​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.

​A magpie Fortean.

Leslie Alan Shepard was born 21 June 1917 in West Ham, London—about two-and-a-half years before the publication of Fort’s first book. I do not know who his parents were, but according to obituaries he did not come from a privileged background—“genteel poor,” he said to one acquaintance, much later. He finished only an elementary education. As a youth, he was infatuated with Charles Kingsley’s collection of Greek myths. He left school at fourteen to become a library assistant but, finding no opening, studied shorthand, typing, and book-keeping, eventually taking a job as an office boy at an asbestos factory. By the time he was 20—so in 1937—he’d developed asbestosis.

Shepard had been interested in cinema since he was a child, and in 1941, he joined Paul Rotha Productions, where he worked in the cutting room. With the outbreak of World War II, he declared himself a conscientious objector, on general humanitarian grounds; he worked with the Civil Defence, carrying stretchers, instead. Also during the war, he worked with the Ministry of Information making regular newsreels. After the Axis powers were defeated, Shepard was a founder of Data Film Productions, serving on its board from 1945 to 1948. Around this time, he also went to work helping produce another regular news film, “Mining Review,” for the National Coal Board. Later, the Central Office of Information employed him to make documentaries.

​A pair of ????? Forteans.

So, here’s one of those examples of a common last name appearing once in the pages of Doubt. I really don’t know who it refers to—there’s just not enough information. But, there is a couple who were associated with the Fortean Society that had this exact same last name, and I’ll use the incident as an example to write about them. Although—reversing the usual happenstance—I am more confident about the woman of the pair than the man. He remains ?????.

Phe Laws was born Phyllis Mae Wyand 2 January 1925 in Kewanee, Illinois. Her father, Charles Eldon, was a glove cutter. Her mother, Fern Green (really) died when Phe and her baby sister, Sheila were still very young—five or less in Phe’s case. According to the 1930 census, Charles’s much older aunt lived with them, presumably to care for the girls. Charles was 28 at the time—a young widow—and Minnie 65. (Charles himself had been raised by his grandfather and Minnie—or at least lived with them in 1910.) The family was still in Kewanee in 1940, but had changed in many ways. Minnie was no loner there. Charles remarried, a woman some dozen years his junior. Phyllis and Sheila were in high school, a sophomore and freshman, respectively.

​Yet another mysterious Fortean.

This write-up is a revised and (slightly) updated version of a series of posts I first did back in 2009 (!) and 2010. It seems to be the un-cited source for much of the wikipedia entry on the man.

Robert Barbour Johnson was born on 19 August.  That much we can say with some certainty.  It's the date given on his application for a social security number and on his death certificate.  Beyond that, well, there's a range of possible answers.  His World War II enlistment card says 1905.  His application for social security says 1906. Obviously, there are incentives for making one's self older to get social security earlier. There are also incentives for making oneself younger and some suggestion Johnson relished the idea of being a wunderkind.  When his story "Far Below" was chosen as the best yarn ever published in Weird Tales, he was noted as one of the magazine's younger writer.  He said that he harassed his writer friends with that for month, pointing out that lots of people say they are young, but he had written proof.  His death certificate says 1907 (as does the SSDI).  His recollections for The Weird Tales Story suggests that he was born in 1909.  Edan Hughes's “Artists in California” has him born in that year as well.

​Enthusiastic—but slippery!—Forteans.

Note that this is an update, revision, and compilation of a series of posts I published several years ago.

There is some confusion about who Garen and Kirk Drussai even were.   I can be sure that Garen was born 17 June 1916 in the Bronx: all relevant documents confirm this.  But what was her name?  According to her death certificate and the birth certificate of her son, Garen’s maiden name was Lewis.  A search of the census records, however, fails to find any Garen Lewises—and Garen is an extremely uncommon name.  A clue to her identity can be found in her social security application. There she gives her name as Clara Hettler and her parents as Benjamin Hettler and Annie (Besner) Hettler.  The 1920 and 1930 census does record a family of Hettlers living in the Bronx, headed by Benjamin and Annie (Besner), with a daughter, Clara, born about 1916.

Clara Hettler filled out her social security application in December 1936.  It seems very possible that she changed her name in the late 1930s when Hettler—a variation of Hitler—would have been an inconvenient name to carry.  (It is also possible that she married in the 1930s and later divorced.)  Further confirmation that she Clara and Garen are indeed the same person come from a 1966 obituary for the eldest of the three Hettler sisters listed on the 1920 census, Estelle.  The article lists her parents and her sisters as Gertrude, the middle child, and Garen Drussai, indicating that although the rest of the family did not change its name—except upon marriage—they accepted their youngest daughter’s new name (at this point, Garen had married and divorced Kirk, and came by Drussai that way).

​A Fortean in spirit, inclination—and his very being.

Charles Fort attacked the very notion of categories. “But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.”

No surprise, then, that when chasing down Forteans I’ve found they do not always have very much respect for one of the most common categories of our lives: names. That’s especially true of this Fortean. I’ll start by saying that he—it’s a he—was consistent with his surname: Markham. And, when he used it, his middle initial, G. (which probably stood for Garrett.) First name, though, was variously David or Norman. And that change made him difficult to track.

