​A frustrated Fortean.

I am a little unsure of this biography; the chronology works out, but the details are hard to reconcile. Still.

It seems that John Philip Bessor was born 15 January 1914 in Pennsylvania to George W. lessor and the former Martha Blymer. George’s parents were both from Pennsylvania, as was Martha’s mother, though her father was a Swedish immigrant. They were older parents, George about 46 and Martha 41 when John was born; they had already had two daughters and a son, all four or more years older than John. I cannot find the family in the 1920 census; in 1930, George worked as a clerk for the sanitary works, and had done well, owning his home, then worth about $5,000. Also living with George, Martha, and John, was Elizabeth, one of John’s older sisters, who was married.

In 1940, John was still living with his parents in the Pittsburgh area, as was another sister, Alberta. (She was a music teacher.) The family may have suffered some misfortune during the thirties, as they had moved houses and now owned one worth $1,800. John had just gone out on the job market—he was classified as a “new worker”—after completing his third year of college. According to his obituary, he took sculpture and design courses at Carnegie Institute of Technology and also studied at Edinboro University, majoring in art—Edinboro is a Pennsylvania college.

​​A brief note on a passing Fortean.

Derek Pickles was born in England in January or February 1928. I do not know anything about his family situation. He was interested in science fiction from a young age, and later told Eric Frank Russell, “After reading ‘SINISTER BARRIER’ when aged about 12 (in ’39) I went about for moths [sic] with a hunted [sic] expression, peering over my shoulder, the sight of a coloured balloon was enough to make me run; I still have a sneaking suspicion that it can be true.” He tried his hand at writing science fiction, but was displeased by the results, and so remained a fan. By accounts, he was a tall man, surprisingly so to those who first met him.

In November 1950, he was associated with the publication of an early British fanzine, “Phantasmagoria.” He was living in Bradford, Yorkshire, in England at the time. The next issue came out the following Spring, and the third that summer. At the same time, he was writing for another ‘zine, Michael Tealby’s “Wonder.” Supposedly—I have not seen any of these—he spent some of his time taking potshots at the London Circle, which had been the center of British science fiction fandom. Encouraged, he and his sister Mavis planned a convention in Bradford for October of 1951. Afterwards, he helped to found the Bradford Science Fiction Association, which had collected 23 members in about six months.

Samuel Kimball Merwin, Jr., was born 28 April 1910 in Plainfield, New Jersey. His parents, Samuel Merwin, Sr., a writer, and Edna (Flesheim), a musician and music teacher, had been married since 1901. Both were from Illinois. Samuel was their second son; in 1904, Edna had given birth to Samuel Bannister, but he had died in 1907. At some point between 1910 and 1915, the family adopted another son, John, and relocated to Queens, New York.

The elder Merwin began to make his mark on the literary scene just before World War I. In his early phase, he was progressive, in favor of women’s writes and chafing at America’s conservatism. After his own success, and the winning of the right to vote by women, he became more conservative himself, according to eh New York Times. He worried over the more liberal ways of youth in the wake of the Great War and complained women’s emancipation had led to the flapper and “millions and millions of young feminine creature underdressed, over-supplied with money, automobiles and freedom, indulging in jazz, liquor and wildness.” His novels, the Times said, were critical of contemporary society, though marked also by “wide understanding and traces of idealistic hopes for modern society.”

​An artistic Fortean.

Martha Hamlin was born, 1906, in Buffalo, New York, to Chauncey J. and Emily Gray Hamlin. They were a rich family with deep roots in the region. Martha went to France in her teens, where she developed an interest in art. In 1922, she studied Académie Julian, in Paris. Through the 1920s, she traveled back and forth between Europe and New York City, taking some time to study stage design (at the Parson’s School of Applied Art, in New York), collecting art by the likes of Modigliani and Chagall, and running with other modernist painters, including Picasso. She was especially connected to the Russian expatriate scene, and had an affair with Boris Grigoriev.

