Polly Lamb is an obscure figure in the history of Bay Area Forteans. By no means is she the most obscure: if Robert Barbour Johnson’s recollections can be trusted even a little bit, dozens of people showed up to the meetings (he said about fifty). But, I have found names for only a handful, and it seems as though most of the attendees will go unrecorded. Compared to them, Polly Lamb’s association with Chapter 2 is well documented. Still, there’s nothing like the sources associated with MacNichol or Haas or Johnson (which, when compared to other, more notable historical figures are themselves not so rich).
Polly Lamb was born 10 June 1901 in Colorado to Benjamin E. Lamb and Helen (Hausch) Lamb. Benjamin Lamb came from a Wisconsin farming family. Helen was born in Tulare County, California. Her mother died before she was ten; her farmer father, Christian, from Germany, remarried in 1883, when she was about thirteen. Benjamin and Helen were married in 1896. Both were about 26. By 1900 census, they were living in Wisconsin—where they met and married is unknown. They had one child, also Benjamin (although spelled Benjimen on the census record), aged two. Benjamin Lamb, Sr., was a farm supervisor.
The next year, the family had moved to Colorado, where Polly Ann (also Pollie and Pauline) was born. By the 1910 census, they had relocated to Kern County, California. At the time, Christian Hausch, his wife Katherine, and daughter (also) Katherine, 15, were still living in Tulare County, just to the north, and that may have drawn them West. There had been no more children, but the family was living with Benjamin’s older brother and a boarder. Benjamin was listed as the owner of a farm.
The family was in Chicago in 1920. It could have been family business that brought them back. The Lamb farm in Wisconsin seems—at least according to census records—to have passed to the eldest brother, George, and the second eldest brother, Charles, was still in Wisconsin. Whatever the reason, Benjamin was listed as a broker. The family was rented with Benjamin’s partner, Eugene Bivert, a French émigré and widower who had before been an engineer and mechanic. They also had a widowed boarder living with them.
Sometime later, Polly Lamb moved to California and married George J. Goforth—the exact order is not known. George himself had been born in Mississippi in 1897; his father had when he was very young, and his mother remarried by the time he was about two. The 1910 census had him living alone with his maternal grandmother, still in Mississippi. (I can find no record of his mother or step-father in that census.) He came to California some time after 1910—I can find no record of him in either the World War registration cards, though he would have been of age, or the 1920 census. His obituary, however, does say that he served in World War I.
Probably, they married in the 1920; the census gives the age of George’s age at first marriage as twenty five, and Polly’s at nineteen, which would date to 1920 for both of them. And by 1930, they had two daughters, Helen and Elise, 7 and 6 years old. Helen H. Lamb, Polly’s mother, was also living with them at the time. Benjamin must have died in the 1920s. In 1930, George was a typewriter mechanic—his obituary says that he had worked at Capwell’s Department Store and was a member of the Staionary’s Engineers Union. Polly was working at the time, somewhat unusually for a married woman with children, as a secretary for a printing company. (Helen was working as a school teacher.)
Through the 1930s, the continued to live in Berkeley, California, with Polly alternately a stenographer and housewife, according to city directories, and George a mechanic, typewriter mechanic, and salesman.
Polly Lamb also had an artistic streak. The 22 September 1929 edition the Oakland Tribune published a poem of hers, which, given the lack of material about her, is of some interest. It is reproduced below:
Life’s My Lover
I.
Life’s my lover, bold and free.
He builds my span of days for me.
Ecstasy dawns the morning of one.
Sorrow drowns the evening sun.
I stand abashed before my lord.
And over me experience is poured.
I loved him from the nursery floor.
I worshipped more, outside that door.
In girlhood, wide my arms I flung
In praise of Life I joyfully sung.
He strained me in a wild embrace
And left his scars across my face.
He taught me happiness and pain:
He gave me loss and showed me gain.
Despair embittered my quest of strife.
But numb and aching, I clung to Life.
My lover thrilled me with delight
And left me miserable that night.
I lived with Life continually,
His whims and fancies lashing me
To docile acquiescence.
II.
Life’s my lover, hard and cruel,
Bending me to his iron rule.
