There were many ways Russell Walter Gibbons could have come to the Fortean Society, but, from this distance, only one is apparent. Born 14 October 1931 in Hamburg, New York, the second son of Walter and Marion Gibbons, Russell was one of the youngest of those who belonged to the original Fortean Society—only seven months after his birth, Fort’s last book came out, and the man himself died. Russell attended area schools and graduated from Ohio Northern University, according to an obituary. He was an inheritor of Upstate New York and Upper Midwest progressive thought—one of the paths that might have brought him to the Fortean Society which, in Thayer’s hands, welcomed political discussion.
Gibbons worked as a journalist for a time, covering labor issues. A member of the United Steel Workers union since 1949—when he did summer work in the mills—he came to work for the union in its public relations division starting in 1965, moving to Pittsburgh. He married in 1957, Louise Samulski, and they had two children. Louise left him a widow, and he remarried in 1972, Charlotte Zirnger, with whom he also had two children. Eventually, he was editor of “Steelabor” and Director of Communications from 1978 to 1987. Gibbons was a Catholic, and wrote on social justice issue for Catholic publications. His father had been a chiropractor, and Gibbons edited “Chiropractic Age,” which documented chiropracty’s struggle for legitimacy—another path that might have led him to the Fortean Society, which embraced naturopaths and advocates of alternative medical ideas.
Gibbons worked as a journalist for a time, covering labor issues. A member of the United Steel Workers union since 1949—when he did summer work in the mills—he came to work for the union in its public relations division starting in 1965, moving to Pittsburgh. He married in 1957, Louise Samulski, and they had two children. Louise left him a widow, and he remarried in 1972, Charlotte Zirnger, with whom he also had two children. Eventually, he was editor of “Steelabor” and Director of Communications from 1978 to 1987. Gibbons was a Catholic, and wrote on social justice issue for Catholic publications. His father had been a chiropractor, and Gibbons edited “Chiropractic Age,” which documented chiropracty’s struggle for legitimacy—another path that might have led him to the Fortean Society, which embraced naturopaths and advocates of alternative medical ideas.
Gibbons passed 24 December 2010.
What we know did draw him to the Society was another fight for an underdog. Gibbons was committed to the idea that Frederick Cook, not Admiral Peary, reached the North Pole. In 1993, he was executive director of The Frederick Cook Society and created its annual journal “Polar Priorities.” But his interest in Cook, and the heterodox claim of his priority, dates back almost four decades, at least. He passed around a 129 page mimeographed essay in 1956 titled “An Historical Evaluation of the Cook Peary Controversy,” which was available through V.C.B. Company in Hamburg; in 1965, he put out—through the Frederick A. Cook Society and the Sullivan County Historical Society—a 23-page pamphlet “Frederick Albert Cook: Pioneer American Polar Explorer.”
In Doubt 52 (May 1956), Thayer ran a three-page long essay by Gibbons titled “Dr. Frederick A. Cook: American Dreyfus.” Gibbons was introduced as an associate of The Arctic Institute of North America and member of the American Historical Association, and was said to be revising his work monograph on the brouhaha. The point behind calling Cook an American Dreyfus was to invoke the 19th-century Dreyfus Affair, a metonym for injustice and rash judgment by a partisan press. It was not the first time the Cook-Peary controversy had appeared in Doubt: there had been a few other irruptions, and Thayer himself admitted that he thought Cook had as good a claim as Peary.
The whole matter almost passed again without notice, one more plumping for Cook, with no further connection between Gibbons and the Fortean Society: once more an advocate of a heterodox position finding the Society a welcome repository of an essay, but seemingly no deep or abiding interest in Fort or Thayer’s version of Forteanism. But there was one more mention of the essay, and the incredible sight of Thayer extending an apology. In Doubt 53 (February 1957), Ted Leitzell wrote an indignant note to the magazine, insisting that his work had been wrongly cited by Gibbons. Thayer looked into the matter, agreed the Leitzell had been mis-represented, and extended his apologies. It is possible that the mistake led to a break between Thayer and Gibbons, but more likely, Gibbons had other matters to which to attend and no real interest in the Society. At any rate, he was never mentioned again.
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What we know did draw him to the Society was another fight for an underdog. Gibbons was committed to the idea that Frederick Cook, not Admiral Peary, reached the North Pole. In 1993, he was executive director of The Frederick Cook Society and created its annual journal “Polar Priorities.” But his interest in Cook, and the heterodox claim of his priority, dates back almost four decades, at least. He passed around a 129 page mimeographed essay in 1956 titled “An Historical Evaluation of the Cook Peary Controversy,” which was available through V.C.B. Company in Hamburg; in 1965, he put out—through the Frederick A. Cook Society and the Sullivan County Historical Society—a 23-page pamphlet “Frederick Albert Cook: Pioneer American Polar Explorer.”