In 1928, still in her early twenties, Hamlin moved back to Buffalo; she and her sister soon enough departed for Taos, New Mexico, where the circulated in the Bohemian culture there, meeting Georgia O’Keefe and making a pilgrimage to Diego Rivera. Her sister would settle there, in New Mexico. Martha, though, returned to Buffalo, where she married Franciscus Visser’t Hooft, a Dutch chemist; they had three children. Raising a family, knuckling under to demands from her husband, and meeting social obligations put a crimp in Visser’t Hooft’s artistic ambitions. She did do local work, joining the Buffalo Society of Artists and, later, founding the Patteran Society, which was a progressive alternative to the Buffalo Society of Artists.

​A Founder of the Fortean Society—but not, in any real sense, a Fortean.

Which indicates a pattern among Founders, it would seem.

Harry Elmer Barnes was born 15 June 1889 in Auburn, New York, making him about Fort’s junior by about fifteen years. He received a Ph.D. in history from Columbia in 1918. Barnes became a respected and sought-after writer and lecturer on all manner of historical, sociological, and economic topics. He was associated with the circle of thinkers around H. L. Mencken that viewed American parochialism and obeisance to Puritan values stifling. In 1928, for example, as Vice President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science he gave an address called “Science vs. Religion”; the next year he wrote a book called “The Twilight of Christianity” which was not a defense of atheism—he said—but was heralded by one reviewer as the most important critical appraisal of religion since Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason.”

That year also saw him give up a position at Smith College to become editor with the Scripps-Howard newspaper service, which he continued until 1940. He continued to write magazine articles and books at a furious pace, though, and his bibliography is immense. He was one of the leading advocates of a historical school known as the Revisionists, which critically evaluated orthodoxy—a Fortean endeavor, no? Among the conclusions he championed was that Germany was not responsible for the Great War and had been vilified by the Allies. (Including by a younger Harry Elmer Barnes, who had been pro-War in the teens.) Although Barnes was associated with Mencken and had given up academia for journalism, he was far from opposed to academic thinking.

A champion of Fort—and a founder of the Society—but not really a Fortean.

Arthur Burton Rascoe was born 22 October 1891in Fulton, Kentucky, to Matthew Lafayette and Elizabeth (Burton) Rascoe. The family moved to Shawnee, Oklahoma, where Arthur and his brothers Henry and George spent their childhoods. According to family lore, the paterfamilias Matthew was saloon keeper, whose fortunes changed when Oklahoma went dry. He went into farming. The census has the family in Fulton in 1900—where Matthew was a hotel clerk—and Shawnee in 1910—where he was a farmer. Oklahoma went dry in September 1907—a few months before it became a state; it allowed for alcohol sales only in 1959.

Rascoe was inclined to literature; he attended the local schools, and worked at the “Shawnee Herald” when he was 14—so just around the time his family’s fortunes changed. In 1911, he moved to Chicago to attend the university there, and became the Chicago Tribune correspondent for the University of Chicago. He left the university after two years, and went to work for the Tribune full time as a reporter and assistant city editor. Rascoe married Hazel Luke on 5 July 1913. They had two children, Arthur Burton (born in 1914) and Helen Ruth (born in 1918).

​A conventionally religious—and therefore somewhat surprising—Fortean.

Dennis Fitzpatrick Crolly was born 9 November 1875 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to William Sarsfield and the former Theresa Feeley. William was an Irish immigrant, Theresa from that area of Pennsylvania. Dennis had at least one brother. He attended local Catholic schools, 
St. John’s, from 1888-1891, and graduating from St. Thomas (now the University of Scranton) in 1901. According to his recollections, he held a variety of jobs and moved around quite a bit: construction water boy, cash boy, assistant janitor, printer’s devil, railroad construction. And then he moved to New York City, where he was attached to the International Correspondence School, setting him upon a writerly path for the rest of his life.

