He was vast—he contained multitudes—and only one small part was Fortean.
Raymond Alfred Palmer was born 1 August 1910 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Roy Clarence and the former Helena Martha Anna Steber. He would later fetishize his birth year, suggesting that he had seen Haley’s comet while still in utero, though in his memory he was held by his grandmother and shown the comet out the window. It is tempting to suggest, though no doubt too pat, that Palmer’s nostalgia was a reaction to what was otherwise a difficult childhood in many ways. The elder Palmer was a skilled laborer. In 1911, the family added a baby girl. Palmer was famously beautiful as a youngster, honored on a milk carton as one of Milwaukee’s healthiest babies. A brother would follow, in 1918, by which time Ray was suffering much. (Another brother would be born around 1929.)
When he was seven, Ray was in an accident with a truck that badly damaged his spine. Operations would follow, pain, and a slow recovery that was never complete: he was left a hunchback and short, never growing more than about four feet tall. Amid his convalescence, Ray’s mother died; Ray resented his father, blaming him for slow medical treatment, for drinking too much and tomcatting around. Unable to go to school, Palmer—who had learned to read very young—escaped into books, and especially the newly developing genre of science fiction. By his own admission, Palmer was a fanciful child, and there is every reason to believe that the line, for him, between reality and imagination was incredibly thin; fantastic literature was a natural fit.
Raymond Alfred Palmer was born 1 August 1910 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Roy Clarence and the former Helena Martha Anna Steber. He would later fetishize his birth year, suggesting that he had seen Haley’s comet while still in utero, though in his memory he was held by his grandmother and shown the comet out the window. It is tempting to suggest, though no doubt too pat, that Palmer’s nostalgia was a reaction to what was otherwise a difficult childhood in many ways. The elder Palmer was a skilled laborer. In 1911, the family added a baby girl. Palmer was famously beautiful as a youngster, honored on a milk carton as one of Milwaukee’s healthiest babies. A brother would follow, in 1918, by which time Ray was suffering much. (Another brother would be born around 1929.)
When he was seven, Ray was in an accident with a truck that badly damaged his spine. Operations would follow, pain, and a slow recovery that was never complete: he was left a hunchback and short, never growing more than about four feet tall. Amid his convalescence, Ray’s mother died; Ray resented his father, blaming him for slow medical treatment, for drinking too much and tomcatting around. Unable to go to school, Palmer—who had learned to read very young—escaped into books, and especially the newly developing genre of science fiction. By his own admission, Palmer was a fanciful child, and there is every reason to believe that the line, for him, between reality and imagination was incredibly thin; fantastic literature was a natural fit.