​A pair of ????? Forteans.

So, here’s one of those examples of a common last name appearing once in the pages of Doubt. I really don’t know who it refers to—there’s just not enough information. But, there is a couple who were associated with the Fortean Society that had this exact same last name, and I’ll use the incident as an example to write about them. Although—reversing the usual happenstance—I am more confident about the woman of the pair than the man. He remains ?????.

Phe Laws was born Phyllis Mae Wyand 2 January 1925 in Kewanee, Illinois. Her father, Charles Eldon, was a glove cutter. Her mother, Fern Green (really) died when Phe and her baby sister, Sheila were still very young—five or less in Phe’s case. According to the 1930 census, Charles’s much older aunt lived with them, presumably to care for the girls. Charles was 28 at the time—a young widow—and Minnie 65. (Charles himself had been raised by his grandfather and Minnie—or at least lived with them in 1910.) The family was still in Kewanee in 1940, but had changed in many ways. Minnie was no loner there. Charles remarried, a woman some dozen years his junior. Phyllis and Sheila were in high school, a sophomore and freshman, respectively.

​Yet another mysterious Fortean.

This write-up is a revised and (slightly) updated version of a series of posts I first did back in 2009 (!) and 2010. It seems to be the un-cited source for much of the wikipedia entry on the man.

Robert Barbour Johnson was born on 19 August.  That much we can say with some certainty.  It's the date given on his application for a social security number and on his death certificate.  Beyond that, well, there's a range of possible answers.  His World War II enlistment card says 1905.  His application for social security says 1906. Obviously, there are incentives for making one's self older to get social security earlier. There are also incentives for making oneself younger and some suggestion Johnson relished the idea of being a wunderkind.  When his story "Far Below" was chosen as the best yarn ever published in Weird Tales, he was noted as one of the magazine's younger writer.  He said that he harassed his writer friends with that for month, pointing out that lots of people say they are young, but he had written proof.  His death certificate says 1907 (as does the SSDI).  His recollections for The Weird Tales Story suggests that he was born in 1909.  Edan Hughes's “Artists in California” has him born in that year as well.

​A marriage of Forteans—though the evidence suggests it was the husband who had the greater inclinations toward being a Fortean.

Sam Youd was born 16 April 1922 in Lancashire. (His last name rhymes with crowd, not rude.) His father, Samuel—different than his son’s name, which was just Sam—worked in a factory. His mother, Harriet, had a hard-luck life: she had been widowed three times (and had three children) by the time she gave birth to Sam. Harriet was the head cook at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Sam was the couple’s only child.

Youd attended Peter Symonds School (now College), in Winchester. When he was confirmed the the Church of England, he took the first name Christopher. Shortly after he finished school, he enlisted in the Royal Corps of Signals and was stationed in Gibraltar, North Africa, and Italy. In 1947, he married the Joyce Fairbairn. They would have five children, one son and four daughters. Immediately after the war, and just after his marriage, he tried to make a living on writing alone, but the few sales were not enough for material support and so he took a job doing publicity for the Diamond Corporation. The work was in contradiction to his personality, which was private and opposed to author’s acting as publicists for their own work. (That made them actors and actresses, he thought, not writers.)

​Enthusiastic—but slippery!—Forteans.

Note that this is an update, revision, and compilation of a series of posts I published several years ago.

There is some confusion about who Garen and Kirk Drussai even were.   I can be sure that Garen was born 17 June 1916 in the Bronx: all relevant documents confirm this.  But what was her name?  According to her death certificate and the birth certificate of her son, Garen’s maiden name was Lewis.  A search of the census records, however, fails to find any Garen Lewises—and Garen is an extremely uncommon name.  A clue to her identity can be found in her social security application. There she gives her name as Clara Hettler and her parents as Benjamin Hettler and Annie (Besner) Hettler.  The 1920 and 1930 census does record a family of Hettlers living in the Bronx, headed by Benjamin and Annie (Besner), with a daughter, Clara, born about 1916.

