Google Map StreetView of Livingston's old home in Lily Dale, NY.
A religiously inclined minor Fortean.
Paul Livingston Keil was born 7 January 1900 in New York City. John Keil was born in 1869, the son of German immigrants; he made a living as a broker. Nellie Bullock Keil was the daughter of New Yorkers. Paul had two older sisters and brother—two of whom predeceased him—as well as a younger sister and two brothers. He attended Stuyvesant High School, where he became interested in printing. He was just a little too young to be drafted into World War I. In 1920, he was still living at the family home—with everyone except his eldest brother and one older sister—although he was also working. The family was in the Bronx.
In high school, Keil edited the school newspaper, which is how he fell in love with the printing profession. That was his job listing in the 1920 census. He formed his own company, Pauke, which seems to have been a play on his name. (He took Pauke as his pseudonym also.) It was based at 140 East Tremont Street in the Bronx, about 4 miles from where the family home was in 1920. Kiel’s enthusiasm was such that in 1922, he walked to Boston to attend a printing convention.
Paul Livingston Keil was born 7 January 1900 in New York City. John Keil was born in 1869, the son of German immigrants; he made a living as a broker. Nellie Bullock Keil was the daughter of New Yorkers. Paul had two older sisters and brother—two of whom predeceased him—as well as a younger sister and two brothers. He attended Stuyvesant High School, where he became interested in printing. He was just a little too young to be drafted into World War I. In 1920, he was still living at the family home—with everyone except his eldest brother and one older sister—although he was also working. The family was in the Bronx.
In high school, Keil edited the school newspaper, which is how he fell in love with the printing profession. That was his job listing in the 1920 census. He formed his own company, Pauke, which seems to have been a play on his name. (He took Pauke as his pseudonym also.) It was based at 140 East Tremont Street in the Bronx, about 4 miles from where the family home was in 1920. Kiel’s enthusiasm was such that in 1922, he walked to Boston to attend a printing convention.
His involvement in amateur journalism brought him into contact with H. P. Lovecraft—and he would not be the last Fortean intrigued by that weird writer. In 1922, they met near Fordham, in the Bronx—not far from where Charles Fort lived beginning in June that year, after returning from London. They continued to exchange correspondence, and Lovecraft read Keil’s amateur publication Pauke’s Quill. In 1924, Keil staked out a position defending some forms of censorship; Lovecraft, while admiring Keil’s enthusiasm, argued back in his essay “The Omnipresent Philistine.” Yes, he admitted, there were many stories written that were indecent and had no redeeming qualities, but any censorship regime would inevitably prohibit works of value, too. Interestingly, he singled out Joyce’s Ulysses and James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen—Cabell being another celebrated writer among Forteans.
Keil remained living at home until 1930, along with an older sister and a younger sister and brother. Everyone except his mother was employed outside the home. Presumably, it was early in the 1930s that he became a ship’s printer—that’s when his name tarts to appear on travel documents. His obituary says he spent eight years on the ocean, visiting many ports throughout the Pacific.
His publishing efforts, unsurprisingly, reflected his other interests. At least those that have survived. The earliest know example of his art is a 1919 pamphlet “Arrowheads and Such,” which described where such artifacts might be found and encouraged their collection by other amateurs. Lovecraft, knowing of Keil’s interest in Native Americans, included bits of Indian lore in his correspondence. Neil was interested in scouting—he’d had some correspondence with Boy’s Life in 1917, wondering about some worms he had found in puddles—and was a member of the Elbeetian Legion, an off-shoot of the scouting movement. His other known publication is dated 1935 and titled “Going to sea: Positions to be had on American flag vessels--how to get and hold them.”