I think I figured it out. But let’s take it step by step.

​A Fortean of tremendous accomplishment, whose life is fully told, except for the parts most relevant to his Forteanism.

Gilson VanderVeer Willets was born in New York City on 19 November 1898. His father, also named Gilson Willets, was an author; in 1904, he exchanged letters with the Fortean founder Booth Tarkington. Willets’ moth was Daisy May VanderVeer, known in the family as Dean. In 1900, the Willets lived with Dean’s father, John Vanderveer, a manufacturer. The New York census from five years later still had the Willets living with Gilson’s maternal grandparents, but now in Bedford, New York. Apparently, they were well off. Gilson recalled that he attended St. Anne’s Academy before moving on to the New York Military Academy, a private institution near West Point.

Gilson would later say that he learned Morse code before he turned ten, which would prove prophetic for his future careers. The timeline of his life does get a bit messy after 1910, though. That year the census had him, aged 11, living with his grandparents, now in New Castle, New York (which is in the same county as Bedford: Westchester.) His father was not with the family at the time. The New York census for 1915 has him living as a lodger in Yonker, attending school. According to one article from a later date (preserved in a clipping file at the San Jose History Museum), he set up a one KW radio station in his room, with the call letters GW. He was tall and strong, 6’3” and 225 pounds. Other articles from the same source have him leaving school and heading out to sea in 1914; one even has him working with the radio pioneer Lee De Forest in that year. A family history on ancestry.com has him marrying in November 1917. I cannot verify that, but it is true that in the 1930 census he put down his age at first marriage as 19, which would track.

At the end of that brief piece, I wrote:

So, it’s a mystery: how did Janney even hear of the Fortean Society, let alone become a member? What did he think of Fort?

Well, there's more:

But to fully answer the question—all I needed to do was see a part of Doubt that I somehow missed: Doubt 14, spring 1946, p. 203, “Conchy Specialist” in which Thayer confirms some of the details I dug up and also says that there was correspondence between Thayer and Janney, although Thayer is oblique about the subject and, unfortunately, the letter or letters seem to have been lost. Thayer wrote,

“We are proud of the Fortean membership among these toilers in the vineyard [here he was referring to Conscientious Objectors being required to build privies and sewer systems], and proudest of Werner Janney. Werner (called ‘Casey’) is so literate that his course—since the reinstitution of slavery in the United States—can be followed by a broad trail of pamphlets. Wherever he goes he sets up a Camp Magazine. The latest, called ’27 F’ after the number of his unit, is the best, and it contains the information that an ‘installation’ which required 14 man-days under WPA is made in 3.4 man-days under CO. Of course, the men were paid under WPA; the CO gets less than nothing. The booklet closes with this note, by Janney: ‘The writer of this article was not born with a flush toilet in his mouth. As Woodrow Wilson might have said, he used open plumbing openly arrived at, until he got to college.’

“In a letter he discusses Florida politics, saying such things as might work hardship upon him if we quoted, and adding:

‘I like the term pyrotic. What is the term for people or families susceptible to falling stones, lithotics? And what is the name for one who receives the attention of an ordinary poltergeist, as distinct from the out-door type? There really ought to be some all-embracing term for the person (adolescent girl?) who is the center of any disturbance, whether she cracks her big toes or entertains visitors from Pluto, who like to shy stuff at her. Vortex?”

There’s a lot to digest here.

First, it seems that Swarthmore’s excellent peace collection does not have copies of Janney’s “27 F.” If I’m reading the excerpt correctly, though, he seems to be making a Fortean point: that in college, all kinds of shit was forced into him. Whether he means that before college he spouted (bull)shit, or just foraged on it, is unclear.

Second, he was clearly conversant with the Fortean Society Magazine, if not Fort’s works. Perhaps Janney became aware of the Society through Thayer’s actions supporting COs, sending Doubt to the CO camps, and getting their newsletters in response. Maybe that’s how they struck up their conversation. From the letter, we again see Janney’s sense of whimsy: he is focusing on the words to describe these anomalies, not so much concerned in their metaphysical or scientific meaning, but the humorous vocabulary that could be invented to describe phenomena the world refused to admit existed. The word ‘pyrotic,’ as we will see later, was introduced by Jack Campbell i Doubt 12. Lithotics was a nice riff on it. And Vortex was inspired—connecting the Fortean interest in telekinetically gifted young girls and the Fortean fascination with vortices as the fundamental structure of the universe. To foreshadow again, we’ll see that Thayer ended up choosing a different name for those unfortunate girls.

Third, it still seems as though Janney’s writing for the camps didn’t make much use of Fort or Fortean philosophy, if any, at least not directly, since Thayer quotes nothing, but presumably would.

Janney, then, remains a mystery, but slightly less than one before. What seemed to appeal to him about the Fortean Society was not its politics—although that might have—its social stances or views on science. Instead, it was the humor central to Fort’s vision, the recognition of life’s irreducible absurdities. Shit, Janney well knew, would always run down hill. Make the best of it.