  He saw that there were a number of inmates who practiced the typically Southwestern hobby of braiding horse hair into hat bands, watch fobs, and similar accessories.  Eytinge organized the hobbyists and began to sell their wares.  However, because he had no sales force and could not go out himself, for obvious reasons, he had to rely on sales letters.

As it happened, Eytinge had a serious knack for writing such letters.   His business grew and attracted attention—as a symbol of life overcoming obstacles and the brave new world being created by Hunt.  (Letters between the two preserved at the Arizona state archives show that they were relatively friendly.)  Advertisers took notice of how good his letters were.  The business was in its infancy and trying to suss out the best methods for attracting customers.  The Chicago advertising journal Letters spent an entire issue analyzing his approach.

At the time, there were a few in Arizona who thought that Eytinge was innocent—that he was a forger, but not a killer, and perhaps Leicht had died from natural causes.  They wanted him freed.  In light of his industriousness, they were soon joined by others, some of whom saw the pardon of Eytinge as necessary on humanitarian grounds: he was talented and so deserved to be freed.  (The Sheboygan press was not so happy about this development, as one might imagine.)  Others saw him as an advertising gold mine.   Hunt was inundated with requests to pardon him.  Among those arguing for Eytinge’s release was Maynard Shipley, who would later be a Bay Area Fortean (though not part of the formal organization) and our man Kenneth MacNichol.

It’s not clear exactly how MacNichol became associated with the Eytinge case.  Perhaps it was, as I said before, through his Arizona journalism.  Perhaps he just saw it in the news—the case seems to have been well covered nationally.  Sometime in the early teens, MacNichol had moved into advertising as well; according to the December 1914 issue of Efficiency Magazine, he worked for the Wonlancet Compnay in New Hampshire, presumably churning out copy for the company, which manufactured corded cotton for mills (and, in the opinion of The Printing Art Suggestion Book, put out a very nice calendar).  Perhaps advertising was the only link.  But whatever it was, MacNichol took up Eytinge’s cause with enthusiasm.

On 1 April 1914—in a tone that suggested this was not a joke—a parole clerk wrote to Governor Hunt, “The American magazine has accepted an article from the pen of Kenneth MacNichol on Eytinge of and the Arizona State prison.  Someone had better put an end to this bone-head business of putting a man of Eytinge’s ability on a pick and shovel before the scribes of the nation make the administration ridiculous.”  I have not yet seen this article—I don’t know if it was ever published—but it would fit well with American Magazine, which had been founded as a muckraking journal.

[Late update: a search of American Magazine from 1914 to 1916 revealed no article by MacNichol.  For good measure I checked the Catholic magazine America for the same time period and also found nothing.]

Along about 1914, MacNichol became associated with Pauline L. Divers, treasurer of an advertising company in New York that had used some of Eytinge’s strategies.  She had been so impressed that she made a personal trip to Arizona to plead with Governor Hunt for Eytinge’s release.  She also said she wanted to marry the prisoner.  Together, MacNichol and Divers established the Eytinge Service.  The exact dates of its operation are unclear: Efficiency magazine announced its formation in late 1914, with Kenneth running the operation in Boston and Divers in New York.  But according to the state of Massachusetts, the Eytinge Service operated there from 1911 to 1914 and according to New York State it was incorporated there 1 March 1915.  At any rate, city directories indicate that the service operated at least in 1916.  The service seemed to provide other companies with Eytinge’s form letters, which were supposed to have fabulous success rates.

Eytinge went on to other successes.  He wrote articles for the slicks, such as The Saturday Evening Post and even a movie script, “The Man under Cover,” which was in theaters when he scored his biggest success: he was leased on 1 January 1923.  He married Divers three days later in New York City.  Eytinge had made a lot of money in prison—by some accounts, $5,000 per month, but ran through that while a free man and in 1927 he was busted for trying to pass another bad check.   Showing very little gratitude—a theme that will recur shortly—Eytinge blamed his wife; she seemed to have stuck by him though, at least for a time, appealing to his uncle for money, a request that was denied.  He went back to jail, was released again and, in 1933, went to jail again for swindling.  In 2006, a reporter for the Yuma (Arizona) Sun tried to find what happened to him after that, but was unable.  Eytinge disappeared into the mists of time.

MacNichol, however, had by that time moved on; the Great War had ended his involvement with Eytinge, set the conditions for his own marital betrayal, and changed his life enormously.

