Summary of a Life

December will mark 20 years since my father died. To many who knew him, he was a remarkable man. My father didn’t think so. I’ll let you decide for yourself.

My father’s name was Widman, and therein lies a tale. The family last name for generations was Widmann. That name had died out. A relative had offered my grandfather money if he would name his child Widman, to carry on the name just a bit longer. My grandfather readily agreed. My father didn’t object: he felt it was as good a way to name a kid as anything. That name would cause an interesting surprise nearly 75 years after my father was born—but that story comes later.

My father grew up in the 1920s, when kids actually did something with their time. I remember hearing tales of how he built stuff. Lots of stuff: kites (including one he called “The Angel of Death”), guitars, sailboats, and even a boat made out of cast concrete. When he wasn’t building, he was reading: his tastes went for old pulp fiction, including a pulp magazine called “The Old West,” as well as books about heroes we know even today: Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Doc Savage.

I wish I had talked to him about his years as a young man, I remember him mentioning something about playing one of the guitars he made in a local coffee house in the 1920s or 1930s (I had assumed that coffee houses didn’t pop up until the beatnik era).

My father related the standard family stories too: while the adults were making bootleg home brew, he was making home made root beer. He even related a story of wanting some candy. He had a recipe, but the recipe required fat. All the fat he had was some leftover bacon grease. The candy tasted funny, but he had candy, and it tasted great to him.

He recalled, years later, how he had been canoeing one day, and suddenly had a pain in his chest, so bad that he couldn’t sleep. Years later, he realized that he had had his first heart attack at 16.

Fast forward a few years, to 1939. In April of that year he married my mother. In September of that year WW2 began, a war that would shape much of his life.

In 1944 my father was drafted. Elements of his division, the 42nd infantry, were in Belgium during December of 1944. My father just missed the battle of the bulge, the last great German offensive of the war.

My father arrived in Germany. Basically the 42nd was doing what they call mop up operations. His division liberated one small German town in particular. It was a little town, not much to speak of really.

The town’s name was Dachau.

My father was morally outraged at what he saw. What decent human being wouldn’t be? He wrote a letter home, describing the horrors he had seen. It was published in a local newsletter; the first piece of writing he ever had published.

I often wonder whether that was a transforming experience for my father. Anti Semitism was a common belief system back then: I remember my mother relating a story about a sign in a park in St. Louis that said “No Jews Allowed.” I do know this much: my father never said one word against the Jewish people during the entire time I knew him. Did any thoughts of anti Semitism leave my father when he saw the reality of the final end product of such thinking, or did he always have respect for the Jewish people? I wish I could ask him.

The war ended in Europe. The war was still very much active in the Pacific theater. The scuttlebutt was among the men of the 42nd infantry was that since the 42nd was MacArthur’s division in WWI, that he was considering using them for an invasion of Japan (this is not true; the soldiers who were slated to invade Japan were already sequestered on an island).

My father was greatly relieved when he read the news about the atom bomb being dropped on Japan. He knew that would end the war.

My father never loaded his rifle during all the time he was in service in Europe: he didn’t want it on his conscience that he had ever killed a man. He felt it was unseemly not to have fired his rifle during the entire war. So one day he saw a raven sitting on the roof of a French barn. He aimed, fired, and missed. And that was the first and only shot he fired in WW2.

After the war, my father went back to his job as the driver for a milk truck. My sister had been born in 1949. Also that year my father had gotten into an accident on his milk truck. I presume there was some sort of collision. The milk cases slammed forward into him, breaking bones.

Darkness. Complete silence. No sound at all: no breathing, no pumping of heart, no circulation of blood.

“Oh my God, I’m dead,” my father thought. Over his body doctors were working to revive him. His body had turned cold, he had been out so long. And then the noise returned.

I was born 10 years later: the son of a dead man.

The years passed. My father got another job, delivering newspapers. I honestly don’t remember much of him from this time. He went to bed at 8PM, got up early in the morning, and would either read or watch television.

