Don and Deedee Lemon on the far right, ca. 1940s. The very model of a Fortean science fiction fan.
Carlos Roy Lavender was born 23 October 1919 in Delaware County, Ohio, making him among the youngest of the early Forteans. His father was Hosea Lavender, son of Ohio parents, and a farmer. His mother was Margaret “Grace” Evans, daughter of Isaac Evans and Clara Trout. Isaac emigrated from Wales, married the Pennsylvania-born Clara, and settled in Ohio. The Christian names suggest a close connection t the church, but this is just supposition. Also supposition: that Roy’s seldom-used first name was in honor of his maternal grandmother. I do not know when Hosea and Grace were married, but it was no later than June 1917—Hosea’s draft card listed Grace as his wife. For whatever reason he was not drafted. Roy was there only child.
The 1920 census had the family in Radnor Township; the 1930 in Troy Township, both in Delaware County. These are about ninety miles apart, Radnor in the orbit of Columbus, Troy a satellite of Toledo. In 1940, the family lived in Delaware Township, some 70 miles southwest of Troy, across the state border from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Isaac died in 1940 and Clara moved in with her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. At the time, Roy was in school, presumably finishing up high school He did eventually attend and graduate from college, but I do not know what seat of higher education.
Carlos Roy Lavender was born 23 October 1919 in Delaware County, Ohio, making him among the youngest of the early Forteans. His father was Hosea Lavender, son of Ohio parents, and a farmer. His mother was Margaret “Grace” Evans, daughter of Isaac Evans and Clara Trout. Isaac emigrated from Wales, married the Pennsylvania-born Clara, and settled in Ohio. The Christian names suggest a close connection t the church, but this is just supposition. Also supposition: that Roy’s seldom-used first name was in honor of his maternal grandmother. I do not know when Hosea and Grace were married, but it was no later than June 1917—Hosea’s draft card listed Grace as his wife. For whatever reason he was not drafted. Roy was there only child.
The 1920 census had the family in Radnor Township; the 1930 in Troy Township, both in Delaware County. These are about ninety miles apart, Radnor in the orbit of Columbus, Troy a satellite of Toledo. In 1940, the family lived in Delaware Township, some 70 miles southwest of Troy, across the state border from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Isaac died in 1940 and Clara moved in with her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. At the time, Roy was in school, presumably finishing up high school He did eventually attend and graduate from college, but I do not know what seat of higher education.
Don and Deedee, 1983. As a boy, Lavender developed an interest in science fiction, though he had trouble getting his hands on it—apparently, money was tight. As he remembered it, Lavender would go into town and root through the garbage behind the Allen Hotel for thrown away science fiction magazines—they were literally disposable, literally trash. This must have been when the family was still in Radnor, which was near the Allen hotel, meaning that Lavender was less than ten. John Cheng, the science fiction historian, recounts that Lavender’s mother was livid at seeing him with garbage literature, but his grandmother—Clara, clearly—calmed her down. Lavender took to sneaking the magazines back home under his shirt, but their cheap print gave him away: “My secret was revealed when I stripped for my Saturday night bath in a wash tub in the middle of the kitchen floor. The bright light of the Aladin [sic] Ray-O kerosene lamp revealed all and I caught it again.”
By the time he was in college, Lavender was committed to science fiction fandom; he found a group in Fort Wayne, and made friends with Ted Dikty and Martin Greenberg. A large part of Lavender’s interest in science fiction seems to have stemmed from his love of gadgets, engineering, technology, and the possible futures they promised. He studied engineering at school and may have also been a pilot for a short time. As Cheng writes,
“Experience within science fiction offered an outlook on science and its practice beyond formal theory and professional standards. ‘Fortunately, my own career stayed on the leading edge of technology,’ Roy Lavender remembered in an autobiographical essay. An avid young reader of science fiction in the 1930s, he attended college, graduating with an engineering degree, and after a stint in the military and a few various jobs found long-term employment int he burgeoning post-World War II aerospace industry. Over the course of several decades at North American Aviation, he worked first on a variety of military aircraft projects in Ohio and then transferred to its West Coast facilities to work on the Apollo and, later, satellite projects. ‘It [was] a wonderful world for a science fiction fan who loves to design gadgets,’ he recalled, recollecting several personal triumphs. ‘When the Apollo circled the Moon and the astronauts reached into B-3 locker for their cameras,’ he noted, ‘they pulled them from the shock absorbing sheath I designed. On the test stand for the Saturn rockets, cameras look up into the flame to photograph the performance (or failure) of the engines. They survive in a protective box I designed.’