In Doubt 52 (May 1956), Thayer ran a three-page long essay by Gibbons titled “Dr. Frederick A. Cook: American Dreyfus.” Gibbons was introduced as an associate of The Arctic Institute of North America and member of the American Historical Association, and was said to be revising his work monograph on the brouhaha. The point behind calling Cook an American Dreyfus was to invoke the 19th-century Dreyfus Affair, a metonym for injustice and rash judgment by a partisan press. It was not the first time the Cook-Peary controversy had appeared in Doubt: there had been a few other irruptions, and Thayer himself admitted that he thought Cook had as good a claim as Peary.
The whole matter almost passed again without notice, one more plumping for Cook, with no further connection between Gibbons and the Fortean Society: once more an advocate of a heterodox position finding the Society a welcome repository of an essay, but seemingly no deep or abiding interest in Fort or Thayer’s version of Forteanism. But there was one more mention of the essay, and the incredible sight of Thayer extending an apology. In Doubt 53 (February 1957), Ted Leitzell wrote an indignant note to the magazine, insisting that his work had been wrongly cited by Gibbons. Thayer looked into the matter, agreed the Leitzell had been mis-represented, and extended his apologies. It is possible that the mistake led to a break between Thayer and Gibbons, but more likely, Gibbons had other matters to which to attend and no real interest in the Society. At any rate, he was never mentioned again.
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Caroline Folk Urie did not seem to be associated with the Fortean Society at all—but was rather an icon to Thayer. A member noted only in passing, it is unclear if she ever paid dues, read the magazine, or knew anything about Fort: the evidence, such as it is, suggests she was recruited, much in the manner of Norman Thomas and other Fortean icons. Born 28 July 1973 in Indiana, as Caroline Foulke, she married John Urie in 1910 (also in Indiana.) Caroline was a devout Quaker and, like Gibbons, a social justice advocate. She worked at Jane Addams’s Hull House for a time, where she introduced the Montessori kindergarten method. She was a socialist and member of the War Resister’s League. (John had served in the Navy during World War I, and his involvement may have led her to Pacifism, I’m not sure.) In 1951, she published “Pilgrimage of Protest,” which I have not read.
I do not know Urie’s story well enough to be sure, but my suspicion is that she came to public attention in the late 1940s when she refused to pay part of her tax bill because it went to preparations for war. At the time, she was living in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and seven other Ohioans joined the cause; forty other people nationwide did too—all members of “Peacemakers,” a pacifist group. In 1948, she deducted 32.3% of the first installment of her tax bill (for the second time) because, she said, “war preparation in the atomic era is a crime against nature.”
It was this stance, as one might expect—given his own pacifist inclinations and general distrust of the government—that endeared Urie to Thayer. I would guess that he probably asked her to join the Society along about this time, though I have no evidence, and he very well may have waived any dues, as he often did, even for so-called regular members. All of this is speculation because Urie only ever made the pages of “Doubt” once, and that was after she could care. In Doubt 49 (August 1955), Thayer noted that Caroline Urie, and MFS who had worked for international cooperation and had refused to pay war taxes, died. She had passed away in early April.
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I do not know Urie’s story well enough to be sure, but my suspicion is that she came to public attention in the late 1940s when she refused to pay part of her tax bill because it went to preparations for war. At the time, she was living in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and seven other Ohioans joined the cause; forty other people nationwide did too—all members of “Peacemakers,” a pacifist group. In 1948, she deducted 32.3% of the first installment of her tax bill (for the second time) because, she said, “war preparation in the atomic era is a crime against nature.”
It was this stance, as one might expect—given his own pacifist inclinations and general distrust of the government—that endeared Urie to Thayer. I would guess that he probably asked her to join the Society along about this time, though I have no evidence, and he very well may have waived any dues, as he often did, even for so-called regular members. All of this is speculation because Urie only ever made the pages of “Doubt” once, and that was after she could care. In Doubt 49 (August 1955), Thayer noted that Caroline Urie, and MFS who had worked for international cooperation and had refused to pay war taxes, died. She had passed away in early April.
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Robert Frank Weirauch was another polymathic member of the Fortean Society whose only documented connection was minuscule—maybe he was a true devoté of Fort, but the evidence is just not there. Weirauch was born 23 June 1930 to Helen (Walters) and Frank Weirauch; he was, like Gibbons, one of the very youngest members of the Fortean Society, coming into the world only two years before Fort left it. Frank, an Austrian immigrant, was in the air force and so the family moved a lot.
Robert, by his own account, studied music at the Manhattan School of Music in the early 1950s. According to records, he married Naomi Blake in 1956; that was in Virginia. She was a musician and he was listed as an astronomer. The marriage does not seem to have lasted long. There’s a record of him marrying another woman, Gertrude Shaw, in South Dakota in August of 1958; Gertrude was subsequently granted a divorce in December 1960. I am not sure what happened to Naomi.