I remember a couple of stories from that time: my father had bought a bull to raise him for meat. He decided that he didn’t need the services of a professional butcher: he was a cook in the army, and he had a couple of military issue books on butchering meat, so why not?

I just remember him sitting at his butcher block table, cutting up huge chunks of meat, and occasionally pointing out to me what the parts were. My sister later told me that he threw most of the meat away.

My father also liked plants. He had a garden, and he often planted trees. He bought a peach tree. He nurtured it over the years, watering it, fertilizing it, making sure in every way that it was healthy.

The big day came: the first crop of peaches, something he had anticipated for years. He cut one open. It was a cling peach. He didn’t like cling peaches.

The next day, he cut the tree down.

I was busy myself. It must have gratified my father greatly when I decided that I wanted to try my hand at making root beer, or that I was interested in the same genre he had loved as a boy: science fiction.

Years passed, years spent with my father doing little but working. And then my father had another pain in his chest, one that reminded him of that time when he was 16. It was another heart attack.

The doctor told my father: either retire now, or die working. It wasn’t much of a choice.

At this point all of the interests my father had came out; interests he hadn’t had the time to express. He became interested in bonsai. He became interested in pottery, because those bonsai plants needed pots after all. He dabbled in painting with oil paints He taught courses in bread baking. And on and on…

Since he was interested in bonsai, he decided that he wanted to go where it all began: Japan. So he and my mother went. And therein lies another tale.

He needed his birth certificate to get a passport. He looked at his birth certificate, and realized that he had misspelled his name for over 70 years: it had been spelled Widmann on the birth certificate. .For the first and last time ever, he spelled his name as it was given, because he didn’t want there to be any troubles getting a passport.

My father enjoyed Japan. It’s my understanding that he impressed the bonsai masters there quite favorably.

Not too many years passed. My father went to a meeting of the Bonsai Society of St. Louis at Shaw’s Garden. He suddenly felt a pain in his chest.

Playwright Alfred Jarry’s last words were “Get me, get me, get me… a TOOTHPICK!” Robert E. Lee’s last words hearkened back to the civil war: “Strike the tent!”

My father’s last words were “When are the paramedics going to get here?’

As a postscript, I remember my father telling me about a movie that impressed him greatly: “Just Imagine.” It was a science fiction movie: 50 years after he had seen it he was still talking about it.

The movie itself wasn’t even listed in movie guides in the 1970s. I had assumed that he had seen the “Futurama” film at the 1939 world trade fair.

And then, one day, clicking through the TV channels, there it was: the film “Just Imagine.” I watched it with great interest. It’s a memorable film; not a great one, but it was the first ever science fiction film shot with sound. I felt a connection with my father.

The film had been lost for years, until resurfacing recently. Another bit of my father’s past.

Life on the margins

First off, I just found out that Starlog has ceased publication—for real this time. Finally, the happy event has arrived. My problems with Starlog have been mentioned in this blog. To the editors of Starlog, all I can say is: I’m here and you’re not. As they say, success is the best revenge.

Secondly, good news: work on the Alpha Control Reference Manual is finished, and is at the printer now: way, way ahead of schedule!

Work on The Lost in Space Encyclopedia continues. Publication has been pushed forward to April due to budgetary issues.

There are a lot of other great projects coming down the pike. 2010 will have a flurry of fan activity.

Normally I don’t talk about fan politics, but since I have become active in LIS fandom again, I suppose the subject is germane.

Years ago, when I started up LISFAN I was completely naïve about how science fiction/media fandom works. Some of the things I was right about: I assumed that LISFAN would get a fan following, and I would get offers from fans eager to contribute to my publications. But I didn’t expect any hostility from the fans. Here I was, putting out the best fanzine and other publications that I could. I just naturally assumed that if I was really positive, others would be too.

Now, the negative comments were few and far between, but I tended to remember them more than the positive comments. I also noted that the negative comments had one predominant theme: they were essentially over nothing; that is, they had no validity. At first I would write back to the complainers and try to explain myself, and my reasons for doing what I did. That, I would find out, was a pointless exercise.

