A few posts down, I mentioned Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and noticed that I did not have a tag for him, which makes me think that dropping his name there might have been confusing.  So let me explain his connection.

As far as I know, LaVey was not a Fortean, at least not explicitly.  But, he did have a collection of the works of Ben Hecht, a writer who ran in Tiffany Thayer's circle and was a founding member of the first Fortean Society.

By itself, that doesn't say much: lots of people read Hecht.  But, LaVey was also in San Francisco by the 1950s and spent time with George Haas, Robert Barbour Johnson, and Clark Ashton Smith.  There's a semi-famous picture of them together, which LaVey titled, "Headmasters in a School for Ghouls."  By the 1960s, Haas told Ashton Smith's wife that he no longer heard from Lavey--"since he became Satan."

But, it's clear there was a substantive connection between LaVey and the Bay Area Forteans and so understanding something about LaVey--who has more written about him--helps explain the Forteans.

I’ve been doing some reading on San Francisco geography, as well—soon to be supplemented by reading on LA geography—to get a sense of how the city (and Bay Area more generally) is organized and try to fit that in with what I know of the California Forteans.  And some interesting patterns have emerged.

Berkeley geographer Richard A. Walker recognizes four residential types.   He writes, “This civic landscape springs from the distinctive class, political and cultural nature of the Bay Area—relatively wealthy, petty bourgeois, bohemian, cosmopolitan, labourist, environmentalist, egalitarian, anti-modern—and embodies the contradictions of the libertine capitalism that is a local trademark.”

The first, and most iconic, category is the Victorian homes.  These resulted from the work of middle class reformers in the 1850s and 1860s, who saw San Francisco as too raw, too libertine, and sought to impose a more appropriate look for the city.  These were not the “modern” buildings of, say, Los Angeles.  Rather they were ornate and gaudy—Thorstein Veblen was thinking of them when he was at Stanford and writing the Theory of the Leisure Class.  Many of these were burned in 1906.  But the rich never abandoned downtown San Francisco as they did so many other inner cities, and so they remained as a tribute to the class identity of the nineteenth century rich.

A second category is what Walker calls ecotopian suburbs.  This is composed of the mock cabin and craftsman houses tucked into hills and surrounded by oaks, redwoods, and eucalyptus.  These areas, although they look natural, were made: the coast range of the Bay Area was mostly grass, and so homeowners and developers had to plant all the trees, as well as building the houses.  The inspiration for these places, Walker argues, is Yosemite and Big Trees.  Ecotopian suburbs can be found in parts of San Francisco, in the Oakland Hills, in Berkeley, and Marin.  These are the homesteads of the libertarian, bohemian middle class.  They combine mysticism, Romanticism, and Masonic ideals and stand in opposition to LA, once again: there the wave of modernist architecture expunged the arts and crafts movement.  In San Francisco, there was a conscious anti-modern movement.

A number of Bay Area Forteans are associated with this ideal.  Polly Lamb lived in Oakland; Anthony Boucher was in Berkeley—both in just these kinds of spots.  Most prominent, probably, is George Haas.  He idealized Big Trees State Park.  He built organic gardens around his Oakland home.  There were certainly anti-modern strains to his thought.

The third category is the suburb proper.  Oakland does not fit into this category because in the late nineteenth century that city wrestled with San Francisco for industrial dominance, and soon developed its own urban infrastructure: it was its own city, taking advantage of new sectors that developed after San Francisco came of age, especially food canning, auto building, and electrical manufacturing.

San Francisco did try to push South but was stopped by the presence of many elite estates in San Mateo County, which prevented the movement.  This fits into the Fortean story, too, for their developed a Bohemian connection between the Bay Area and less developed places to the south, especially Carmel, but also San Mateo.  These places retained their Bohemian, mystical vibe.  Marin did, too: remember, the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t completed until 1936, and for many seemed unnecessary.

Instead, development marched East, and the Bay Area did well: even as San Francisco’s manufacturing declined, around 1910 the region was only outpaced by Detroit (cars!), Cleveland, and its competitor to the South, LA.  Again, new sectors allowed the outlying areas to compete with their older neighbors, food processing, oil, and chemical work, especially.  Good wages and an extensive trolley system allowed workers to move East and North into new tract homes.

Past Alameda county, Contra Costa county developed its suburbs more slowly.  Places like Hercules and Rodeo were essentially company towns, with workers shacking up on business property.  (San Francisco financiers had a level of control this far out that they did not have in the East Bay, as much of the money for Contra Costa’s development came from the City.)  To tie in with the earlier connections, these suburbs also came to be supported by defense procurements as fortress California also built out in this direction.  But there is still some connection to Forteana even here, as Jack Parsons, the occultist rocket-developer from LA came north to work at Hercules Powder Company.