The 1940 census does not have a record for Keil, and so it may be that he was still at sea, and his adventures had started later in the 1930s. (Then again, I cannot find his father or mother in that census, either.) He did serve in the Army Air Force in World War II from 1942 to 1944, reaching the rank of corporal. He was discharged to work at the Curtis-Wright Corporation in Buffalo. (Perhaps he met the bookseller H. W. Giles, the Fortean who lived and worked there.) He still had an interest in Lovecraft, if only nostalgically, writing up his remembrance of the 1922 meeting for The Phoenix, an amateur press publication, in 1946. From Buffalo, he moved to the Fredonia area around 1948, working first as a printer at the Dunkirk Evening Observer and then, after a few years, as a compositor and pressman at the Fredonia Censor.
John Keil, the father, became a member of the Tremont-German Methodist Episcopal Church in 1922. (The church had been organized in 1904). Donald Keil, Paul’s younger brother by two years, became a Methodist pastor in Dover Plains and Chatham. Paul was a member of the Presbyterian church. But he doesn’t seem to have been too tied to his denomination. His funeral rites were performed by the minister of the First Presbyterian Church, as well as the pastors of the First Baptist Church and the First Methodist Church.
Which isn’t surprising—considering the religious history of the area to which he moved. He was living in Lily Dale, NY, which is famous as a town of spiritualists. Town leaders moved the home of the Fox sisters to the town—Kate and Margaret Fox had kicked off the modern spiritualist movement in the late nineteenth century, and Lily Day became the center of the movement, even as its popularity waned. Keil was a member of the Lily Dale Assembly, which was an organization dedicated to the study of spiritualism and related phenomena, such as mediumship and clairvoyance. At the prayer service prior to Keil’s funeral,the spiritualist reverend Arthur Myers presided along with the minister of the Presbyterian Church.
It was the religious aspects of Forteanism that seems to have drawn Keil to the Fortean Society: seemingly both the promise of new religious movements, and (perhaps) the collapse of older forms of religious practice. He was only mentioned twice in the pages of Doubt, both times in reference to religious items. Thayer might have been attracted to him, initially, because of his career: Thayer liked printers, and their ilk. He talked several times of Harry Leon Wilson’s book The Wrong Twin—Wilson was one of the Fortean Society founders—and the tramp printer, Dave Cowan, who practiced what Wilson called “a good loose trade,” meaning of job that required skill and allowed the practitioner to move around the world as he (or she) saw fit, finding work wherever life took him (or her). Keil had some of that, and Thayer acknowledged that work, without drawing the connection, but seemed to understand Keil mostly as a spiritualist, describing him thusly:
“. . . Keil, who knows any number of spirit controls by their first names, and who has moved to Lily Dale, N.Y., the necromancers’ Mecca. Paukie extends a standing invitation to any Forteans passing through to look him up. He means, in the flesh, but one has no doubt you would be twice as welcome if you arrived disembodied.”
The first notice came in Doubt 13 (Winter 1945), when he won “first prize” in Thayer’s regular contest to see who could send in the best bit of Forteana. Keil won “the plum duff” for a story about a Kentucky snake-handling congregation. During a service, one of the members was bit by a poisonous serpent. The next day, the man was back to work normally. The snake, though, had died. “That’s news,” Thayer wrote. It’s impossible to know in what spirit—ahem!—Keil contributed the piece, though—was it meant humorously or more seriously? In the middle of that year, there was a legal battle over the permissibility of snake handling, and its certainly possible that Forteans—many of whom were sensitive protectors of civil liberties—would have taken the side of the snake handlers against officials who were cracking down on the practice.
Keil’s second (and final) contribution to Doubt was cryptic, even by Fortean standards. It appeared in number 36 (April 1952), by which time he was firmly ensconced in the Lily Dale community. He sent in a question and some commentary, none of which was developed enough to make sense of. The question had to do with “Our Lady of Fatima,” or “The Miracle of the Sun,” a series of visions in Fatima, Portugal which climaxed in October 1917, when thousands of observers claimed to see the sun changing color and moving in unusual ways. (This event later became wrapped up in discussions of prophecy and politics.) Keil wanted to know—as any god Fortean would—if newspapers had reported on observations from other points of the earth that might substantiate the claims. What did they see in Germany? In South America? No one ever seems to have answered his question, at least not in the pages of Doubt.
