​The movie was unmade, the Society unjoined—but his inclination was Fortean.

Barry Shipman was born 24 February 1912 in Pasadena to Ernest and Nell Shipman, he a theatrical producer and she an actress. Barry grew up on Hollywood studio lots, and accompanied his mother—after her divorce—on location in Big Bear, and at a “movie camp” on the Washington-Idaho border. Later in the 1920s, they moved frequently, through Connecticut, Florida, Spain, and back to California in 1928. Shipman himself went into the entertainment business and, in 1934, married an actress, Beulah McDonald, who went by the stage name Gwynne Shipman. They would have three children, a daughter an twin sons.

​Not a Fortean.

H. G. Wells is the towering figure in science fiction. Charles Fort is a source of Fortean ideas and plots. It is inevitable that they some times end up in the same histories. I do not get the sense that anyone mistakes Wells for a Fortean (the same cannot be said for the stridently anti-Fortean H. L. Mencken, who is often co-opted into the movement), but it seems best to reiterate the point: H. G. Wells was not a Fortean.

Even if he was honored by the Society.

​Interested in theories of the earth’s hollowness—and a fringe member of the community of Forteans.

Francis Dillon Brownley was born 20 September 1916 in New York to Howard D. Brownley and the former Margaret May. He had an elder brother named James. In 1920, the family lived in Washington, D.C., with Howard’s widowed father and a 16 year-old servant. Howard was the only one in the family working, as a government clerk.; he had earlier served in World War I. Ten years later, the nuclear family—Howard and May, James and Francis—were in Howard’s natal home state of Maryland, where he worked for the Coast Guard.

Some time in the 1930s, the family relocated to the other side of the country, settling in Alameda, California around 1935. The 1940 census has Howard working as a marine engineer at an engine company—probably related to the shipyards outside of Oakland. James had moved out. Francis, now 24, was categorized as a “new worker” and having been unemployed for 12 weeks. He seems to have quit school after his junior year of high school. He went by the name Frank now, using it on official forms, such as his social security application.

​Harry Allen Smith was born 19 December 1907 in McLeansboro, Illinois, the son of Henry Arthur Smith and the former Adeline Mae Allen. He was the third of nine children. Adeline had planned to name him Henry Allen, but his grandmother had the documents made out in her preferred way: Harry Arthur Smith, Jr. His parents knew nothing of the shenanigans, and called him by the name they thought was his; only later was the subterfuge revealed, and the young Smith opted for Harry Allen—H. Allen as it was later stylized—though he became unsure, thinking it a bit “faggoty.”

His father, at least according to the 1910 census, was in retail bricks, which would seem to mean he sold bricks. He worked on his own accord. The family moved through Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana, during his childhood yearsThe family was in Defiance, Indiana, by 1920, where the elder Harry worked as a cigar maker. Around this time, the younger Harry dropped out of high school, eventually finding himself working as a journalist, beginning, it seems, with a job at the Huntington Press in 1922.

Over the next decade, Smith moved frequently, rural journalist job to rural journalist job: Jeffersonville, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; Sebring, Florida. He was sometimes editor, sometimes even part owner of the places he worked. In Sebring, he met the society editor Nelle Mae Simpson, and they became engaged. He did bummed around, from job o job, and even spent time compiling city directories, before moving out to Tulsa, Oklahoma, were he and Nelle wed. They had two children. After a short stay there, he and Nelle moved to Denver, where he followed in the footsteps of Gene Fowler.

​This one is kind of a guess—but a good guess.

And, it turns out: a correct one. I recently received a cache of letters from a family member of this MFS that confirms my (earlier) speculation about his identity, and gives some insight into how he read and thought about Fort, Forteanism, and the Fortean Society.

“Douglas” gets a few mentions in Doubt. The first was in June 1943’s story on ‘Scientifiction,’ in which he is listed as associated with science fiction. That same issue notes he had sent in material, although Thayer did not have the space to consider it. Douglas—or someone with the last name Douglas—received credit five more times. The last also gave a better clue to the identity of the Fortean, as the surname was spelled with two esses, Douglass. (Thayer mis-spelled names a lot.)

But the biggest clues come from the last mention, in April 1955 (issue #48). Thayer notes that the cover of the winter issue—featuring a grimacing face captioned “Joy to the World”—received much praise, so much that some suggested it be made into a Christmas card.Thayer noted that it was a Christmas card, from Jesse Douglas—one S, again—who had joined the Fortean Society as a undergraduate at the University of Minnesota and sent in the card—drawn by a fellow Fortean and Gopher, last name Swisher—from Panama.

​Overlooked, but—at least as much because of what he represents as his own activities—an important Fortean.