Clara Hettler filled out her social security application in December 1936.  It seems very possible that she changed her name in the late 1930s when Hettler—a variation of Hitler—would have been an inconvenient name to carry.  (It is also possible that she married in the 1930s and later divorced.)  Further confirmation that she Clara and Garen are indeed the same person come from a 1966 obituary for the eldest of the three Hettler sisters listed on the 1920 census, Estelle.  The article lists her parents and her sisters as Gertrude, the middle child, and Garen Drussai, indicating that although the rest of the family did not change its name—except upon marriage—they accepted their youngest daughter’s new name (at this point, Garen had married and divorced Kirk, and came by Drussai that way).

A nice little find.  Syracuse University holds the Mercury Press Records; Mercury Press produced The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited for a long time by Anthony Boucher.  It turns out that there’s a file labeled Drussai which contains several letters from Garen and a pair from Kirk, all to Boucher.

The correspondence begins in January 1951, after Boucher had already asked for rewrites on an early version of “Extra-Curricular.”  All of the correspondence is from one or the other Drussai to Boucher—none of his responses survive except as faintly penciled notes on the letters.  Most of the material is Drussai sending off manuscripts, often through several rounds of revisions, which gives some insight into her career.

At the time she first wrote Boucher, Garen had already been rejected by Horace Gold at Galaxy and she was trying to get a sense of the market—how many revisions she could expect, and what-not.  At first, she admitted, she started a lot of stories but could not finish them.  Then she focused more.  One gets the sense that she sometimes felt overwhelmed by her domestic responsibilities: “Between lawn planting------and fence building----------and curtain making I did manage to whip this “Surprisingly” long (for me) story together.  Huh?,” she wrote in October 1956.  A little while later, she resolved to take her writing more seriously.  She also asked for Boucher’s advice on agents.  She wanted to move into mainstream publishing, in addition to her science fiction, and also found Harry Altshuler—her agent—was apathetic toward her work.

In addition, the correspondence sheds some light on some of the obscure details of the Drussai’s life.  They moved often.  Her first letter gave their address as 259 Montana Street—far from Telegraph Hill, almost in Daly City.  By May of 1951, she had moved to Hollywood, then to LA before the summer was over.  The following Autumn she was on La Crescenta, only to move back north to San Francisco by 1955.  In the spring of 1956, she was in the suburb of San Carlos, and then moved to Campbell, California that summer.  The Drussais seemed to have stayed there until they divorced, right around New Year’s 1960.  Garen and Milo moved to San Jose, Kirk to Santa Clara.

Apparently, Kirk had been in sales for most of this time—although I don’t know what he was selling.  Around the beginning of 1957, he got involved with technical writing and was a member of the Bay Area Chapter of the Society of Technical Writers and Editors, which had about 25 members.  He obviously could not know it, but moving into technical writing just as Silicon Valley was about to take off was wise.  Quite probably, he published far more than his wife, who, judging by the correspondence here, had a lot of trouble placing her writing, although it’s unknown whether that’s because of the quality of the output or the closing of the pulp market in the 1950s.

Indeed, it’s worth a slight digression on this topic.  I have seen a couple of newsletters the Golden Gate Chapter of the Society of Technical Publishers put out in the late 1950s.  (That group and the STWE merged in 1960), and there are some interesting connections between technical writers and Forteans that are worth further exploration.  Anthony Boucher, for example, came to talk at one of TPS’s meetings, discussing funny gaffes that had gotten past science fiction editors.  Members of the TPS also heard a talk by one of the followers of General Semantics, which was then taking root in San Francisco since S. I. Hayawaka had come to San Francisco State University.  And Kirk asked Tony to republish Isaac Asimov’s “Insert Knob A in Hole B,” which had been in the December 1957 F&SF.  Although tech writing and science fiction seem, on the face of it, so different, I can see the connection, as in both cases the writer must use her or his imagination to make sense of—and make sensible—otherwise undigested scientific material.

But, back to the correspondence.  It also reveals some personal facts about Garen that would otherwise be hard to come from.  She had a great sense of humor, for instance.  One letter to Boucher was entirely blank between the salutation and the signature, with a P.S.: “More later.”  Another time, she submitted a story that, she learned upon reading the magazine, was very similar to one just published by F&SF (Avram Davidson’s “Summerland,” which implies that hers, titled “Wish Fulfillment, had something to do with Spiritualism.)  She wrote, “I’ve been tricked by coincidence. . . .  I hope my next to you is not the result of some telepathic meeting of minds.  I couldn’t take it.”