In 1910, Crolly experienced a Fortean rain, of sorts, when, he walked under the South Washington avenue bridge, wearing his best suit. A shower of hot water and culm rained down upon him. The source wasn’t too mysterious, though: the bridge supported railroad tracks, and he sued the Lackawanna railroad for $500.

For the most part after he went to work for he ICS, Crolly settled in the Scranton area: home. Over his life he would be involved in many civic organizations and become well-known as a motivational speaker. He was also part of the movement protect against mine cave-ins. Newspapers from the area are full of announcements for talks he was to give. By 1914—before he was yet 40— he was a familiar figure about town. The “Scranton Truth” reported in October of that year, “Dennis F. Crolly, of the I.C.S publicity department, is famed for his ties and bachelorhood. He excels in both, according to his friends. He is also an indefatigable worker, and his motto is ‘Loyalty.’ You can find him post every day safely ensconced in his little office on the secon [sic] floor of the I.C.S. Annex building on Wyoming avenue. It is there that he does his valuable work for the company, decides on the shade of the tie he will wear the next day and safe from the guiles of bewitching eligibles [sic]. But withal he is popular, and his appearance in any part of the building generally brings an avalanche of cross-eyeing as he walks about.”

​His work ran parallel to theirs, and so he was more an icon—and barely that—than a Fortean.

Eric John Dingwall was born in the early 1890s, probably 1891—he didn’t know the exact date—in what was then known as Ceylon, a British territory. He moved to the metropole, and studied at Cambridge, graduating in 1915. As a young man, he did library work, had an interest in magic, and, like many magicians of the time, developed a fascination with parapsychology and spiritualism. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1920, and spent 1921 in the U.S. with the American Society forPsychical Research. 

In addition to his other enthusiasms, Dingwall also had an interest in sexual deviation and erotica—these would get him kicked out of the SPR. He continued to practice magic, collect erotica, and investigate parapsychology, though, earning a D.Sc. in 1932 and writing numerous books: Studies in the Sexual Life of Ancient and Medieval Peoples (1925); Male Infibulation (1925); How to Go to a Medium: A Manual of Instruction (1927); Ghosts and Spirits in the Ancient World (1930); The Girdle of Chastity (1931); Artificial Cranial Deformation (1931); Woman: An Historical, Gynecological and Anthropological Compendium (1935).

​James Irwin (or Erwin) Pneuman was born 8 January 1889 in Meshoppen, Pennsylvania, the third child of William and Crissie Pneuman. William was a miller. James seems to have dropped out of high school after his second year. At the time of World War I, he was married, with a child, and lived in Montana, where he worked as a farm laborer, I believe, at least according to a draft card, but it does not fit exactly with later census data. In 1930, he was back in Pennsylvania with his family; his father had died, and a brother was now the family head. James worked as a toolmaker, which was also the job of two brothers. His son also lived with him, but there is no wife listed on the census.

Pneuman also seems to have had some connection to New York. His obituary said he’d been in central New York since the early 1910s, which I do not have evidence for, but in 1931 he had an address in Camillus, New York. It was there, on 29 May, that he applied for a patent on an animal trap. In 1940, according to the census, he was in Oneida with a sister and his mother; he was still listed as married, but there was no wife enumerated. Pneuman was a machinist. He owned his home. In 1949, Pneuman (with James Foote) applied for another patent, this one a machine for printing on spherical objects.

Pneuman’s connection to Forteanism is slender. I can find only two points of contact, though one suggests the connection might have been more meaningful than the available evidence records. The name Pneuman appeared once in Doubt, issue 27, in late 1949. This reference is what put me on the track. He sent in a report from Outdoor Life that mentioned a rain of salamanders in North Dakota—salamanders that locals did not recognize. Although Pneuman is a relatively unusual spelling, that wasn’t enough to identify the sender of the clipping, and so this Fortean name was filed away by me.

​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.