​He moved through the Lovecraft circle and a circle of Forteans.

About Clark Ashton Smith there is much written—though he remains, even today, less famous than his peers, H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard—and one approaches discussing him with trepidation: for their is also fanatical devotion to him, and mis-steps will be severely reprimanded. Still, it is worth a brief biographical overview, to highlight some of the lineaments that ultimately supported the Fortean community as well as Smith.

Clark Ashton was born 13 January 1893 in Long Valley, California, to Fanny and Timeus Smith. Early on, the family moved to Auburn, California, and built a cabin that served as Clark’s home for most of his life. The younger Smith never attended high school, reputedly because of a fear of crowds, and instead was taught at home. Famously, he read through a dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica (which was also the reading material of another Fortean, whose circle was tangential to Smith’s, Kenneth Rexroth). He taught himself French and Spanish.

Smith was something of a writing prodigy, selling stories to “Black Cat” magazine when he was 17. Among other genres, “Black Cat” published fantastic fiction and was warmly remembered by the later Fortean Miriam Allen Deford. Indeed, the magazine even published Fort’s fiction, “How Uncle Sam Lost Sixty-Four Dollars,” in 1904, not long before Smith broke into its pages.

​Caught in the Fortean nexus, he was, himself, disdainful of Forteans.

Benedict Abramson was born 25 August 1898 in Kadenei, Lithuania. I cannot find him in the U.S. census from 1910 or 1920—not especially surprising, really—but later records indicate his family emigrated early in the new century, reaching New York (from Hamburg, Germany) on 3 July 1901, aboard an unknown ship. They then made their way to Chicago, supposedly reaching it on 6 July. Ben—as he became known—was the eldest of five children, all the others born in Chicago.

The Abramsons were Jewish—it may be that they left their homeland because of anti-Semitism—and found support from the Jewish community. Benedict attended the Jewish Training School of Chicago, which had been established by German Jews at the end of the 19th century to help assimilate immigrants to their new homes. At first, the school’s course focused on handwork—in addition to language and history—hoping to create a class of Jews who were not peddlers. Abramson attended toward the end of the school’s career, when there was some debate over whether it was still necessary, and apparently when clerical and related skills were also being taught. He when he was 18—so around 1914.

​Probably a key Fortean.

Henri-René Guieu was born 19 March 1926 in Aix en Provence, France, another of the late generation of Forteans. I do not know much about his early life, but there is some evidence he developed an interest in reading and the esoteric at a young age. According to Bradford Lyau’s essential “The Anticipation Novelists of 1950s French Science Fiction,” he joined the French Resistance during World War II. Shortly thereafter, with the outbreak of interest in flying saucer’s sparked by the Kenneth Arnold sighting in 1947, Guieu became a UFOlogist, dedicating “practically all of his adult life to the proof of UFOs . . . and to the education of the public about them” in Lyau’s words.

Over the course of his career, Guieu wrote a number of books under many pseudonyms—Claude Vauzière, Jimmy G. Quint, Claude Rostaing, Dominique Verseau—and most famously Jimmy Guieu. His first was the science fiction novel “Le Pionnier de l’Atome" in 1952. There followed well over 100 novels, most of them science fiction, but also detective novels and erotic stories. In 1954, he published his first non-fiction book on flying saucers, “Les Soucoupes Volantes Viennent d’un Autre Monde.” He started a UFO journal, “Ouranos” and reported a series for “Radio Monte Carlo” called “As-Tu Vu Les Soucoupes?” as well as a working on a television program. According to Lyau, Guieu was the most recognized of France’s science fiction writers, earning an imprint under his own name in 1979, which published revised versions of his early stories.

​A Fortean’s Fortean.

Though one would never know it from “Doubt” or the Fortean Society.

George Townsend Wetzel was born 1 June 1921 in Maryland. His name seems unusual, but there were a number of Wetzels, including other George Wetzels, throughout Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the upper Midwest. It’s a German name. His mother was the former Eva Mae Carrick. His father, Otto, was an accountant; he had served in the navy during the Boxer Rebellion. Both were born in the late 1880s; both were Marylanders, from families of Marylanders. George was the third of six children; he had an older brother and sister, and three younger brothers. In 1930, they rented a house for $37.50 in Baltimore. They did not have a radio set.

The family weathered the Depression well. They moved during the 1930s, into a home that they owned. According to the 1940 census, Otto was working full time in 1939, making about $3,500 per year. George was the eldest of the four boys still at home; I am not sure if he finished high school—the census credits him with one year, his enlistment papers with three. He subsequently seems to have done “semiskilled” machine work for a a couple of years at most. (The 1942 Hagerstown City Directory has a George Wetzel listed, working as a “greaser.”) On 6 June 1942, a few days after he turned 21, Wetzel enlisted in the army. From what I can tell, he served in the army air force, though I am not sure what he did beyond that. Wetzel was five-foot-nine and a slight 137 pounds.

A behind-the-scenes Fortean.

William Milligan Sloane was born 15 August 1906, in Plymouth, Massachusetts. This was the year that Charles Fort started collecting reports of anomalous events, and so he was born into a Fortean universe. His mother was the former Julia L. Moss; his father Joseph C. Sloane. (In some documents, the surname was also spelled Sloan, with the E.) In 1910, according to the census, the family lived in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where Joseph taught at The Hill School, a boarding school. Julia had only recently given birth to a second son, Joseph Jr. They rented their house, living with two servants as well as Joseph Senior’s sister, Hannah Spare.