Kenneth MacNichol was born 3 November 1887.  (There’s some confusion about the exact year, but this seems the normal  kind of inexactitude, rather than the systematic obfuscation of Robert Barbour Johnson.  He is listed in the 1890 census as having been born about 1886; his WWI registration card gives the year as 1888.  But all of his other records give the year 1887).  His father, Frank MacNichol (or McNichols), was born New Jersey in 1849.  By 1880, he was living in Shreve, Ohio, where he was the landlord of a hotel. According to the 1880 census, six other people lived in the hotel, three men in their twenties and thirties and three women in their late teens and twenties.  The oldest of the women was Emma Young, 23, who was listed as Frank’s cousin and landlady of the hotel.  She also became his wife.

Frank and Emma had two sons, Kenneth, born in 1887 and Rodney, born two years later.  In a passport application from the 1920s, Kenneth said that his father died in 1904.  But the Canton City directory from 1900 already lists Emma as a widow; and the 1900 census lists Emma as living with her two sons and two boarders, which is probably how she paid her bills, since no occupation is otherwise listed.

For reasons unknown, the family had relocated to Farmington, New Mexico by 1910; their living arrangements are hard to decipher from the census.  Emma’s age is given as 46, rather than 53.  She’s also listed as married (with a superscript notation indicating a second marriage) and her surname is given as McAlpine, but no husband is listed for the family; she is the head, and existed on her “own income,” whatever that meant.  Rodney was still with her, his occupation a cowboy.  Kenneth, by now twenty-three, said he was an “author” of “special articles.”

It seems likely that the MacNichols—or, at least Kenneth—did not move straight from Ohio to New Mexico.  In a biography he wrote—I found it in Who Was Who among North American Authors 1921-1939—he said that he had early newspaper training with the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers which, if true, would have occurred around this time, as the rest of his life is more easily tracked.  As well, he is referenced in the San Francisco Call 17 January 1909 as being among a literary circle in Carmel, California.  It is also worth noting that the earliest writing of his I could identify—although I have not read it yet—is “The Petaluma Product” from All Story Magazine, August 1909—Petaluma being a town in northern California.

At any rate, he was writing by the late aughts, not only “The Petaluma Product” but also The King’s Idol, from the same magazine’s October 1909 issue as well as a couple of articles for Arizona Magazine, “Harnessing the Colorado” (May 1912), “An Arizona Inventor and His Work (July 1912), and “Phoenix—The Growing City” (September 1912), plus, most likely, a number of others that remain unknown to me. 

Life in Arizona proved pivotal for Macnichol.  On 1 September 1913, he married Louise Eckel in Prescott, Arizona.  It was Hetta Louise Eckel’s twenty-fourth birthday.  She had been born in Arkansas City, Kansas, where her father worked as a carpenter; they had moved to Arizona and bought a farm.  Presumably, Kenneth and Louise met while he was working as a writer in the Phoenix area.  It seems likely that he also met Louis Eytinge here, probably while writing “An Arizona Inventor and His Work,” although I haven’t yet seen that article so can’t be sure.

Kenneth Hartley MacNichol seems to have decided at a young age to be a writer.  It’s hyperbole—but maybe just a little bit—to say that was the last easy decision he made.  Over the course of his life he was married four, perhaps five, times, lived everywhere from New Mexico to China, and started and quit numerous businesses.  According to Don Herron and Robert Barbour Johnson, he was the impetus behind the San Francisco Fortean Society, and, certainly, the image gets of him is a generator, bristling with energy, constantly creating.  He’s been especially hard to track, historically, his traces scant, but if nothing else, it can be said that he lead a full life, if not one especially heroic.

Writing about Forteans necessarily brings up the question of skeptics--in modern American parlance, this term refers to those who defend a scientific approach, and sometimes the ideas of modern science, above and beyond the so-called scientific method.  It's not that skeptics and Forteans are opposites--that's too simple.  Certainly, they often do disagree on fundamental issues, but they also share certain ideas and commitments and so the relationship between the two is complex.  And so, I think, it's impossible to write about Forteans without understanding the modern skeptical movement, which largely evolved over the same time period, the second half of the twentieth cetury.

All of which means I have been giving some thought to the sketpical movement.

I've also been thinking about it because, over teh last few months, I've had an on-going email discussion with a well-known skeptics about my book Bigfoot.  That book also forced me to deal with skepticism, but on a more limited scale, since there was not a huge overlap between the Bigfoot story and the skeptics's story until the 1990s.