“While he made a career in aerospace, Lavender declared that science fiction fandom ‘is my way of life.’ He and his wife, Deedee, raised a family but also participated in local fan groups where they lived and organized and attended science fiction conventions, particularly favoring Midwestcon, which was oriented more toward fans than professionals. ‘It is my family picnic,’ he explained. Lavender also looked for fellow fans, observing the, in a variety of fields. ‘Every astronaut we worked with,’ he noted, ‘was also a science fiction reader, if not a fan.’ Science fiction, moreover, was more than entertaining adventure. It also provided perspective on politics, priorities and their impact on the industry in which he worked and the world in which he lived. ‘When you’ve watched galactic empires fall,’ Lavender said, ‘you can take a longer view on local politics.’ Science fiction fans are ‘aware of the world that could be,’ he explained. ‘Changes do not panic them.’”
Some time before 9 December 1943, he married Vira Dee Ellis, who went by the nickname Deedee, daughter of a Missouri farming family. She was four years his senior, and lost her father when still relatively young, suggesting her life was probably not an easy one. The latest date is set by his World War II service: he enlisted on that December day and on his draft card wrote that he was married. That was likely the year that his grandmother Clara died, as well. In 1944, Deedee bore their first child, Roy, Jr. Their second, Lois, was born in 1945. I’m not sure what he did for the war—presumably he used his engineering experience, having completed three years of college by the time he enlisted—but was not always excited by it. In late 1948, he grumped to Eric Frank Russell, “Perhaps it is the setting the makes me thus overcritical. I am writing this while at work, and nothing looks good from the windows of a munitions factory.”
As the letter to Russell indicated, Lavender remained committed to science fiction—indeed, he would remain so committed throughout his life. He had first written to Russell in 1940, or thereabouts. He had joined the club in Fort Wayne. He became close with fan Don Ford and writer Charles R. Tanner. In 1949, he organized the Cinvention, a science fiction convention in Cincinnati, where the science fiction publisher Lloyd Eschbach recruited Lavender and fellow Fortean Stan Skirvin to suggest stories for a collection of Russell’s short stories. Lavender had already been lightly badgering Russell for a bibliography of his works, just so he could read them, and now he had an even better reason to get one from him. Eschbach did put out a collection of Russell’s short stories—Deep Space—in 1956, and presumably it was at least partially based on Lavender’s input. Lavender also knew the young science fiction fan and writer, Harlan Ellison, and those two shared an acquaintance with Al Wilson, a Fortean and thorn in the side of Tiffany Thayer and Russell both: he had odd ideas and worried them worse than a dog with a bone. For a time in the early 1950s, he and Deedee put out newsletters tangentially connected to the National Fantasy Fan Federation.
Lavender and his family were in Columbus, according to city directories, as late as 1953, and Dayton 1955. Some time after that they left for California, living first in a motel in Downey before settling in Long Beach and continuing his work with the aerospace industry. Deedee and Roy also both remained committed fans—although Deedee preferred fantasy and mysteries to science fiction—and Roy joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, most closely connected with super-fan Forest Ackerman, and home to a number of Forteans. As with many others, Lavender found the LASFS too chatty, too social, and so joined a break off group, called “The Petards,” which was more dedicated to reading and talking about science fiction stories. Apparently, Lavender was also a great fan of jazz, and collected deeply in that genre of music just as he did in the literary genres of science fiction and, to a lesser extent, fantasy.
I do not have very much information on Lavender’s later life. His father died after he had moved to California, in 1962. He continued to work for the aerospace industry, and put out his own newsletters; I have seen no copies of them, but reportedly they dwelt on both science fiction and science fact. Lois also joined science fiction fandom and became engaged to another fan, Ron Ellik, who died before their wedding. Roy Jr. served in Vietnam and had cursory connections to fandom. Lavender’s mother, Grace, died in 1980. He continued with his science fiction fandom, offering his reminisces to a younger generation, and sending insultingly humorous birthday cards to fellow fans. (There exists some correspondence between Lavender and Nelson Bond, science fiction writer and Fortean, from the 1990s, in Bond’s papers, at Marshal University.) Vira died in 1986, “leaving Roy all alone,” Harlan Ellison wrote in Hard Candy.
Carlos Roy Lavender passed away 17 June 2007.
As with so may Forteans, it is not possible—given the available information—to date Lavender’s first acquaintance with Charles Fort. Given his reading habits, likely he came across the name in the science fiction pulps. Astounding, which he was known to read in the 1940s, at least, serialized Lo! in the 1930s, when Lavender was in his early teens, and that might have been his first exposure. He came to the Fortean Society itself in the very late 1930s or early 1940s. The first correspondence between Lavender, then about twenty, and Eric Frank Russell, then in his mid 1930s, is lost, but references in later letters dates the communications to this period. It is tempting to think that Lavender wrote to Russell about his explicitly Fortean novel, “Sinister Barrier,” which was published by Astounding’s editor, John Campbell, in his new fantasy magazine, Unknown. That is only speculation, though.