He gives a seldom, soft caress
And steals from me all loveliness.
What I desire he gives away,
What I abhor he asks to stay.
I straighten up beneath his load,
Driven by load. It is his goad.
If I am tired, there is more work.
If I want effort, I must shirk.
He will not let me see my way,
Stumbling and falling, day by day.
He woes me with his steady tread.
Half of me lives, and half is dead.
I was soft clay in his artist’s hands.
He has moulded me to suit his plans.
My outer shell is callous and rough.
But my inner soul is finer stuff.
It is the spark that he set free,
It is the eye he taught to see,
His own superiority.
In the mid 1930s, according to the Oakland Tribune, she was involved with the Berkeley “Scribbler’s Club”—which seemed focused on writing—and the All Arts Club. For the latter, she was in the drama section and wrote and performed in at least one play, “Camouflage,” which was performed at small civic buildings—a Masonic Temple and community church, for example. In 1946, she joined the California Writer’s Club and established its novel section, according to the California Writer’s Club Bullletin.
As well, according to Don Herron, she was a pulp writer. Her career in that, though, is hard to follow. It seems that she wrote for the “love pulps,” a much-maligned genre targeted at young working-class women. Unlike the science fiction, detective, and weird pulps, the love pulps have attracted very little historical scholarship. So far, I have been able to track down one story she wrote, “Half Saint, Half Sinner,” which appeared in All-Story Love Stories 6 March 1937. She used her full name, Polly Lamb Goforth.
It was right around this time, however, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, that her marriage to George ended. The 1942 and 1944 city directories no longer lists George at the same address as Polly, and Polly has a job as a private secretary (her death certificate also listed her occupation as secretary, but in that case as working for an insurance company.) George’s World War II registration card, filled out in 1945, gives the name of his wife as Anne, incidentally Polly middle name, but also the name of the wife listed in his obituary, and so a different woman.
Some time in the late 1940s she moved to San Francisco proper. According to her death certificate—the information for which was provided by June Bird, one of George’s daughters and maybe one of Polly’s, too, or maybe not—she moved to the City in 1946. The Writer’s Club Bulletin, however, has her address in Berkeley through May of 1947. Presumably, then, she actually moved in late 1947 or after, and this would have been the time that she met Kenneth MacNichol. Her last address was 628 Montgomery Street, about a ten minute walk from Pencraft Writers Studio.
The courtship and marriage (and divorce) of Kenneth MacNichol and Polly Lamb (Goforth) is unrecorded. But it is possible to see what drew them together. First, both were divorced, MacNichol at least twice, maybe three times. Second, MacNcihol was a successful writer and Lamb was a writer, though seemingly not as successful. They both looked at writing, too, as a craft, which could be mastered. When Lamb was running the novel section of the California Writer’s Club, she insisted that participants—about five or six, according to the Bulletin—break down the process of novel writing into small bits, and focus on mastering these bits, not unlike the way MacNichol approached some of his story writing. As well, they both wrote for the pulps, which confined them to a certain class of writers and a certain social circle—it’s not hard to see how they might have met especially since Lamb seemed to be a joiner, and so may have sought out Pencraft and MacNichol.
Pulp writing would have further focused the two on thinking of writing as a craft, rather than an art. The love pulps, edited at the time often by women (that would change) and written by women (that wouldn’t) for a mostly young working-class audience (that wouldn’t either) had very stringent conventions, more so than the weird or science fiction pulps, even, as best I can tell. A 1938 article for Scirbner’s on the love pulps divided them into three classes: the love pulps proper, in which a good young woman met and successfully courted a good, strong man, who was the epitome of romance. There was no sex in these. The confession magazines upheld the same ideals, but by following a different scheme: the so-called three Rs, ruin, regret, and redemption, with a bad girl sometimes engaging in sex, but certainly going too far, paying hell for her transgressions. The “breezy” pulps were targeted at older women and focused on married or adulterous women. There forbidden passions---the bed preceding the chapel, as Scribner’s had it—did not lead to ruin, but to happiness. In all cases, it was imperative that the author understand the different rules and write to them. It was also important that, above all else, emotion be evoked—this, said Scribner’s was what truly differentiated pulp from slick writing, even more than the quality of the prose, which sometimes did favor the pulps.
