A Fortean cri de coeur.
In Doubt 24 (April 1949), Tiffany Thayer published the following letter:
“I guess, maybe, we will be planning to raise Bigger and Better hound dogs—and more expensive Hereford Bulls—and less intelligent soldiers—five minutes before—Armageddon.
“Yes, Mr. Thayer, I would like to correspond with other members. I would like to drink with ‘em—and talk with ‘em—but I can’t find ‘em. Up to date I’ve never even seen one. They just don’t grow in places like this.”
It was signed Lee Summers, c/o Buford Skaags [sic]. West Plains, Mo., Route 2.”
It is not immediately clear to what Summers was referring—the better bred cows and dogs, the stupider soldiers—nor who he was. The address gives only the slightest clue.
Buford Skaggs was a prominent Missouri politician who became a judge in 1942. Originally born in Arkansas, he lived in West Plains, Missouri, but his judgeship required him to leave his farm on Route 2 for Jefferson, MO. At that farm, he raised cattle, particularly Hereford, showed them, and won awards for them.
Likely, then, Lee Summers was a farmhand working on Skaggs’s land when he wrote to Thayer. Likely, too, this wasn’t the first time he’d written the Fortean Society. Back in Doubt 17 (Summer 1946), someone named Summers sent in two clippings: one about a mysterious black panther shot in Indiana—and lost when it fell into a river—and another about mysterious people parachuting from the sky, saying either ‘hello’ or ‘help.’ That was near Baltimore and the report came from a St. Paul, Minnesota paper.
That is all I can say about Lee Summers, though. There are a number of people by that name in the area around West Plains, but nobody I could identify as working for Skaggs. Fitting, in its way, a Fortean who felt lost in the middle of nowhere, crying out for fellowship, only to be lost to history.
That letter was the last time Lee Summers ever appeared in Doubt.
In Doubt 24 (April 1949), Tiffany Thayer published the following letter:
“I guess, maybe, we will be planning to raise Bigger and Better hound dogs—and more expensive Hereford Bulls—and less intelligent soldiers—five minutes before—Armageddon.
“Yes, Mr. Thayer, I would like to correspond with other members. I would like to drink with ‘em—and talk with ‘em—but I can’t find ‘em. Up to date I’ve never even seen one. They just don’t grow in places like this.”
It was signed Lee Summers, c/o Buford Skaags [sic]. West Plains, Mo., Route 2.”
It is not immediately clear to what Summers was referring—the better bred cows and dogs, the stupider soldiers—nor who he was. The address gives only the slightest clue.
Buford Skaggs was a prominent Missouri politician who became a judge in 1942. Originally born in Arkansas, he lived in West Plains, Missouri, but his judgeship required him to leave his farm on Route 2 for Jefferson, MO. At that farm, he raised cattle, particularly Hereford, showed them, and won awards for them.
Likely, then, Lee Summers was a farmhand working on Skaggs’s land when he wrote to Thayer. Likely, too, this wasn’t the first time he’d written the Fortean Society. Back in Doubt 17 (Summer 1946), someone named Summers sent in two clippings: one about a mysterious black panther shot in Indiana—and lost when it fell into a river—and another about mysterious people parachuting from the sky, saying either ‘hello’ or ‘help.’ That was near Baltimore and the report came from a St. Paul, Minnesota paper.
That is all I can say about Lee Summers, though. There are a number of people by that name in the area around West Plains, but nobody I could identify as working for Skaggs. Fitting, in its way, a Fortean who felt lost in the middle of nowhere, crying out for fellowship, only to be lost to history.
That letter was the last time Lee Summers ever appeared in Doubt.