Whatever prompted the correspondence, Russell turned Lavender on to Tiffany Thayer and the Fortean Society, which Lavender thanks him for in the earliest extant letter between the two, dated 8 December 1947: “It’s been a long time since I first wrote to you. About seven years, I believe. Nevertheless I wish to thank you for putting me in touch with the Fortean Society and Tiffany Thayer.” Lavender would remain active in the Society into the 1950s—he was not one of the many Forteans from the forties who dropped out as the decade changed. Rather, his declining contribution is timed fairly well with his move to California. There is evidence, however, that his interest in Doubt—if not Forteana—continued through the demise of the Society in 1959. All told, his name appeared in the magazine 8 times between 1947 and 1954, marking him as a consistent if not frequent contributor. No surprise, given his job, his family, and his role in science fiction fandom.
There is just enough material, between his contributions to Doubt and his correspondence with Russell, to limn his Fortean interests, though not to give a full accounting. It seems very clear that for him Forteanism was not an antagonist of science, but a complement, the way that science fiction deepened his thinking about science fact. Indeed, at least in the forties, he seems to have seen Forteanism, science fiction, and science fact all working together. There may also have been a political aspect to his Forteanism, although the evidence for this is much skimpier, based as it is a few comments in letters to Russell.
As Cheng suggested in his evaluation, Lavender brought a science fictional imagination to his work in a science-based industry. That imagination was deepened—or given a new dimension, I’m not sure of the best metaphor here—in his encounter with Russell and, through him, Fort—or, at least, Russell’s understanding of Fort. In that first (extant) letter, Lavender wrote that reading Doubt “has given me to think and has more than doubled my pleasure and understanding in reading such stories as your Metamorphosite, the Timid Tiger, and especially Hobbyist.” The first of these, Metamorphosite (published in 1946—I have not read it) dealt with the ultimate evolution of humans into being of pure energy, under the guiding hand of aliens, a familiar enough trope before and after its publication, but the alien control give its the Fortean edge; Timid Tiger (1947) I have not read nor seen discussed, so cannot comment upon; Hobbyist (also 1947, also unread by me) concerns a human who finds his way to meeting an alien god—thus, again, the idea that humans might be property. It is worth noting that Timid Tiger was included in “Deep Space,” which Lavender may have helped to select.
Lavender’s first contribution to Doubt shows how he was linking Forteanism to science, making them adjuncts rather than adversaries. This came in Doubt 17 (March 1947) under the mis-spelled heading “Lavendar Writes.” The prominence suggests that Russell may have put in a good word to Thayer about his correspondent. The column stats with a long quotation from the “American Journal of Physics”—the very embodiment of scientific orthodoxy:
“The bad temper which the theologian attributes to original sin, the chemist may attribute to calcium deficiency, and each be unaware that his explanation is the consequence of his specialized study. . . . No single subject can therefore form an adequate basis for philosophy or be in itself a satisfactory guide to conduct . . . The real danger of specialization is not so much an ignorance of other branches as a failure to be conscious of this ignorance . . . Science is today uprooting faith without planting anything more suitable in its place, though science itself is not devoid of inspiration. Yet the urge to seek truth is what leads science forward. Those who are responsible for the examination of religious beliefs are not always sensitive to this urge. But so long as there are churches there will be creeds; and so long as their are creeds there will be obstruction. Any religious system which so binds itself by formal creeds that it cannot embrace newly discovered truths stands self condemned.”
To this, Lavender appended: “Sounds to me like Forteans fill the bill.” Which is to say that Forteans were to help scientists, to accept scientific pronunciamentos as truth, but to remind scientists that there was still more to know: that the universe and its ten-thousand things had not yet all been named. This position was similar to other Forteans with a scientific bent, such as Maynard Shipley, who saw Fort as providing masses of new data that didn’t undo scientific theories but that was supposed to spur scientists on to further investigation. In that light, the conclusion of his first (extant) letter to Russell is revealing. He wanted more Forteanism—more unexplained things—to think over: “In search of still more such pleasant reading I would like to know (1) if there is an English version of Doubt, (2) if you know of any magazine being published in English similar to the prewar Unknown, and (3) if you are contributing regularly to any publication other than Astounding Science Fiction.” Just as he would later say that science fiction prepared him, as a scientist, to accept change, so did Forteanism prepare him to accept that the world was bigger than he knew—but was still explicable. (This last bit—that the world is explicable—may be too stark a reading of Lavender; he very well may have held that some phenomena will always remain beyond the ken of science. Yet it seems almost certain that he expected science to explain some Fortean anomalies.)