Lamb and MacNichol also shared an interest in what at the time might have been called the weird or occult. Since the late 1930s MacNichol had turned back to pulp writing and did a lot of work for fantasy and weird magazines. He was also interested in Forteana. Lamb had a romantic streak, at least, as is clear from her poem. Also, according to Robert Barbour Johnson, she was an actual sorceress, practicing a kind of magic made famous earlier in the twentieth century by Aleister Crowley.
Crowley was the most renowned mage of his generation. The most notorious, too, known sometimes as The Beast. He defined magic as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” This definition emphasized visualization and fit in with a stream of metaphysical ideas that had been apparent in America since at least the New Thought wave of the Civil War era. (George F. Haas, who had some works by Crowley, also defined magic in these terms.) There’s something of this ideal in a few of the notes that Lamb wrote for The California Writer’s Club Bulletin in which she emphasized—with italics—that she would see people at the next meeting, as if visualizing what she expected to come true. That may be reading too much into a few notes, but Johnson did swear by her abilities.
Eventually, she and MacNichol divorced and went their separate ways. It seems likely that the Fortean Society would have dwindled, then, too, since this was already after its expulsion and Johnson only remembers it lasting for a few years after the excommunication. (He also conflates the end with the death of MacNichol and Lamb, but those events were separated by several years.)
It is not known what Polly Lamb was doing during the middle part of the 1950s. Presumably, she continued to write. She did not remarry, but stayed in the City as a secretary, living in what was still then a Bohemian, artsy area. She also seems to have continued practicing magic.
According to Johnson, it was her magical abilities that led to her demise: by mucking around with the occult, she unleashed some horrible power from the Outside. I don’t know enough about Polly Lamb to know if that’s fair to her, or a language she would have understood and accepted. It very well may say more about Johnson than anything else, his (possibly arch) belief in coincidence, the weird, and the beyond. Doctors had a more prosaic cause for her death. Polly Lamb was said to have a congenital aneurysm in her brain (in the Circle of Willis). Around 14 December 1956, it ruptured and some time after that she went to Mt. Zion Hospital, about three miles from her home. She died at 0700 on 17 December 1956.
Polly Lamb was born 10 June 1901 in Colorado to Benjamin E. Lamb and Helen (Hausch) Lamb. Benjamin Lamb came from a Wisconsin farming family. Helen was born in Tulare County, California. Her mother died before she was ten; her farmer father, Christian, from Germany, remarried in 1883, when she was about thirteen. Benjamin and Helen were married in 1896. Both were about 26. By 1900 census, they were living in Wisconsin—where they met and married is unknown. They had one child, also Benjamin (although spelled Benjimen on the census record), aged two. Benjamin Lamb, Sr., was a farm supervisor.
The next year, the family had moved to Colorado, where Polly Ann (also Pollie and Pauline) was born. By the 1910 census, they had relocated to Kern County, California. At the time, Christian Hausch, his wife Katherine, and daughter (also) Katherine, 15, were still living in Tulare County, just to the north, and that may have drawn them West. There had been no more children, but the family was living with Benjamin’s older brother and a boarder. Benjamin was listed as the owner of a farm.
The family was in Chicago in 1920. It could have been family business that brought them back. The Lamb farm in Wisconsin seems—at least according to census records—to have passed to the eldest brother, George, and the second eldest brother, Charles, was still in Wisconsin. Whatever the reason, Benjamin was listed as a broker. The family was rented with Benjamin’s partner, Eugene Bivert, a French émigré and widower who had before been an engineer and mechanic. They also had a widowed boarder living with them.
Sometime later, Polly Lamb moved to California and married George J. Goforth—the exact order is not known. George himself had been born in Mississippi in 1897; his father had when he was very young, and his mother remarried by the time he was about two. The 1910 census had him living alone with his maternal grandmother, still in Mississippi. (I can find no record of his mother or step-father in that census.) He came to California some time after 1910—I can find no record of him in either the World War registration cards, though he would have been of age, or the 1920 census. His obituary, however, does say that he served in World War I.
