George Frederick Haas was born 4 April 1906 in Westport, California, just above Fort Bragg on the northern coast. His father was Fred L. Haas, his mother Bertha M. Severance, both also California natives. According to the 1910 census, Haas, his father , and mother lived with Haas's grandparents when he was very young--Tracy and Elizabeth Smith, who were apparently Fred's step-parents.
By 1912, at least, his parents had divorced, and his mother had remarried Daniel Boyd, a New Yorker who, like Fred Haas,worked in the northern California lumber camps. On a picnic that year at Camp Grant, his mother read George and Daniel Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes from the October issue of All-Story magazine. Seemingly, this initiated Haas's life-long love of the fantastic and the Romantic. Within a couple of years, he was corresponding with ERB.
Photo from Marcin Wichary