Almost all the useful references to Lavender in the pages of Doubt support this understanding of his Forteanism. There were, of course, many un-useful ones, as in the 1950s Thayer took to lumping all of his contributors into a single paragraph of gratitude, without tying them to particular clippings, making it impossible to know what material any one person sent in. But the mentions in Doubt of Lavender that are traceable reveal a consistent pattern: all of these referred either to flying saucers or to mysterious falls. These two subjects seemed particularly amenable to scientific analysis. As the case of Waldo Lee McAtee shows, scientists were indeed working on the subject of falls, even after Bergen Evans tried to make it disreputable. (Indeed, Lavender was among those to send in the report from Marksville, Louisiana, in 1947, which so impressed later investigators of the phenomenon.) That actual scientists were looking into flying saucers showed that it, too, was a possible area of scientific development (even as Theosophically-inclined mystics had very different interpretations of the aerial phenomena).
Lavender’s potential political kinship with the Fortean Society derives from even sketchier evidence. He wrote to Russell again in November 1948, this time in reaction to Russell’s sequel to Sinister Barrier, Dreadful Sanctuary, then appearing in Astounding as a serial. He enjoyed the first two installments but thought the third was very weak, and wondered why. In particular, he praised the characters as “good strong individuals” but wished that Russell would some time write about an introvert. Perhaps hoping to find such a story, he asked him again for a list of his writing. A month later, Lavender responded to an unsaved letter by Russell, thanking him for pointing to the stories he had published in Weird Tales (Lavender had stopped reading that magazine—it’s covers may have been too erotic to sneak pass his mom back in the day), and nodding knowingly that it had been editorial mangling that ruined the third installment. Lavender, along with his friends Charlie Tanner and Don Ford had come to the conclusion that John Campbell, editor of Astounding, had lost his golden touch and the magazine was going the way of Amazing Stories—which had turned off many science fiction fans with its adoption of the paranormal stories of Lemuria, Deros, and Teros, known as the Shaver Mystery. (Lavender now favored “Wonder Stories,” presumably meaning “Thrilling Wonder Stories,” which was being edited by Sam Merwin. Both Merwin and Campbell had affection for Fort, though of different varieties.) He wrote, “You last letter was indeed most interesting, confirming as it did our meanest suspicion about Campbell’s blue pencil tactics. (Our means Charlie Tanner, Don Ford and myself). Have we permission to declare a postal war on Campbell, via fan letters? We will not quote you without permission. We will refrain from any mention you feel will cause you any inconvenience.”
In the same letter, Lavender again asked if Russell would do a story on an introvert, and then offered him the very plot idea that he had tried to write up himself, but failed, making it sound too much like a high school theme paper. The story he suggested doesn’t sound, to me, as though it has much to do with introversion or extroversion—but there is a clear political message. The story would be set in a society where there was only one law: mind your own business. “To my notion that covers all the human rights and by implication, every other law I can think of right off hand. The most immediate implication is that gossip is the worst crime. I’ll let that stand. The next most obvious ramification would seem to be that the most important ‘right’ is the right of physical and mental privacy. One of the other implications is that indecency is a state of mind existing in the accuser.” Lavender saw the story as a contest between two groups—with a single individual in the middle—the old-time religionists who held up the Bible as inerrant and the progressives, who now took the Kinsey Report as holy writ—presumably thus accepting the wide variety of sexuality as a natural part of the human experience and not to be condemned.
The story seems silly, but the political ideas were resonant with those common in the Fortean Society—there was within them a kind of libertarianism, or anarchism. It wasn’t as explicitly left-leaning as many Forteans (to be sure, there were right-leaning libertarians in the Society, too), what with its focus on negative liberty. It contrasts even with McAtee’s idea that the whole of the law can be summed up in the Golden Rule, which is more active—helping others, not just staying away from them. (Perhaps that is what Lavender meant by an introvert: someone who didn’t want to be talked to.) It did fit with a large plurality of Forteans, though, who were upset at the growing power of the state, of businesses, and the military to define human life and human individuality. (I do not know if Lavender ever recognized the disjunction between his ideals and the fact that he worked for the military-industrial complex.) This vision of politics stood in contrast to Campbell’s, which was much more progressive and tolerant of the state, which may, indeed, be one of the reasons that Lavender liked Astounding less and less.
That libertarianism might have been something attracting Lavender to the Fortean Society is implied in another small remark from his correspondence with Russell. After complaining about the third installment of “Dreadful Sanctuary,” he mused that it might have read differently if it had been published “by the Old Wine Press.” Old Wine Press had been established in 1932 by none other than Tiffany Thayer, and was still active in the late 1940s, putting out some of his more obscure work. The story was based around the Fortean conceit that earth is an insane asylum, kept segregated from the rest of the solar system. In the third section, the secret group in control of the the conspiracy is exposed—anti-climactic, given what came before, according to the Fortean science fiction writer and critic Anthony Boucher. Much later versions would have a tragic conclusion, though it is not clear to me whether the later change was at Russell’s discretion or not. At any rate, Lavender’s note indicates that he had been in correspondence with Thayer and that the two had shared some ideas about the political situation, one that was dyspeptic compared to the Campbell’s optimism. Likely, they agreed, at least in part, that the problem was the state and its various bureaucracies, making everyone insane. That Lavender liked Thayer is also indicated by his inviting the Secretary of the Fortean Society to the Cinvention—albeit an invitation that was sent to every author of a science fiction story in English for which he and Deedee could find an address. (Thayer did not go.)
