Miriam Allen de Ford and Maynard Shipley discovered Charles Fort in 1921.  De Ford was at a library in Oakland, where she came across Fort’s The Book of the Damned.  It had been published two years before.   She flipped through the book, found it intriguing, and took it home to Shipley, in Sausalito.  “My husband and I sat up all night, reading the book aloud to each other, unable to put it down,” she wrote later.

What was the attraction?

Shipley was primarily drawn to the catalog of odd facts—he had little time for Fort’s theories, whether meant as jokes or not.  Although obviously a committed scientist, Shipley was open to expanding the known laws to account for unusual phenomena.  For instance, in 1919—the same year Fort published The Book of the Damned—he investigated Dr. Albert Abrams for The Scientific American.  Abrams was a San Francisco doctor who claimed amazing results with “electronic medicine.”  At first, Shipley—who de Ford admits several times was quite naïve—accepted Abrams findings.  Eventually, though, he concluded that the doctor was both a charlatan and a dupe.

In her biography of him, de Ford writes that he had several unusual experiences himself.  His house in Mill Valley, for instance, was haunted.  She said,

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In historian Kenneth Starr’s categorization, “Provincial” (or “High Provincial”) San Francisco preceded the “Baghdad by the Bay” image that evolved after World War II, but was never completely replaced by it.  By Provincial, Starr means to invoke San Francisco’s status as the capital of the West.  Provincial San Francisco is marked by certain professions: manufacturing, banking, law, insurance, shipping, government, and food processing.

Provincials are also particular about class stratifications—in a way that Bohemians and the later Baghdadders were not.  “All elites are obsessed with status,” Starr writes in Golden Dreams, “but in San Francisco—insecure, yet affluent and stylish—social maneuvering had long since become a blood sport.”

The pressure from Baghdadders and the post-World War II changes also turned Provincials attention to the past, as a place to affirm the city’s status and the class stratifications.  That did not mean provincials were opposed to change.  Indeed, it was the business elite that stood for the destruction of the Montgomery Block and its replacement with the Trans-America building and parking lots.  Bohemians were opposed to such changes—as well cross-town freeways and other modernizations.

In conjunction with Provincial values, authors developed a particular literary style, probably best embodied by Frank Norris, who was both fascinated and repelled by the City’s businesses and Bohemia.  This literature was characterized by naturalistic detail—Zola was an influence—that was alloyed with bits of the picturesque, whimsy, and the paranormal.

Shipley and de Ford clearly fit into this mold, with their socialism (as opposed to the anarchism of Rexroth and others) and concern with class stratification as well as their focus on the naturalistic (science), leavened with an openness toward the new and unexplained.

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De Ford and Shipley only stayed in the socialist party and San Francisco for a short time.  They moved out of the city in 1920 for Sausalito.  They left the Socialist Party in 1922, thinking it had moved too far right.  While never a member of the communist party, de Ford believed in revolution, not reformation.  After leaving the party, their activism slowed.  (It was also curtailed by Shipley’s heart attack that year.)  de Ford worked for the insurance company until 1923, when she was forced out because of her radical ties.  She had been doing journalism even as a claims adjuster, though, and she continued that, along with other odd jobs.  Shipley was lecturing.  They also found Haldemann and Julius’s Little Blue Books, and both wrote a number of volumes.  In 1924, their extra time became focused on the Science League, founded by Shipley to combat the spread of anti-evolutionist sentiment and laws.  They continued with that until 1932.

Shipley died in 1934.  De Ford grieved in Hawaii for a time, visited her family in the East, and then returned to San Francisco.  She continued to move from job to job and develop her writing.  De Ford had been writing detective fiction for the pulps since the 1920s and was very interested in crime writing.  She dabbled in true crime as well as writing about a number of leftist martyrs who had been wronged by the justice system.  In the late 1930s and early 1940s, inspired by having typed up so much of Shipley’s science material, she drifted into science fiction, mentored by Anthony Boucher.  By this point, she was living in one of the Provincial enclaves—the Ambassador Hotel—and writing full time.

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Maynard Shipley was born on 1 December 1872 in Baltimore, Maryland.  He was the fourth of six sons.  Elmon Shipley, the family’s patriarch, could trace his American ancestors back to seventeenth-century Maryland.  His mother, Sarah Armitage Jerome, came from a prominent Baltimore family.  In Miriam Allen de Ford’s biography of Shipley, she wrote Elmon was “about as bad a husband and father as can be imagined—a domestic tyrant, a philanderer, and a paragon of refined selfishness.”  Elmon made a good living and was religious for a time, but eventually moved into the wholesale liquor business, which had him out of church and becoming a free-thinker.  This last influenced Maynard greatly.  In 1887, Elmon deserted the family.

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San Francisco's connection to Forteanism preceded the San Francisco Renaissance and founding of the Fortean Scoiety.  What historian Kenneth Starr calls "Provincial" San Francisco had its Forteans, too--Miriam Allen de Ford and her husband Maynard Shipley.
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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.
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