The commentary dealt with religious disasters around the time of the Fatima visions: that a Lisbon church was struck by lightning in November 1917 (shades of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake); a church in Buenos Aires collapsed a few days before the visions; an Italian boy died in church on the first day of December; that same day saw a bus crash of parishioners in Quito, Ecuador; and he mentioned that the Vatican refused to grant supernatural origin to the visions—which doesn’t seem exactly correct—while other Popes have claimed to have had visions there. The point of all this commentary is exceedingly unclear.
It could be that Kiel was attempting to prove the event actually happened—or that there was some important religious moment in late 1918. Or, more likely, given his ecumenical life, that a strictly Catholic understanding of the miracle was not warranted. But, really, there is no way to figure out what he wanted to say. Ad he left no other writing to provide contextual clues, at least none that I can find. His amateur press publications are nowhere to be found.
What can be said, tentatively, is that Kiel was interested in Fortean phenomena that could also be interpreted as religious miracles. It’s just not clear the nature of his religious belief.
In the middle of June 1953, only a few months after his last contribution to Doubt, he became ill and underwent what the newspaper described as a “major surgery.” He never recovered, dying Monday, 29 June 1953. The Sunday night before he passed into what he hoped would be some kind of Summerland, 2-inch hailstones pelted the area—as the Fredonia Censor said—in an “outburst of Nature as freakish as any on record.”
Keil remained living at home until 1930, along with an older sister and a younger sister and brother. Everyone except his mother was employed outside the home. Presumably, it was early in the 1930s that he became a ship’s printer—that’s when his name tarts to appear on travel documents. His obituary says he spent eight years on the ocean, visiting many ports throughout the Pacific.
His publishing efforts, unsurprisingly, reflected his other interests. At least those that have survived. The earliest know example of his art is a 1919 pamphlet “Arrowheads and Such,” which described where such artifacts might be found and encouraged their collection by other amateurs. Lovecraft, knowing of Keil’s interest in Native Americans, included bits of Indian lore in his correspondence. Neil was interested in scouting—he’d had some correspondence with Boy’s Life in 1917, wondering about some worms he had found in puddles—and was a member of the Elbeetian Legion, an off-shoot of the scouting movement. His other known publication is dated 1935 and titled “Going to sea: Positions to be had on American flag vessels--how to get and hold them.”
The 1940 census does not have a record for Keil, and so it may be that he was still at sea, and his adventures had started later in the 1930s. (Then again, I cannot find his father or mother in that census, either.) He did serve in the Army Air Force in World War II from 1942 to 1944, reaching the rank of corporal. He was discharged to work at the Curtis-Wright Corporation in Buffalo. (Perhaps he met the bookseller H. W. Giles, the Fortean who lived and worked there.) He still had an interest in Lovecraft, if only nostalgically, writing up his remembrance of the 1922 meeting for The Phoenix, an amateur press publication, in 1946. From Buffalo, he moved to the Fredonia area around 1948, working first as a printer at the Dunkirk Evening Observer and then, after a few years, as a compositor and pressman at the Fredonia Censor.
John Keil, the father, became a member of the Tremont-German Methodist Episcopal Church in 1922. (The church had been organized in 1904). Donald Keil, Paul’s younger brother by two years, became a Methodist pastor in Dover Plains and Chatham. Paul was a member of the Presbyterian church. But he doesn’t seem to have been too tied to his denomination. His funeral rites were performed by the minister of the First Presbyterian Church, as well as the pastors of the First Baptist Church and the First Methodist Church.
Which isn’t surprising—considering the religious history of the area to which he moved. He was living in Lily Dale, NY, which is famous as a town of spiritualists. Town leaders moved the home of the Fox sisters to the town—Kate and Margaret Fox had kicked off the modern spiritualist movement in the late nineteenth century, and Lily Day became the center of the movement, even as its popularity waned. Keil was a member of the Lily Dale Assembly, which was an organization dedicated to the study of spiritualism and related phenomena, such as mediumship and clairvoyance. At the prayer service prior to Keil’s funeral,the spiritualist reverend Arthur Myers presided along with the minister of the Presbyterian Church.