All of which is not to say that Lavender was simpatico with everything brought out in Doubt. How could he be, if indeed he saw Forteanism and science as helpmates, not enemies? He mentioned this dissent briefly in his first (extant) letter to Russell, although with good humor. After all, he was of the mind that opinions of all stripes should be erred, without regard for censors, editors, or those of delicate sensibility. “I’ve received many a good laugh reading Doubt (including a few at my own expense),” he said. And clearly Lavender continued to enjoy Thayer’s sense of humor—maybe, too, his sense of politics—if not his scientific views, even after his move to California and ending his contributions. (To be fair, he may have continued to send in material, and Thayer may just have chosen not to use it.) In an undated letter—the last in their correspondence—sent probably sometime in the very late 1950s or 1960s, Lavender wrote to Russell:
“Dear Eric:
Does the Fortean Society continue in any form but memory?
Yours,
Roy Lavender.”
No, no it did not continue, at that time, in any form but memory. Still, Lavender held on. In the late 1960s, as he prepared a biography of Charles Fort, the science fiction author Damon Knight was hunting down a complete run of Doubt. He contacted Forest Ackerman, who knew everybody and seemed to keep everything. Even Forry didn’t have a run of Doubt. But he knew someone who did. Roy Lavender had a bound set.
By the time he was in college, Lavender was committed to science fiction fandom; he found a group in Fort Wayne, and made friends with Ted Dikty and Martin Greenberg. A large part of Lavender’s interest in science fiction seems to have stemmed from his love of gadgets, engineering, technology, and the possible futures they promised. He studied engineering at school and may have also been a pilot for a short time. As Cheng writes,
“Experience within science fiction offered an outlook on science and its practice beyond formal theory and professional standards. ‘Fortunately, my own career stayed on the leading edge of technology,’ Roy Lavender remembered in an autobiographical essay. An avid young reader of science fiction in the 1930s, he attended college, graduating with an engineering degree, and after a stint in the military and a few various jobs found long-term employment int he burgeoning post-World War II aerospace industry. Over the course of several decades at North American Aviation, he worked first on a variety of military aircraft projects in Ohio and then transferred to its West Coast facilities to work on the Apollo and, later, satellite projects. ‘It [was] a wonderful world for a science fiction fan who loves to design gadgets,’ he recalled, recollecting several personal triumphs. ‘When the Apollo circled the Moon and the astronauts reached into B-3 locker for their cameras,’ he noted, ‘they pulled them from the shock absorbing sheath I designed. On the test stand for the Saturn rockets, cameras look up into the flame to photograph the performance (or failure) of the engines. They survive in a protective box I designed.’
“While he made a career in aerospace, Lavender declared that science fiction fandom ‘is my way of life.’ He and his wife, Deedee, raised a family but also participated in local fan groups where they lived and organized and attended science fiction conventions, particularly favoring Midwestcon, which was oriented more toward fans than professionals. ‘It is my family picnic,’ he explained. Lavender also looked for fellow fans, observing the, in a variety of fields. ‘Every astronaut we worked with,’ he noted, ‘was also a science fiction reader, if not a fan.’ Science fiction, moreover, was more than entertaining adventure. It also provided perspective on politics, priorities and their impact on the industry in which he worked and the world in which he lived. ‘When you’ve watched galactic empires fall,’ Lavender said, ‘you can take a longer view on local politics.’ Science fiction fans are ‘aware of the world that could be,’ he explained. ‘Changes do not panic them.’”
Some time before 9 December 1943, he married Vira Dee Ellis, who went by the nickname Deedee, daughter of a Missouri farming family. She was four years his senior, and lost her father when still relatively young, suggesting her life was probably not an easy one. The latest date is set by his World War II service: he enlisted on that December day and on his draft card wrote that he was married. That was likely the year that his grandmother Clara died, as well. In 1944, Deedee bore their first child, Roy, Jr. Their second, Lois, was born in 1945. I’m not sure what he did for the war—presumably he used his engineering experience, having completed three years of college by the time he enlisted—but was not always excited by it. In late 1948, he grumped to Eric Frank Russell, “Perhaps it is the setting the makes me thus overcritical. I am writing this while at work, and nothing looks good from the windows of a munitions factory.”