Waldemar Bernhard Kaempfert was born 23 September 1877 in New York City, making him a contemporary of Charles Fort, who was born upstate, in Albany, three years earlier. His father, Barnhard, was a German immigrant; his mother, the former Juliette Levine, was born in New York to a Russian father and German mother; Barnhard and Juliette were married 15 October 1876. I believe that Waldemar was their eldest child; he had a sister, Magda, two years his junior. I have not been able to find the Kaempfferts in the 1880 or 1900 censuses (the 1890 census was destroyed in a fire), so I do not know what work Barnhard did. He died sometime before 1910, leaving Juliette a widow for the last several decades of her life. Waldemar attended local schools, and graduated from the City College of New York with a Bachelor’s of Science in 1897.

Kaempffert went to work at Scientific American after his graduation; according to Wikipedia, his first job there was translating. In 1900, he became a managing editor; he also continued his education: he received and LL.B. from City College in 1904. In 1910, according to the census, Waldemar was living with his mother and sister on West 105th in Manhattan. Magda, who was divorced, taught at a school; Juliette did not have a job listed. The following year, Kaempffert married Carolyn Lydia Yeaton. During this period,, he was also writing on science for other periodicals—including Harper’s, Cosmopolitan, and McClure’s—and putting out books. In 1905 he translated Mathot’s “Gas-Engines and Producer-Gas Plants” from the French; in 1909 he published “Astronomy,” the first volume in “The Science-History of the Universe”; and in 1911, “The New Art of Flying.”

​Too little known, too important to ignore: the story of a Fortean.

I know very little about the personal life of Judith L. Gee, but some of it can, perhaps, be reconstructed by a cache of letters in the Eric Frank Russell archives which I first missed (as they are not collected with the rest of the Fortean correspondence.) Her maiden name was likely Lask—at least that was the surname of her brother—and it may be what is what the L stands for. She was Jewish, and her brother lived in Israel, at least  as of September 1948. 

​A seminal skeptic who was, inevitably, caught up in the nexus of Forteans.

Bergen Baldwin Evans was born 19 September 1904 in Franklin, Ohio. His father, Rice Kemper, was a doctor, the fourth generation in the family to practice; his mother was Louise Cass. They had six children, Bergen the third of them. When Bergen was about five, the family relocated to Sheffield, England, as his father had given up his work as a doctor to accept clerkship in the consular service. World War I and the poor salary had him send his children back to Ohio, where they lived with an aunt. At night and on Saturdays, Bergen worked in a paper mill. He was a bright child, educated at the local schools. He matriculated at Miami University (in Oxford Ohio) when he was 15.

A need to be the smartest guy in the room seems to have developed—according to his own reckoning—from his family situation. He later said, “I don’t know quite where my iconoclasm got its roots—possibly in the fact that my father and brother were both big guys, terribly athletic and physically self-reliant, definitely the do-it-yourself type, while I was a lie-by-the-fire, ten-thumbed mollycoddle. My only revenge was to hunt out some chinks in the armor of their assurance when they were arming for battle and drop a few chiggers in. Then, by extension, to all the dogmatic and assured.”

Conspicuously not a Fortean.

Rupert Thomas Gould was born to a solid middle-class background in England 16 November 1890. He went into the navy early, where he studied navigation. His career, though, was waylaid an intense period of depression—one of many that would mark Gould’s life. At one point, he was in bed, mute, for a year. He was given a position in the hydrographer's department, and retired as a lieutenant commander.

He married Muriel Estall in 1917, and the two established a family; their son Cecil was born in 1918, and a daughter Jocelyne in 1920. Apparently, Gould had quite a bit of liberty in the hydrographer’s office. He studied naval history, especially British polar expeditions, and cartography. Most famously, he restored the marine chronometers of John Harrison, which had been essential in establishing ways for navigators to determine longitude. In 1923 he wrote “The Marine Chronometer, Its History and Development,” which, according to his biographer, the horologist Jonathan Betts, was a standard work for the next half century. (Gould had an engineering cast of mind, and also tinkered with—and wrote about—typewriters.)

​Caught in the Fortean nexus, he was, himself, disdainful of Forteans.

Benedict Abramson was born 25 August 1898 in Kadenei, Lithuania. I cannot find him in the U.S. census from 1910 or 1920—not especially surprising, really—but later records indicate his family emigrated early in the new century, reaching New York (from Hamburg, Germany) on 3 July 1901, aboard an unknown ship. They then made their way to Chicago, supposedly reaching it on 6 July. Ben—as he became known—was the eldest of five children, all the others born in Chicago.

The Abramsons were Jewish—it may be that they left their homeland because of anti-Semitism—and found support from the Jewish community. Benedict attended the Jewish Training School of Chicago, which had been established by German Jews at the end of the 19th century to help assimilate immigrants to their new homes. At first, the school’s course focused on handwork—in addition to language and history—hoping to create a class of Jews who were not peddlers. Abramson attended toward the end of the school’s career, when there was some debate over whether it was still necessary, and apparently when clerical and related skills were also being taught. He when he was 18—so around 1914.