It was the religious aspects of Forteanism that seems to have drawn Keil to the Fortean Society: seemingly both the promise of new religious movements, and (perhaps) the collapse of older forms of religious practice. He was only mentioned twice in the pages of Doubt, both times in reference to religious items. Thayer might have been attracted to him, initially, because of his career: Thayer liked printers, and their ilk. He talked several times of Harry Leon Wilson’s book The Wrong Twin—Wilson was one of the Fortean Society founders—and the tramp printer, Dave Cowan, who practiced what Wilson called “a good loose trade,” meaning of job that required skill and allowed the practitioner to move around the world as he (or she) saw fit, finding work wherever life took him (or her). Keil had some of that, and Thayer acknowledged that work, without drawing the connection, but seemed to understand Keil mostly as a spiritualist, describing him thusly:
“. . . Keil, who knows any number of spirit controls by their first names, and who has moved to Lily Dale, N.Y., the necromancers’ Mecca. Paukie extends a standing invitation to any Forteans passing through to look him up. He means, in the flesh, but one has no doubt you would be twice as welcome if you arrived disembodied.”
The first notice came in Doubt 13 (Winter 1945), when he won “first prize” in Thayer’s regular contest to see who could send in the best bit of Forteana. Keil won “the plum duff” for a story about a Kentucky snake-handling congregation. During a service, one of the members was bit by a poisonous serpent. The next day, the man was back to work normally. The snake, though, had died. “That’s news,” Thayer wrote. It’s impossible to know in what spirit—ahem!—Keil contributed the piece, though—was it meant humorously or more seriously? In the middle of that year, there was a legal battle over the permissibility of snake handling, and its certainly possible that Forteans—many of whom were sensitive protectors of civil liberties—would have taken the side of the snake handlers against officials who were cracking down on the practice.
Keil’s second (and final) contribution to Doubt was cryptic, even by Fortean standards. It appeared in number 36 (April 1952), by which time he was firmly ensconced in the Lily Dale community. He sent in a question and some commentary, none of which was developed enough to make sense of. The question had to do with “Our Lady of Fatima,” or “The Miracle of the Sun,” a series of visions in Fatima, Portugal which climaxed in October 1917, when thousands of observers claimed to see the sun changing color and moving in unusual ways. (This event later became wrapped up in discussions of prophecy and politics.) Keil wanted to know—as any god Fortean would—if newspapers had reported on observations from other points of the earth that might substantiate the claims. What did they see in Germany? In South America? No one ever seems to have answered his question, at least not in the pages of Doubt.
The commentary dealt with religious disasters around the time of the Fatima visions: that a Lisbon church was struck by lightning in November 1917 (shades of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake); a church in Buenos Aires collapsed a few days before the visions; an Italian boy died in church on the first day of December; that same day saw a bus crash of parishioners in Quito, Ecuador; and he mentioned that the Vatican refused to grant supernatural origin to the visions—which doesn’t seem exactly correct—while other Popes have claimed to have had visions there. The point of all this commentary is exceedingly unclear.
It could be that Kiel was attempting to prove the event actually happened—or that there was some important religious moment in late 1918. Or, more likely, given his ecumenical life, that a strictly Catholic understanding of the miracle was not warranted. But, really, there is no way to figure out what he wanted to say. Ad he left no other writing to provide contextual clues, at least none that I can find. His amateur press publications are nowhere to be found.
What can be said, tentatively, is that Kiel was interested in Fortean phenomena that could also be interpreted as religious miracles. It’s just not clear the nature of his religious belief.
In the middle of June 1953, only a few months after his last contribution to Doubt, he became ill and underwent what the newspaper described as a “major surgery.” He never recovered, dying Monday, 29 June 1953. The Sunday night before he passed into what he hoped would be some kind of Summerland, 2-inch hailstones pelted the area—as the Fredonia Censor said—in an “outburst of Nature as freakish as any on record.”