As the letter to Russell indicated, Lavender remained committed to science fiction—indeed, he would remain so committed throughout his life. He had first written to Russell in 1940, or thereabouts. He had joined the club in Fort Wayne. He became close with fan Don Ford and writer Charles R. Tanner. In 1949, he organized the Cinvention, a science fiction convention in Cincinnati, where the science fiction publisher Lloyd Eschbach recruited Lavender and fellow Fortean Stan Skirvin to suggest stories for a collection of Russell’s short stories. Lavender had already been lightly badgering Russell for a bibliography of his works, just so he could read them, and now he had an even better reason to get one from him. Eschbach did put out a collection of Russell’s short stories—Deep Space—in 1956, and presumably it was at least partially based on Lavender’s input. Lavender also knew the young science fiction fan and writer, Harlan Ellison, and those two shared an acquaintance with Al Wilson, a Fortean and thorn in the side of Tiffany Thayer and Russell both: he had odd ideas and worried them worse than a dog with a bone. For a time in the early 1950s, he and Deedee put out newsletters tangentially connected to the National Fantasy Fan Federation.
Lavender and his family were in Columbus, according to city directories, as late as 1953, and Dayton 1955. Some time after that they left for California, living first in a motel in Downey before settling in Long Beach and continuing his work with the aerospace industry. Deedee and Roy also both remained committed fans—although Deedee preferred fantasy and mysteries to science fiction—and Roy joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, most closely connected with super-fan Forest Ackerman, and home to a number of Forteans. As with many others, Lavender found the LASFS too chatty, too social, and so joined a break off group, called “The Petards,” which was more dedicated to reading and talking about science fiction stories. Apparently, Lavender was also a great fan of jazz, and collected deeply in that genre of music just as he did in the literary genres of science fiction and, to a lesser extent, fantasy.
I do not have very much information on Lavender’s later life. His father died after he had moved to California, in 1962. He continued to work for the aerospace industry, and put out his own newsletters; I have seen no copies of them, but reportedly they dwelt on both science fiction and science fact. Lois also joined science fiction fandom and became engaged to another fan, Ron Ellik, who died before their wedding. Roy Jr. served in Vietnam and had cursory connections to fandom. Lavender’s mother, Grace, died in 1980. He continued with his science fiction fandom, offering his reminisces to a younger generation, and sending insultingly humorous birthday cards to fellow fans. (There exists some correspondence between Lavender and Nelson Bond, science fiction writer and Fortean, from the 1990s, in Bond’s papers, at Marshal University.) Vira died in 1986, “leaving Roy all alone,” Harlan Ellison wrote in Hard Candy.
Carlos Roy Lavender passed away 17 June 2007.
As with so may Forteans, it is not possible—given the available information—to date Lavender’s first acquaintance with Charles Fort. Given his reading habits, likely he came across the name in the science fiction pulps. Astounding, which he was known to read in the 1940s, at least, serialized Lo! in the 1930s, when Lavender was in his early teens, and that might have been his first exposure. He came to the Fortean Society itself in the very late 1930s or early 1940s. The first correspondence between Lavender, then about twenty, and Eric Frank Russell, then in his mid 1930s, is lost, but references in later letters dates the communications to this period. It is tempting to think that Lavender wrote to Russell about his explicitly Fortean novel, “Sinister Barrier,” which was published by Astounding’s editor, John Campbell, in his new fantasy magazine, Unknown. That is only speculation, though.
Whatever prompted the correspondence, Russell turned Lavender on to Tiffany Thayer and the Fortean Society, which Lavender thanks him for in the earliest extant letter between the two, dated 8 December 1947: “It’s been a long time since I first wrote to you. About seven years, I believe. Nevertheless I wish to thank you for putting me in touch with the Fortean Society and Tiffany Thayer.” Lavender would remain active in the Society into the 1950s—he was not one of the many Forteans from the forties who dropped out as the decade changed. Rather, his declining contribution is timed fairly well with his move to California. There is evidence, however, that his interest in Doubt—if not Forteana—continued through the demise of the Society in 1959. All told, his name appeared in the magazine 8 times between 1947 and 1954, marking him as a consistent if not frequent contributor. No surprise, given his job, his family, and his role in science fiction fandom.
There is just enough material, between his contributions to Doubt and his correspondence with Russell, to limn his Fortean interests, though not to give a full accounting. It seems very clear that for him Forteanism was not an antagonist of science, but a complement, the way that science fiction deepened his thinking about science fact. Indeed, at least in the forties, he seems to have seen Forteanism, science fiction, and science fact all working together. There may also have been a political aspect to his Forteanism, although the evidence for this is much skimpier, based as it is a few comments in letters to Russell.