Probably, they married in the 1920; the census gives the age of George’s age at first marriage as twenty five, and Polly’s at nineteen, which would date to 1920 for both of them. And by 1930, they had two daughters, Helen and Elise, 7 and 6 years old. Helen H. Lamb, Polly’s mother, was also living with them at the time. Benjamin must have died in the 1920s. In 1930, George was a typewriter mechanic—his obituary says that he had worked at Capwell’s Department Store and was a member of the Staionary’s Engineers Union. Polly was working at the time, somewhat unusually for a married woman with children, as a secretary for a printing company. (Helen was working as a school teacher.)
Through the 1930s, the continued to live in Berkeley, California, with Polly alternately a stenographer and housewife, according to city directories, and George a mechanic, typewriter mechanic, and salesman.
Polly Lamb also had an artistic streak. The 22 September 1929 edition the Oakland Tribune published a poem of hers, which, given the lack of material about her, is of some interest. It is reproduced below:
Life’s My Lover
I.
Life’s my lover, bold and free.
He builds my span of days for me.
Ecstasy dawns the morning of one.
Sorrow drowns the evening sun.
I stand abashed before my lord.
And over me experience is poured.
I loved him from the nursery floor.
I worshipped more, outside that door.
In girlhood, wide my arms I flung
In praise of Life I joyfully sung.
He strained me in a wild embrace
And left his scars across my face.
He taught me happiness and pain:
He gave me loss and showed me gain.
Despair embittered my quest of strife.
But numb and aching, I clung to Life.
My lover thrilled me with delight
And left me miserable that night.
I lived with Life continually,
His whims and fancies lashing me
To docile acquiescence.
II.
Life’s my lover, hard and cruel,
Bending me to his iron rule.
He gives a seldom, soft caress
And steals from me all loveliness.
What I desire he gives away,
What I abhor he asks to stay.
I straighten up beneath his load,
Driven by load. It is his goad.
If I am tired, there is more work.
If I want effort, I must shirk.
He will not let me see my way,
Stumbling and falling, day by day.
He woes me with his steady tread.
Half of me lives, and half is dead.
I was soft clay in his artist’s hands.
He has moulded me to suit his plans.
My outer shell is callous and rough.
But my inner soul is finer stuff.
It is the spark that he set free,
It is the eye he taught to see,
His own superiority.
In the mid 1930s, according to the Oakland Tribune, she was involved with the Berkeley “Scribbler’s Club”—which seemed focused on writing—and the All Arts Club. For the latter, she was in the drama section and wrote and performed in at least one play, “Camouflage,” which was performed at small civic buildings—a Masonic Temple and community church, for example. In 1946, she joined the California Writer’s Club and established its novel section, according to the California Writer’s Club Bullletin.
As well, according to Don Herron, she was a pulp writer. Her career in that, though, is hard to follow. It seems that she wrote for the “love pulps,” a much-maligned genre targeted at young working-class women. Unlike the science fiction, detective, and weird pulps, the love pulps have attracted very little historical scholarship. So far, I have been able to track down one story she wrote, “Half Saint, Half Sinner,” which appeared in All-Story Love Stories 6 March 1937. She used her full name, Polly Lamb Goforth.
It was right around this time, however, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, that her marriage to George ended. The 1942 and 1944 city directories no longer lists George at the same address as Polly, and Polly has a job as a private secretary (her death certificate also listed her occupation as secretary, but in that case as working for an insurance company.) George’s World War II registration card, filled out in 1945, gives the name of his wife as Anne, incidentally Polly middle name, but also the name of the wife listed in his obituary, and so a different woman.
Some time in the late 1940s she moved to San Francisco proper. According to her death certificate—the information for which was provided by June Bird, one of George’s daughters and maybe one of Polly’s, too, or maybe not—she moved to the City in 1946. The Writer’s Club Bulletin, however, has her address in Berkeley through May of 1947. Presumably, then, she actually moved in late 1947 or after, and this would have been the time that she met Kenneth MacNichol. Her last address was 628 Montgomery Street, about a ten minute walk from Pencraft Writers Studio.