Frustratingly, however, the letters do not quite solve some problems about her identity.  In his first letter to her, Boucher was confused about her gender; she explained that she was a woman and, after some further prompting, gave some background to her unusual name: “In the Ross 128 Sector, Karen is a cognate of Garen; and Drussai is quite a common name.  Sort of like your Smiths and Jonses (sic) here.  (It’s Hungarian).”

At the time, Boucher (obviously) had not met Garen face-to-face.  But he had by the time of his introduction to her first story (“Extra-Curricular,” June 1952), when he commented on her Hungarian beauty.  But, of course, she never says in this letter that she is Hungarian.  Maybe he assumed it, and so wrote it—and given that Garen was interested in re-inventing herself, she let it stand.  Or maybe she had confirmed this in some other conversation.  At any rate, it suggests that, at least at this time, she was not claiming to be Hungarian.

More confusing is her reference to “Ross 128 Sector.”  Ross 128 is the star nearest the Earth; it had been discovered in 1926 and so was likely known by science fiction aficionados.  Perhaps this was what she meant—a joke, her letters full of them, a reference to how far she was from Berkeley and the Bohemian parts of San Francisco?—or perhaps something more obscure.  If we accept the star interpretation, then she seems close to admitting that the name is wholly fabricated, whether Drussai is Hungarian or not.

Like so many Forteans, Garen Drussai is quite a slippery character.

The eleven stories in Garen Drussai’s “Triptych” tell us one thing regarding her Forteanism: she left that philosophy behind, even as she continued her interest in other topics.  A couple of the stories reiterate her pacifist stance—in particular, “Selection,” which concerns an Earth driven to near destruction, saved only when a race of aliens came and put the remaining humans on reservations.  While they tried to rebuild civilization with the peaceful types, the rest were divided by races and kept entertained by violent pastimes.  The stories also emphasize the power of imagination.  For example, in “The Smell of Ice Cream” merely a whiff of the dairy dessert make a couple remember a bad day; in “Touching,” a lonely man finds satisfaction in his ability to, well, touch.  And in “Caring,” a sensitive girl wills herself to become a dying bird when after she fails to save a broken-winged seagull.

The stories reflect, broadly speaking, a liberal attitude.  Even the most reactionary (and predictable), “The Fifth Window,” about a man in long ago China trying to arrange his marriage, is liberal in the sense that, as Drussai explains in the introduction, she tried to understand the man in the context of his time, not measured against some timeless ethics.  Others are more obviously so: “Leopardus,” for instance, concerns a woman who comes to hate what fur represents.

But her critics would still probably take exception at her vision of women.  She mentions in the introduction that women are essential to civilization—but makes the argument in essentialist terms, seeing women not as potential explorers, say, but as those who build churches and hold societies together.  The four hundred page novel which she wrote was about a pioneer woman, “Harriet” and one vignette makes it into the thesis as the story “snare.”  Harriet turns out to be a selfish hedonist, who resents her husband, hates her children, has an affair, but cannot find it in herself to feel anything but trapped.  The main character in “Knowing It All” is a woman who relies on the help of men to make her way through the world.

I got a hold of Garen Drussai’s Sonoma State University thesis.  I haven’t had time to read through the eleven stories (it’s called “Tryptich” because the thesis is divided into three sections), but the introduction gives some more information on her life, and also confirms some of what I had been guessing.

According to the introduction, Drussai was a born story-teller.  When, as a child, she was supposed to be dusting the furniture, she would instead hide under a table and tell herself stories.  (She felt herself an “alien,” adrift from others.)  As she looked back on that time, she valued her imagination—it is imagination, the ability to create vivid images—which makes the writer.  She seems to have a romantic, as opposed to craftsmanlike, say, view of writing.  Movies fed her imagination—although never stories with violence—and reading, of course.

The first stories she read were adventure tales, Lost World, and fairy tales, and the travels of Richard Halliburton, and the fantasies of Jules Verne.  She was influenced by Jack London and H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holes—this may have given her a connection to Anthony Boucher—as well as Greek, Roman, and Norse myths.  She read A Tale of Two Cities and memorized the poems of Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe.