As Cheng suggested in his evaluation, Lavender brought a science fictional imagination to his work in a science-based industry. That imagination was deepened—or given a new dimension, I’m not sure of the best metaphor here—in his encounter with Russell and, through him, Fort—or, at least, Russell’s understanding of Fort. In that first (extant) letter, Lavender wrote that reading Doubt “has given me to think and has more than doubled my pleasure and understanding in reading such stories as your Metamorphosite, the Timid Tiger, and especially Hobbyist.” The first of these, Metamorphosite (published in 1946—I have not read it) dealt with the ultimate evolution of humans into being of pure energy, under the guiding hand of aliens, a familiar enough trope before and after its publication, but the alien control give its the Fortean edge; Timid Tiger (1947) I have not read nor seen discussed, so cannot comment upon; Hobbyist (also 1947, also unread by me) concerns a human who finds his way to meeting an alien god—thus, again, the idea that humans might be property. It is worth noting that Timid Tiger was included in “Deep Space,” which Lavender may have helped to select.
Lavender’s first contribution to Doubt shows how he was linking Forteanism to science, making them adjuncts rather than adversaries. This came in Doubt 17 (March 1947) under the mis-spelled heading “Lavendar Writes.” The prominence suggests that Russell may have put in a good word to Thayer about his correspondent. The column stats with a long quotation from the “American Journal of Physics”—the very embodiment of scientific orthodoxy:
“The bad temper which the theologian attributes to original sin, the chemist may attribute to calcium deficiency, and each be unaware that his explanation is the consequence of his specialized study. . . . No single subject can therefore form an adequate basis for philosophy or be in itself a satisfactory guide to conduct . . . The real danger of specialization is not so much an ignorance of other branches as a failure to be conscious of this ignorance . . . Science is today uprooting faith without planting anything more suitable in its place, though science itself is not devoid of inspiration. Yet the urge to seek truth is what leads science forward. Those who are responsible for the examination of religious beliefs are not always sensitive to this urge. But so long as there are churches there will be creeds; and so long as their are creeds there will be obstruction. Any religious system which so binds itself by formal creeds that it cannot embrace newly discovered truths stands self condemned.”
To this, Lavender appended: “Sounds to me like Forteans fill the bill.” Which is to say that Forteans were to help scientists, to accept scientific pronunciamentos as truth, but to remind scientists that there was still more to know: that the universe and its ten-thousand things had not yet all been named. This position was similar to other Forteans with a scientific bent, such as Maynard Shipley, who saw Fort as providing masses of new data that didn’t undo scientific theories but that was supposed to spur scientists on to further investigation. In that light, the conclusion of his first (extant) letter to Russell is revealing. He wanted more Forteanism—more unexplained things—to think over: “In search of still more such pleasant reading I would like to know (1) if there is an English version of Doubt, (2) if you know of any magazine being published in English similar to the prewar Unknown, and (3) if you are contributing regularly to any publication other than Astounding Science Fiction.” Just as he would later say that science fiction prepared him, as a scientist, to accept change, so did Forteanism prepare him to accept that the world was bigger than he knew—but was still explicable. (This last bit—that the world is explicable—may be too stark a reading of Lavender; he very well may have held that some phenomena will always remain beyond the ken of science. Yet it seems almost certain that he expected science to explain some Fortean anomalies.)
Almost all the useful references to Lavender in the pages of Doubt support this understanding of his Forteanism. There were, of course, many un-useful ones, as in the 1950s Thayer took to lumping all of his contributors into a single paragraph of gratitude, without tying them to particular clippings, making it impossible to know what material any one person sent in. But the mentions in Doubt of Lavender that are traceable reveal a consistent pattern: all of these referred either to flying saucers or to mysterious falls. These two subjects seemed particularly amenable to scientific analysis. As the case of Waldo Lee McAtee shows, scientists were indeed working on the subject of falls, even after Bergen Evans tried to make it disreputable. (Indeed, Lavender was among those to send in the report from Marksville, Louisiana, in 1947, which so impressed later investigators of the phenomenon.) That actual scientists were looking into flying saucers showed that it, too, was a possible area of scientific development (even as Theosophically-inclined mystics had very different interpretations of the aerial phenomena).
Lavender’s potential political kinship with the Fortean Society derives from even sketchier evidence. He wrote to Russell again in November 1948, this time in reaction to Russell’s sequel to Sinister Barrier, Dreadful Sanctuary, then appearing in Astounding as a serial. He enjoyed the first two installments but thought the third was very weak, and wondered why. In particular, he praised the characters as “good strong individuals” but wished that Russell would some time write about an introvert. Perhaps hoping to find such a story, he asked him again for a list of his writing. A month later, Lavender responded to an unsaved letter by Russell, thanking him for pointing to the stories he had published in Weird Tales (Lavender had stopped reading that magazine—it’s covers may have been too erotic to sneak pass his mom back in the day), and nodding knowingly that it had been editorial mangling that ruined the third installment. Lavender, along with his friends Charlie Tanner and Don Ford had come to the conclusion that John Campbell, editor of Astounding, had lost his golden touch and the magazine was going the way of Amazing Stories—which had turned off many science fiction fans with its adoption of the paranormal stories of Lemuria, Deros, and Teros, known as the Shaver Mystery. (Lavender now favored “Wonder Stories,” presumably meaning “Thrilling Wonder Stories,” which was being edited by Sam Merwin. Both Merwin and Campbell had affection for Fort, though of different varieties.) He wrote, “You last letter was indeed most interesting, confirming as it did our meanest suspicion about Campbell’s blue pencil tactics. (Our means Charlie Tanner, Don Ford and myself). Have we permission to declare a postal war on Campbell, via fan letters? We will not quote you without permission. We will refrain from any mention you feel will cause you any inconvenience.”