The family continued peripatetic. At some point they moved to Illinois—Julia had family in the state; it was there, in 19115, that Julia drew up a will. They then continued westward, landing in the Los Angeles area toward the end of the decade. There were six of them, Julia in a book about their California life, “The Smiling Hill-Top”: Joseph and her, the two boys (Billie and Joe), and their twin Yorkshire terriers, Rags and Tags. The plan was to tay only a year, in a remote house overlooking the ocean once owned by own of Julia’s aunts, but they settled, and eventually found their way into Pasadena. That first part, when they lived on the hilltop, Joseph worked in town, apparently still teaching, and, because of the commute, only returning home on the weekends.

​Of the many ideas that put him on the fringe—and, later, the center of the fringe, if that makes sense—the least of them was being a Fortean.

​This one is long.

Robert Ernst Dickhoff was born 6 February 1904 in Germany. I do not know anything about his family and very little about his early life. Much later, he remembered that when he was eight—around 1912—and living in a suburb of Cologne, he saw two “little people,” no more than three-and-a-half feet tall sitting against his fourposter bed. Realizing that they had been seen, the naked creatures, humanlike and tan, dissolved into the thing air.

He arrived in the United States in the 1927 (although there is at least one document that says 1925.). The manifest of the ship “New York” shows him arriving in New York on 4 July 1927 from Hamburg. He was a member of the crew, and had been for a few weeks, since 4 June 1927, but had bene at sea for two-and-a-half years. He was not supposed to be discharged in New York, but seems to have jumped ship. According to the manifest he was tall and slim, 5’10” and 166 pounds. He would later admit that he had entered the United States illegally.

Across the two-culture divide spanned this Fortean.

Antony Borrow was born 1923 in Hampshire, England, in the south of that country. As with most English Forteans, I have very little information about his early life. He was of age to serve during World War II, but I have no evidence of him being in the services or doing other, related work. He worked as a biochemist, and in a letter to Eric Frank Russell noted he had achieved a B.Sc., but I do not know from where. He also had an interest in modern literature, particularly that of the fantastic and occult. In the late 1940s, he had a relationship with Eva Tucker, the novelist, and they went to poetry readings, seeing Muriel Sparks and Derek Stanford, among others. By this time, Borrow was living in London, according to official records. 

In 1948, he started publishing his own little magazine, “The Glass,” a “literary magazine devoted to such forms as Fable, Fantasy, Poetry, Prose-poetry, Journals, and other genres of imaginative or introspective writing,” according to the inner front cover of the fourth issue. Tucker helped him put it together and print it on his 100-year old press, she remembered. (Among the contributors at that date were Harold Pinta, the playwright, who had not yet changed his name.) Later he was assisted by R. P Dodd and Nelson Pollard. At other times, his co-editor was Madge Hales, the poet. The publisher John Calder recollected, The Glass was “set by hand and printed on a hand-press by its eccentric editor, Antony Borrow, who was by profession a chemist, but had a real enthusiasm for new literature, a penchant for the arcane, the occult and the mythical, and who also wrote verse plays. He liked my poems and published at least two.” The Glass was published out of Suffolk, to London’s northeast.

​To even the capaciously accepting Fortean Society, he was too outrageous—a fringe Fortean.

I know very little about Alan F. Wilson, and most of what I know comes from a remembrance. Aside from a few addresses he lived at, I have none of the usual biographical data, at least not in verifiable form. I do have a few purely speculative possibilities.

Wilson live in Cleveland, Ohio during the early 1950s, at least. Harlan Ellison, who knew him them, says he was in his thirties, but had already been married and divorced. Wilson worked for a factory—Ellison couldn’t remember which—and made a good living. Around about 1951, when Ellison was 17, Wilson hired him to be a go-fer: but one who also carried a gun. He made him deliver chemicals to different people (one case involved sodium, which Wilson later disposed of in a body of water, while Ellison watched, resulting in a huge explosion.) He had him woo a woman with a raw steak. He made him travel to another city and deliver the contents of a suitcase—the valise having been handcuffed to Ellison’s wrist—to fellow science fiction fan Don Ford.

Ellison wrote, much later: “Wilson looked like a Martian to me. At least, what I had always seen represented in sf magazines as a Martian: skinny, large head, receding hairline, big eyes. He was, to me, a weird and fascinating man.” There were signs he was very unusual—beyond, you know, hiring a 17-year old to carry a gun around Ohio and do errands. One task he gave Ellison was to, from time to time, scare him. “I didn’t ask him what he meant,” Ellison wrote. “I knew. He wanted me to feed his strangeness, whatever that was.” Thus, some nights the high school boy would climb up the outside of Wilson’s apartment and “make hideous sounds and tap on the window and scream and scare the hell out of him. Did he know it was me? Of course he knew. He’d asked me to do it, hadn’t he?”

​Conservative, poetical, genealogist, academic, literary detective: a Fortean.

Charles Juan (Stephen Richard) Jacobs was born 19 April 1902 in Rochester New York. Through his father, Homer Jacobs, he could trace his lines of descent to Italy—and to the American Revolution. In the years after, Charles was born, Homer was a harness maker,. Charles’s mother was Catharine “Nellie” Gugelman. She was the daughter of immigrants. Charles had three younger brothers, Howard, Homer, and Francis. No later than 1907—the year Homer was born—the family had relocated to South Dakota, and they were still there in 1910, when the census was taken. Homer owned his home free and clear.

By 1914—the year Homer the younger was born—the family was back in New York, any by the time of the 1920 census, if not before, lived in Victor, New York, in Ontario County. Homer the elder was now a salesman at an agricultural store. Charles was 17 at the time of the census, and in high school. After graduation, he attended the University of Rochester, whence he received his bachelor’s of art in 1926. He returned home, then, and I am not sure what he was doing during the end of the 20s. At the time of the 1930 census, Homer the elder had become a clerk at a general store—and that was supporting almost the entire family. (Only Howard was no longer at home.) The younger Homer and Francis were still in school. Nellie was raising the kids. Charles had no job listed.

​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.