While she was in high school she tried her hand at writing—“melancholy teen-age poems and stories” as she says on page ix, and though she submitted them they were never published.  After graduating high school, she lit off for Hollywood—this would have been about 1937—and took a speech class at Hollywood High School to get rid of her New York accent.  (It would have been about this time that Clara Hettler changed her name to Garen Lewis, and so it is likely that Garen was changing her entire identity with the move across the country.)

It was in California that Garen met and married the (also newly-renamed) Kirk Drussai.  She was attracted by his love of reading and interest in things philosophical.  He introduced her to science fiction where she could work out her own philosophical ideas: Science Fiction “opened up new vistas for me,” she wrote.  “There were subjects I could not tackle, at least it might be unwise to do so if I wanted to be published in popular magazines.  Sexual, racial, and violent themes might not be acceptable, and yet put the same ideas on another planet or at another time in the future, and they were all right.”  Garen name checked some of the masters, Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Matheson (although she mis-spelled Asimov and Heinlein).  She went on to tell a story about how the editor of Galaxy recognizer her on a return trip to New York and invited her to a party, at which a man asked her what her husband did.  She put him in his place.

According to Garen’s later account, she sold over a dozen stories (of which I have found five), some of which were reprinted.  Apparently, she had no other job at the time.  Her first sale—and first hundred dollars ever earned—came from the second story she sold to Anthony Boucher at F&SF.  (This was “Extra-Curricular.”)  She had to do three rewrites.  At the time, Drussai also began auditing courses at San Francisco State University, which fed her love of learning but left her no better off when she and Kirk divorced and she was left to support Milo.  (Who was, she said, ten years-old, which puts the divorce at about 1959.)

She did indeed end up in Southern California again, where she had a “managerial position” (likely this was running the coat check) and happened onto the UCLA campus.  Vowing to return to academe, she applied at Santa Monica Junior College and spent six years getting her bachelor’s—so she was in school from 1974 to 1980.  During this time, she also wrote a four-hundred page novel, although this remains unpublished.

According to Garen Drussai, Kirk spent some time in New York City, where he me Tiffany Thayer, the one man operation behind the Fortean Society.  Afterwards, he ended up in Hollywood.  Garen Lewis—as Tiffany Thayer called her—and Kirk Drussai met somehow and were drawn together—by Forteanism, Thayer claims.  This probably oversells the importance of Foreteanism to them, but there is no doubt that they were both interested in the subject.

Kirk Drussai was sending clippings to Thayer and promising a paper on heterodox cancer cures for the Fortean Society’s magazine, Doubt.  It never appeared—whether Kirk never wrote it or Thayer never published it is not known.  In his introduction to her first short story, Anthony Boucher noted that Garen Drussai was a vigorous debater on matters Fortean.

The Drussais seem to have been the motive force behind the organization of the Fortean Society in San Francisco after they relocated to the northern part of the state.  (Garen said that they hitchhiked between the northern and southern parts of the state.)  Thayer announced in Doubt 21 (published around June 1948): The San Francisco and Bay Area members have met informally as guests of MFS MacNichol, who shares honors for the idea with MFS Drussai [no mention as to which Drussai], and the labors of assembly with MFS di Gava [?].”  The meeting was held on 1 April and attendees put their names in a ledger titles “The Book of the Damned.”

This founding of Chapter Two, as it was known, came at a time when Tiffany Thayer seemed to be interested in organizing Forteanism a little bit.  He suggested a Fortean University, a Fortean arrangement of knowledge, and the announcement of Chpater Twos formation was soon followed by Chapters Three and Four—in Chicago and Dallas—although this burst of organization ended soon enough.

Drussais soon became moderator of the meetings, as well as its “Bugler,” or secretary.”

Doubt 24, published around April 1949, noted that the Drussais paid dues for their unborn child.  This was, Thayer said, The Fortean Society’s Virginia Dare, referring to the first person born to English parents in North America.  The Drussais named their son Milo.  He was born 21 April 1949.

Within a few months, Thayer had overcome his interest in organization, reprimanded the chapters, and stopped reporting on them.  A few years later, Garen was turning her attention to writing science fiction, and though the high tide of Chapter two had ebbed, her stories showed that she maintained an interest in Forteanism.         As Garen remembered the times from years later, it was a brief, but fun interval, a chance to hang out with young oddballs, in her phrase.