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.

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.

While I collect a little more information on Kenneth MacNichol, I'm starting a new series: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fortean.

The poet Wallace Stevens famously said that there were Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.  I don't know much (read: anything) about Wallace Stevens, but the Wikipedia entry on him suggests that he had a Fortean flair.  He wrote,

“The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them."

Charles Fort, I think, would have understood this.  Stevens is saying that there are perceptions--things we experience and know about--that come before reason, or scientific understanding.  And some of these things, then, might later be dropped out when reason is applied--experiences left unexplained.  Damned facts.  The entry explains,

[I]n Stevens's work "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness nor is "reality" equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry, philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning.

And thus we can see how there might be thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird: as the mind sorts through different ways of making reality.

Similarly, there might be thirteen ways of looking at anything.

Including Forteans.

I have yet to make up my mind about how exactly to structure a history of the Forteans.  In large part that's because I am still engaging with the data.  But there is also the act of imagination--or, to switch metaphors--the (intellectual) tools any of us has available, the ways of thinking.  And so this series will explore different ways of thinking about Forteans, different intellectual tools for making sense of them, different historical approaches, different ways of looking.

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.