In the same letter, Lavender again asked if Russell would do a story on an introvert, and then offered him the very plot idea that he had tried to write up himself, but failed, making it sound too much like a high school theme paper. The story he suggested doesn’t sound, to me, as though it has much to do with introversion or extroversion—but there is a clear political message. The story would be set in a society where there was only one law: mind your own business. “To my notion that covers all the human rights and by implication, every other law I can think of right off hand. The most immediate implication is that gossip is the worst crime. I’ll let that stand. The next most obvious ramification would seem to be that the most important ‘right’ is the right of physical and mental privacy. One of the other implications is that indecency is a state of mind existing in the accuser.” Lavender saw the story as a contest between two groups—with a single individual in the middle—the old-time religionists who held up the Bible as inerrant and the progressives, who now took the Kinsey Report as holy writ—presumably thus accepting the wide variety of sexuality as a natural part of the human experience and not to be condemned.
The story seems silly, but the political ideas were resonant with those common in the Fortean Society—there was within them a kind of libertarianism, or anarchism. It wasn’t as explicitly left-leaning as many Forteans (to be sure, there were right-leaning libertarians in the Society, too), what with its focus on negative liberty. It contrasts even with McAtee’s idea that the whole of the law can be summed up in the Golden Rule, which is more active—helping others, not just staying away from them. (Perhaps that is what Lavender meant by an introvert: someone who didn’t want to be talked to.) It did fit with a large plurality of Forteans, though, who were upset at the growing power of the state, of businesses, and the military to define human life and human individuality. (I do not know if Lavender ever recognized the disjunction between his ideals and the fact that he worked for the military-industrial complex.) This vision of politics stood in contrast to Campbell’s, which was much more progressive and tolerant of the state, which may, indeed, be one of the reasons that Lavender liked Astounding less and less.
That libertarianism might have been something attracting Lavender to the Fortean Society is implied in another small remark from his correspondence with Russell. After complaining about the third installment of “Dreadful Sanctuary,” he mused that it might have read differently if it had been published “by the Old Wine Press.” Old Wine Press had been established in 1932 by none other than Tiffany Thayer, and was still active in the late 1940s, putting out some of his more obscure work. The story was based around the Fortean conceit that earth is an insane asylum, kept segregated from the rest of the solar system. In the third section, the secret group in control of the the conspiracy is exposed—anti-climactic, given what came before, according to the Fortean science fiction writer and critic Anthony Boucher. Much later versions would have a tragic conclusion, though it is not clear to me whether the later change was at Russell’s discretion or not. At any rate, Lavender’s note indicates that he had been in correspondence with Thayer and that the two had shared some ideas about the political situation, one that was dyspeptic compared to the Campbell’s optimism. Likely, they agreed, at least in part, that the problem was the state and its various bureaucracies, making everyone insane. That Lavender liked Thayer is also indicated by his inviting the Secretary of the Fortean Society to the Cinvention—albeit an invitation that was sent to every author of a science fiction story in English for which he and Deedee could find an address. (Thayer did not go.)
All of which is not to say that Lavender was simpatico with everything brought out in Doubt. How could he be, if indeed he saw Forteanism and science as helpmates, not enemies? He mentioned this dissent briefly in his first (extant) letter to Russell, although with good humor. After all, he was of the mind that opinions of all stripes should be erred, without regard for censors, editors, or those of delicate sensibility. “I’ve received many a good laugh reading Doubt (including a few at my own expense),” he said. And clearly Lavender continued to enjoy Thayer’s sense of humor—maybe, too, his sense of politics—if not his scientific views, even after his move to California and ending his contributions. (To be fair, he may have continued to send in material, and Thayer may just have chosen not to use it.) In an undated letter—the last in their correspondence—sent probably sometime in the very late 1950s or 1960s, Lavender wrote to Russell:
“Dear Eric:
Does the Fortean Society continue in any form but memory?
Yours,
Roy Lavender.”
No, no it did not continue, at that time, in any form but memory. Still, Lavender held on. In the late 1960s, as he prepared a biography of Charles Fort, the science fiction author Damon Knight was hunting down a complete run of Doubt. He contacted Forest Ackerman, who knew everybody and seemed to keep everything. Even Forry didn’t have a run of Doubt. But he knew someone who did. Roy Lavender had a bound set.