The skeptic took exception to my charactetization of the movement in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the sentence, "ridicule was the skeptics' primary weapon."  He--for the skeptic was a he--pointed out that recently the skeptical movement has not indulged in ridicule, and wondered what my evidence for the claim was.  I argued, one, that ridicule was sometimes a useful tactic, and so the statement was more descriptive than normative, and two, to the extent that it was normative, I could cite a number of articles in Skeptical Inquirer written during the 1970s and 1980s that used ridicule to debunk Bigfootery.

He disagreed that the evidence I put forth was substantive.  Fine.  There was clearly a difference in reading between the two of us, and I don't want to deny him his interpretations, but it got me wondering about how one thinks as a skeptic (understanding, of course, that there is no one way, but many, probably related ways).

So, I've been thinking about skepticism, and want to do so in a way that parallels my "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fortean."  That is to say, a series of hypotheses and posibilities, none of which I am necessarily wedded to.

Although, I do think that today's example, while possibly limited, is fundamentally correct.

It comes from Jonathan Marks Why I am NOT a Scientist, page 126:

Simply from the standpoint of considering science, I find it troubling that scientists [or, more broadly scientific defenders and skeptics] actually care what people 'believe in.'  . . .  After all, the principal reason for doing so is to exercise ideological power."

The skeptical movement, then, is a way of forcing people to agree with science.  But why should we care what people believe?  Who cares if people believe in UFOs or shape-shifting Sasquatches?  Only proselytizers.   

A while back, on Laelaps's blog, I had a contretemps with Matt Moneymaker, head of the BFRO.  Although he resolutely refused to read my book--because it was supposedly part of some literary scam--he thought he understood the details of my argument and also could suss out my personality.

I let the issue go then, and don't mean to revivify it now.  Participants at the BFRO forum were convinced he had gotten the better of argument.  I disagree, but otherwise leave it to the reader to decide.

What I've been thinking about recently, though, is the way that his attack supported the thesis of the book.

One argument I made was that Bigfoot was popular among (some) working-class white men because through it ideas about masculinity could be wrestled with--not necessarily solved, but confronted and played with.

So, it's no surprise, then, that Moneymaker would boil the argument down to masculinity.  He suggested that I was homosexual--and, more than that, a gay man who was uncomfortable with his own sexuality and could not be a true man, but let the world hold me back.

I let the comment slide at the time because, in part, I don't want to take offense at being called gay.  I'm not, but I don't want to treat the term as pejorative, which, i think, was part of Moneymaker's intent.  I also let it slide because it seemed to me then--as it does now--that Moneymaker proved the weakness of his own argument by resorting to questions about sexuality--forgetting any attempt to deal with, you know, evidence and logic.

But, I think it is worth noting as a data point which supports the thesis.  Bigfoot, at least as it's been understood over the last half-century or so, often raises questions about the authenticity of masculinity.

The most obvious way, at least when one thinks of Charles Fort himself, is as a collector.  Fort spent years in New York and British libraries collecting reports of the strange, the inexplicable, which he then filed according to his own system: a hue collection.

Collecting has been central to much Fortean activity since then.  In the reprint edition of his Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, for example, Ivan Sanderson said that Forteanism could only be advanced y scouring libraries for more reports of the unknown.  And he was an inveterate collector himself. joking that when he died, he would not be buried, but filed amid his collection.

I have recently learned that Booth Tarkington, one of the founding members of the Fortean Society, wrote a book called The Collector's Whatnot.  That's probably worth checking out.

This is an old story--and a badly uploaded picture--but an interesting one nonetheless.  It comes from the 22 August 2008 San Francisco Chronicle.  I found it in some files I was sorting yesterday.

The (fake) article refers to the supposed capture of Bigfoot by two men in Georgia, which was announced to a anxious--and bemused--world last summer.  This story has it that Bigfoot was not a gorilla stuffed with roadkill, but a costume of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was one of the masterminds behind 9/11.

The joke works on a couple of levels, I think.  One thing it does is call into question just how scary these terrorists are--by conflating them with the Bigfoot--who is best known for his absence.  It also suggests that many terrorists may not be caught--they are as elusive as the beast.

What intrigues me, though, is the way that Bigfoot is used to dehumanize the terrorist.  This is one of the functions of wildmen throughout history, to question the line between human and non-human.  Here, in a very explicit way, the wildman is being used to suggest that terrorists are not human: they are dirty, stinking, hairy, they live in caves.

The trope of the wildman in America combines several different conflicting ideas.  And here, we see those meanings shuffled to reveal the inhumanity of the beast--and, by extension, the inhumanity of some humans.