The fourth category is multi-family housing.  The university in Berkeley and the industrial areas in Oakland—especially with the coming of World War II—supported such dwellings, but the center for this residential type was San Francisco.  Apartments and residential hotels came into their own during the 1890s—before that, the need was taken care of by boarding out rooms.

The small rooms pushed people into the community: in places dominated by apartment buildings and residential hotels there was more life on the streets.  People ate out.  They went to coffee.  They went to movies.  These zones of dense dwelling, cheap entertainment, and public life are where experimental lifestyles took root.  This was the natural habitat of Bohemians, beats, hippes, gays: political rebels and public intellectuals.  (San Francisco was rich in such areas and so has a rich history of experimentation, with the Barbary Coast of the mid-nineteetnh century, the turn of the century Bohemianism, as well as the more obvious later manifestations.)

The Fortean connections here are obvious.  Miriam Alan de Ford lived in a hotel for most of her life, within walking distance of the library (urbanism made Forteanism easier, as there were vast collections of facts to study).  One thinks, also, of Kenneth MacNichol with his writers studio in the heart of one of San Francisco’s art districts, and Robert Barbour Johnson living in a little apartment and making appearances at the literary hotspots—indeed, it was this scene that drew him to San Francisco in the first place.

With the depression, and the drying up of investments, these areas began to decline.  Jobs moved to the suburbs, leaving the area old, infirm, and with decreasing political clout.  In the late 1940s and 1950s, the rich began to see these areas as blights in need of redevelopment.  And so there were fights between them and the remaining rebels, especially the beats in North Beach—what Kenneth Starr says was a battle between Provincials and Baghdadders.  Some of Old San Francisco was saved, and freeways were not allowed to cut through the old downtown.  But, the most iconic Bohemian place was lost.  This was the Montgomery Block, a warren of rooms housed by artists and such.  (Likely, a number of the people who attended MacNichols’s Fortean meetings lived here.)  In 1959, the structure—which had survived the 1906 fire—was bulldozed for a parking lot.  Later, the Trans-America Building was built there.  

Boucher’s interest in science fiction and fantasy did not dwindle, though.  He wrote a poem for Weird Tales, reviewed science fiction and fantasy for the Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Daily News.  During his time in Los Angeles, in the late 1930s, he became acquainted with the Mañana Literary Society, which was a club of science fictioneers (as they often called themselves), including Robert Heinlein, Cleve Cartmill, Ed Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, and others.  Boucher wrote about the Society in his mystery Rocket to the Morgue (which was published under a different pseudonym: H. H. Holmes; that was not a reference to Sherlock, at least not explicitly, but the borrowed pseudonym of murderer, Herman Mudgett—who, incidentally, was the subject of the recent The  Devil in the White City.)

Rocket to the Morgue is interesting in a number of ways.  It gave some clues to Boucher’s interest in Forteana—indeed, it is a very Fortean book.  It also gave a glimpse of the science fictioneers at work during the late 1930s.  (It was published in 1942 and set in 1941.)  It is self-referential: one of the characters is Anthony Boucher, another member of the Society, and his wife.  The book also recasts the Sherlock Homes mythos into the world of weird fiction and science fiction tales.  It is set in a world where science fiction was given a huge lift by author Fowler Foulkes, who created the character Dr. Derringer.  Derringer did for science fiction what Holmes did for mysteries—made them possible, was the epitome of the genre, was so believable that he almost seemed to be alive and, indeed, seemed to come to life in the course of the mystery.  At the time the story took place, Fowler Foulkes had died and his literary empire was being run by his son, Hilary.  Writing about the all the ways that Hilary frustrated those who hoped to adapt Derringer to different media or to continue his exploits in new stories gave Boucher a chance to comment on the manager of the Holmes character, Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Sir Arthur, who also jealously protected his father’s legacy and often confounded the plans of fans who wanted to use Sherlock Holmes in new ways.

Boucher’s most famous intervention into the world of weird tales, though, was as co-editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Originally conceived as only a fantasy magazine, FSF, as the cognoscenti knew it, became the successor to John W. Campbell’s Astounding—even as that magazine continued publishing.  It can be arguably said to be the standard-bearer of science fiction magazines during the 1950s, and certainly so of the fantasy—or weird—tale, with Weird Tales itself ceasing publication in the middle 1950s, after years of decline.  The magazine published a couple of Bay Area Forteans, Garen Drussai and Miriam Alan de Ford (who published an article on Fort).  Toward the end of his life, Clark Ashton Smith had George Haas facilitate correspondence with Boucher; Smith was having trouble finding new markets for his work, and hoped Boucher could help.  (Apparently, he couldn’t.)  Other Fortean inflected stories also appeared here.

Boucher edited The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction until 1958.  He stayed active in the field—and in mystery—up to his death from lung cancer on 29 April 1968.

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.