According to Robert Barbour Johnson, MacNichol met Thayer while he was in New York.  Johnson isn’t a reliable historian, but this claim makes sense.  The two men were in New York at the same time and were well known writers.  It seems likely that there social circle should overlap.  MacNichol was not a science fiction writer, but did turn out fantasy and what was called the weird story (although in Twelve Lectures he warned his students that the market for such stories was small and unreliable).  Given this interest, it’s not hard to imagine that MacNichol knew of Fort’s work, especially after 1941 when Thayer put out a collected volume of Fort’s four books on damned facts.  So an interest in Forteana may have drawn the two together, as well.  It’s all speculation at this point, though, for none of the Thayer correspondence I have seen is with MacNichol.

At any rate, we do know that MacNichol founded the San Francisco Fortean Chapter, from Johnson as well as Haas (and, through him, Herron), so, again, it makes sense that he might have met Thayer in New York and carried the interest west with him.  The meetings took place at Pencraft College, which suggests that they began after 1946.  Johnson’s story of Thayer expelling the chapter—more on this later—dates, through outside sources, the excommunication to 1948 or 1949.  It seems likely that the club may have declined after the break-up of MacNichol and Polly Lamb, which would date the end to some time between 1951 and July 1953.  Whatever was going on with the club was not attracting a great deal of attention—at least my research has uncovered no reporting on the club by the local papers.

MacNichol appears in the 1945-46 city directory for San Francisco, so he came west sometime after the start of World War II.  His address is given as 478 Union Street, his occupation as literary consultant.  His business listing also included someone named Susan E. MacNichol, which may mean that he married again.   No later than 1948, he opened Pencraft College at 2255 Lombard Street, where he taught writing, and was a founding member of the Seven Arts League, which was supposed to encourage the fine arts in San Francisco.  The League didn’t seem to have made much of a dent—there’s no discussion of it in the San Francisco Chronicle and no record of it in the California State Library History Room.

If he had been married to someone named Susan, that ended by the late 1940s, for in 1949 he married Polly Lamb, another member of the Fortean Society.  That relationship, too, ended a few years later, for in 1953, he married Marie A. Wright (it was her second marriage) in San Francisco.  He was sixty five; she was forty two.  The marriage was recorded in San Francisco, but it seems that his connection to the city was dying.

He did give a series of lectures on writing at the University of San Francisco in 1954, but he last appeared in the city directory in 1951, and then he was listed as a writer (not the head of Pencraft College) and still married to Polly Lamb.  A few years later, he was mostly remembered as publisher of the San Lorenzo Village Sun, a newspaper that served the planned community of San Leandro Village, which suggests that he may have been living there, or in Santa Cruz.  I can find no record of this publication at the California State Library or Hayward Area Historical Society.   At any rate, the paper could not have lasted very long—like most of the many projects MacNichol started and then abandoned.

On Sunday June 26, the MacNichols were on a bus in Santa Cruz, California, crossing the railroad tracks at Younglove Avenue and Seaside Street.  A slow moving train crashed into the bus.  Kenneth’s chest was crushed, puncturing his lungs.  “If he had been 10 years younger he probably would have recovered,” a medical spokesman said.  But he died on Wednesday morning.  Marie suffered a fractured skull, but was expected to make a full recovery.  I’m not sure what happened to her, but presumably she did survive because I have been unable to find a death certificate for Marie MacNichol from the summer of 1955.

  MacNichol was impressed by Eytinge because of the quality of the prisoners writing: the seemingly magical power of his words to compel responses from those who received them.  MacNichol maintained throughout his life an interest in writing as art and writing as advertising.  While he was in England, he began to play with a new way to bring these different ideas about writing.

In the meantime, according to his later recollection.  He travelled extensively through Europe and Asia.  I have not found reference to books or articles that he wrote during the second half of the 1920s beyond the Piper of Kerimor, which was a collection of stories, and one other exception, which wil be discussed momentarily.  He did seem to continue to write, though, for he says in Who Was Who among North American Writers that he was a China correspondent for the Athens-Peking News Agency.  He was supposed to have written for American, British, and French magazines, too.   The same year as his divorce, he said, he “practically abandoned fiction writing” for “more serious material”—“economic and sociology.”  In 1930, he married again, Netta Marjorie Wright, the 21-year old daughter of a music composer.  (By that time, MacNichol was 41.  Given the age difference, one hopes that she was not the mistress in 1923.)

He also came to advertise himself.  In 1924 and 1925, he had given a series of lectures on writing, which he then turned into a book, Twelve Lectures on the Technique of Fiction Writing, which he published in 1929.  In the book, MacNichol focused on the craft elements of writing—teaching students to learn how to mass produce stories on a regular basis that fit the rubric of particular magazines.  He gave an example of a method he sometimes used himself: he was in need of funds and so needed a story.  Mexico was in the news, so he thought to write about it.  He invented to men, a hero and foe, and decided to put them in the middle of revolution, since that was occurring in Mexico.  He invented a reason for the two men to fight, and wrote the story from their—which, he said, was enough to get it into Collier’s.  (I have been unable to find the story.)  MacNichol had little sympathy for sincerity—or what we might now call authenticity—in fiction writing.  Certainly, there was artistry—but that came from the genius by which a story if put together, the language used.  For the most part, however, writing was a job.

Twelve Lectures was more than a book, though.   It was an advertisement for Kenneth MacNichol.   At the same time he released the book, he Kenneth MacNichol Limited to advertise his book and run an ancillary industry.  MacNichol advertised to read and criticize stories of hopeful authors.  Those who bought his book would find at the back coupons for discounted rates.

Records held by the National Archives of the United Kingdom indicate the company was profitable.  It was capitalized at 154 pounds to begin with and its last report showed it worth almost 31,000 pounds.   It didn’t stay in around for long, however.  It stopped conducting business in 1931 and was shut down in 1932 by the government for failure to pay fees and file necessary documents.

By that time, MacNichol and Netta had returned to America, reaching New York from Plymouth on 3 April 1931.  It’s unknown what MacNichol was doing through most of the 1930s and early 1940s.  He did publish at least two works he felt worthy of inclusion in Who Was Who: An Idiot Looks at It and Femina Flamma, both of which were likely essays or short stories.  In addition, he claimed to be executive director of the National Writer’s Club and running a school of literature in New York.  (Further research is necessary, but it seems that the National Writer’s Club was the school he was running.)

MacNichol also left Netta.  She applied for naturalization in September 1936 and noted that she had been living apart from Kenneth since July 1935 and had no idea where he was.

He also seems to have given up on serious matters, returning to the pulp fold,  publishing in Argosy, Popular Detective, Thrilling Detective (under his pseudonym O. M. Cabral), Thrilling Mystery, Weird Tales—thus another connection between him and other Bay Area Forteans—and a slew of works for Doc Savage.

MacNichol’s World War II registration card gives some indication of where he was in 1945: still in New York, but now working for the Newspaper Institute of America.   This seems to have been something much like Kenneth MacNichol Limited in London, with prospective writers sending in samples of their writing for evaluation.  It was further extension of the interest he had maintained since at least the mid-1910s with the connection between writing and advertising.