For instance, in the early days of LISFAN I made a decision not to print photos in the fanzine. The paper I used, I felt, would not work well with photos; they would look muddy. I got a complaint about that. I explained why I didn’t use photos. The explanation was lost on the fan, like water rolling off a duck’s back.

After a while of trying to defend myself, I realized something: there are a class of people that like to complain. They get a sort of enjoyment out of feeling that they are right, and the other guy is wrong. Pointing out to them the silliness of what they are saying just makes them angrier: that takes away the whole fun of it.

I eventually figured out a second rule: the more people you deal with, the more likely that someone is going to be unhappy. It is unavoidable. Here is an exercise: Go to Google.com. Think of the gentlest, most inoffensive person that is famous that you can think of. Add the word “sucks” to their name. Hit enter. No matter what name you pick, there will be web pages blasting them.

A corollary of the above are the people that enjoy feeling ripped off. They love the “me vs. you” feeling; that feeling of them being right and the other person being wrong (I suspect this is so because they are wrong so often in real life that they hav to create situations where they are right). As an example, I had a customer in England. He had ordered some merchandise from me. He hadn’t specified how he wanted it mailed to him. He had sent a small amount of money for postage. So I sent it the cheapest way: surface mail, which could take months to arrive (surface mail no longer exists). He called me on the phone. He was angry.

“Where’s my stuff?” he said.

“I sent it surface mail,” I said.

“Why didn’t you send it by air mail?” he said.

“You didn’t pay for air mail postage—and you didn’t tell me to send it air mail.” I said.

He then raked me over the coals, calling me every dirty name that exists (and he might have made a few up too).

One final story on that subject: One fan sent me a letter of complaint. Hr had ordered something two years earlier, and he hadn’t received it yet. He was angry that he had to wait two years. I explained that I am no mind reader; that if something doesn’t arrive, it’s up to him to contact me so I can set things right. After that point, if I had to delay an item, I would send out postcards explaining the delay.

I’ve been the victim of rumors, both inside and outside of fandom. These things are like memes: that is, self perpetuating ideas. I decided long ago to stop the cycle: I refuse to pass on stories about other people. On occasion I will mention issues like the ones I have covered today—but I will not give out names.

I won’t even go into the many marginal types I have met over the years. Though SF/media fandom has a lot of great people, it also has a lot of gutter dwellers as well. The standard stereotype of SF/media fans as being 30 and 40 (and now 50) something single unemployed males who live in their parents’ basement, have never kissed a girl and who bathe twice a month (if that) do exist. I’ve met some of them.

Let me tell you one fan encounter: this fan was touring the country, trying to meet every major LIS fan out there. He showed up on my doorstep one day. He started talking about my neighborhood. “Boy, you sure have a lot of good looking girls here!” he said. His eyes darted back and forth as he said it. The average age of the girls in my neighborhood at the time was eight. I mentioned that. “Well, yeah…” he said, grinning goofily. I don’t need to comment further.

At present there is one fan who is quite unhappy with me. I won’t go into the specifics here. In summary, he had asked me for information, and I gave him that information. Why is he angry then? Because I didn’t get the information to him fast enough to suit him. He wanted a friend’s email address. I gave him that email address. And, considering all of the complaining he did for it (I had to get my friend’s permission to pass the email along, and that took some time), he still hasn’t contacted him. Of course, I am the villain in all of this. What is that old saying? Oh yes: No good deed goes unpunished.

I’d often wondered why some fans seem so eager to attack others. Then I read a wonderful book called “Resentment Against Achievement” by Robert Sheaffer. The premise of the book is a simple one: there are people who like to build themselves up by tearing others down. Mind you, it doesn’t work: those people are still dwelling in the gutter after their attacks.

After some thought, I realized I was guilty of the same thing myself, and almost overnight I purged that bad habit. Achievement of any type is to be celebrated. If a fan goes through the effort to do a book or a fanzine r whatever, I won’t attack them—even if what they put out isn’t very good. My public reaction will either be praise, or no reaction at all.

Fandom can be a great gathering of likeminded people. But it has to start with all of us.