The courtship and marriage (and divorce) of Kenneth MacNichol and Polly Lamb (Goforth) is unrecorded. But it is possible to see what drew them together. First, both were divorced, MacNichol at least twice, maybe three times. Second, MacNcihol was a successful writer and Lamb was a writer, though seemingly not as successful. They both looked at writing, too, as a craft, which could be mastered. When Lamb was running the novel section of the California Writer’s Club, she insisted that participants—about five or six, according to the Bulletin—break down the process of novel writing into small bits, and focus on mastering these bits, not unlike the way MacNichol approached some of his story writing. As well, they both wrote for the pulps, which confined them to a certain class of writers and a certain social circle—it’s not hard to see how they might have met especially since Lamb seemed to be a joiner, and so may have sought out Pencraft and MacNichol.
Pulp writing would have further focused the two on thinking of writing as a craft, rather than an art. The love pulps, edited at the time often by women (that would change) and written by women (that wouldn’t) for a mostly young working-class audience (that wouldn’t either) had very stringent conventions, more so than the weird or science fiction pulps, even, as best I can tell. A 1938 article for Scirbner’s on the love pulps divided them into three classes: the love pulps proper, in which a good young woman met and successfully courted a good, strong man, who was the epitome of romance. There was no sex in these. The confession magazines upheld the same ideals, but by following a different scheme: the so-called three Rs, ruin, regret, and redemption, with a bad girl sometimes engaging in sex, but certainly going too far, paying hell for her transgressions. The “breezy” pulps were targeted at older women and focused on married or adulterous women. There forbidden passions---the bed preceding the chapel, as Scribner’s had it—did not lead to ruin, but to happiness. In all cases, it was imperative that the author understand the different rules and write to them. It was also important that, above all else, emotion be evoked—this, said Scribner’s was what truly differentiated pulp from slick writing, even more than the quality of the prose, which sometimes did favor the pulps.
Lamb and MacNichol also shared an interest in what at the time might have been called the weird or occult. Since the late 1930s MacNichol had turned back to pulp writing and did a lot of work for fantasy and weird magazines. He was also interested in Forteana. Lamb had a romantic streak, at least, as is clear from her poem. Also, according to Robert Barbour Johnson, she was an actual sorceress, practicing a kind of magic made famous earlier in the twentieth century by Aleister Crowley.
Crowley was the most renowned mage of his generation. The most notorious, too, known sometimes as The Beast. He defined magic as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” This definition emphasized visualization and fit in with a stream of metaphysical ideas that had been apparent in America since at least the New Thought wave of the Civil War era. (George F. Haas, who had some works by Crowley, also defined magic in these terms.) There’s something of this ideal in a few of the notes that Lamb wrote for The California Writer’s Club Bulletin in which she emphasized—with italics—that she would see people at the next meeting, as if visualizing what she expected to come true. That may be reading too much into a few notes, but Johnson did swear by her abilities.
Eventually, she and MacNichol divorced and went their separate ways. It seems likely that the Fortean Society would have dwindled, then, too, since this was already after its expulsion and Johnson only remembers it lasting for a few years after the excommunication. (He also conflates the end with the death of MacNichol and Lamb, but those events were separated by several years.)
It is not known what Polly Lamb was doing during the middle part of the 1950s. Presumably, she continued to write. She did not remarry, but stayed in the City as a secretary, living in what was still then a Bohemian, artsy area. She also seems to have continued practicing magic.
According to Johnson, it was her magical abilities that led to her demise: by mucking around with the occult, she unleashed some horrible power from the Outside. I don’t know enough about Polly Lamb to know if that’s fair to her, or a language she would have understood and accepted. It very well may say more about Johnson than anything else, his (possibly arch) belief in coincidence, the weird, and the beyond. Doctors had a more prosaic cause for her death. Polly Lamb was said to have a congenital aneurysm in her brain (in the Circle of Willis). Around 14 December 1956, it ruptured and some time after that she went to Mt. Zion Hospital, about three miles from her home. She died at 0700 on 17 December 1956.