By his own report, he studied astronomy, physics, and mathematics at Georgetown University, receiving a Bachelor’s Degree, but not finishing the doctorate program. He subsequently worked—again, by his own account—as an astronomer at the Naval Observatory, with Nasa, and doing aerospace engineering for private industries. His dissertation research on celestial mechanics was published in 1960. There followed much travel, a doctorate in music (1967) and numerous jobs around the world.
As far as I know, he is still alive, and based in Reno, Nevada.
Weihrauch’s only known connection to Fort or the Fortean Society came in Doubt 52 (May 1956), the same issue that carried Gibbons’s essay. It was a brief note about the astronomy of the moon—a favorite subject of another Fortean, Morris K. Jessup. Thayer seems to have promoted the contribution as much because of Weirauch’s credentials as anything else: it was a weird tension in the Society, the distrust of science but also the craving for scientists to join and give credibility to the organization. Thayer introduced the brief bit—titled “Floor of Plato”—thusly: “The Society has added another bona fide astronomer to its rolls in Robert Weirauch.”
What followed then was what seems to be an excerpt from a letter Weirauch had written to Thayer. He was a member of the Society and, judging by Thayer’s comments, a recent one, though I do not know what drew him to Fort or the Fortean Society; I do not even know if he ever read Fort’s books, though it is not impossible: astronomers would have heard of Fort as a critic o their profession, and that might have intrigued Weirauch. He noted to Thayer that he had read an article in the April 1955 issue of the popular science magazine “Sky and Telescope” titled “The Tree Riddles of Plato” and “now I really have a purpose in life as an astronomer . . . to watch the moon as never before.”
As summarized by Weirauch, the article mentioned Plato—a lunar crater near Mare Imbrium—was the site of three anomalies: shadows of nearby mountains have changed shapes drastically; the floor of Plato sometimes appeared convex, sometimes concave; and the crater was itself pockmarked with smaller craterlets—that changed number, ranging from something in the seventies to only a dozen to none at all, the floor of Plato perfectly smooth. Weirauch did not draw out any implications of the observations, but of course they fed into the idea being then promoted by Jessup that the moon was inhabited—in Jessup’s version, it was descendants of ancient human civilizations that lived there.
One wonders what Weirauch himself was getting at; the matter was left incomplete, though, as he never again appeared in Doubt.
Robert, by his own account, studied music at the Manhattan School of Music in the early 1950s. According to records, he married Naomi Blake in 1956; that was in Virginia. She was a musician and he was listed as an astronomer. The marriage does not seem to have lasted long. There’s a record of him marrying another woman, Gertrude Shaw, in South Dakota in August of 1958; Gertrude was subsequently granted a divorce in December 1960. I am not sure what happened to Naomi.
By his own report, he studied astronomy, physics, and mathematics at Georgetown University, receiving a Bachelor’s Degree, but not finishing the doctorate program. He subsequently worked—again, by his own account—as an astronomer at the Naval Observatory, with Nasa, and doing aerospace engineering for private industries. His dissertation research on celestial mechanics was published in 1960. There followed much travel, a doctorate in music (1967) and numerous jobs around the world.
As far as I know, he is still alive, and based in Reno, Nevada.
Weihrauch’s only known connection to Fort or the Fortean Society came in Doubt 52 (May 1956), the same issue that carried Gibbons’s essay. It was a brief note about the astronomy of the moon—a favorite subject of another Fortean, Morris K. Jessup. Thayer seems to have promoted the contribution as much because of Weirauch’s credentials as anything else: it was a weird tension in the Society, the distrust of science but also the craving for scientists to join and give credibility to the organization. Thayer introduced the brief bit—titled “Floor of Plato”—thusly: “The Society has added another bona fide astronomer to its rolls in Robert Weirauch.”
What followed then was what seems to be an excerpt from a letter Weirauch had written to Thayer. He was a member of the Society and, judging by Thayer’s comments, a recent one, though I do not know what drew him to Fort or the Fortean Society; I do not even know if he ever read Fort’s books, though it is not impossible: astronomers would have heard of Fort as a critic o their profession, and that might have intrigued Weirauch. He noted to Thayer that he had read an article in the April 1955 issue of the popular science magazine “Sky and Telescope” titled “The Tree Riddles of Plato” and “now I really have a purpose in life as an astronomer . . . to watch the moon as never before.”
As summarized by Weirauch, the article mentioned Plato—a lunar crater near Mare Imbrium—was the site of three anomalies: shadows of nearby mountains have changed shapes drastically; the floor of Plato sometimes appeared convex, sometimes concave; and the crater was itself pockmarked with smaller craterlets—that changed number, ranging from something in the seventies to only a dozen to none at all, the floor of Plato perfectly smooth. Weirauch did not draw out any implications of the observations, but of course they fed into the idea being then promoted by Jessup that the moon was inhabited—in Jessup’s version, it was descendants of ancient human civilizations that lived there.
One wonders what Weirauch himself was getting at; the matter was left incomplete, though, as he never again appeared in Doubt.
