The Death of Alanson Skinner

The December 1925 issue closed out the first full year of Farnsworth Wright's tenure as editor of Weird Tales. It was also the first full year for the magazine itself, with twelve monthly issues published in all. Nineteen twenty-five was also the last full year during which the editorial offices of Weird Tales were based in Indianapolis. The magazine moved to Chicago in late 1926. I have already written about many of the authors who were in that December issue. A couple of others--James Cocks, Douglas Oliver--might prove a challenge.

There was sad news to report in "The Eyrie" that month. Alanson Skinner (1886-1925), who had had a story in the October issue, was reported killed in an automobile accident. That had happened on August 17, 1925, and so Skinner's first story in Weird Tales was published posthumously. I can't say that this was the first tribute to a deceased author to appear in Weird Tales, but it must have been one of the first. I'll reprint it here in it entirety so that we can remember again an author who died a century ago this past summer.

Those of you who read Alanson Skinner's story of Indian witchcraft, Bad Medicine, in the October issue, will be saddened to learn of the author's tragic death in an automobile accident near Tokio, North Dakota, on August 17. The car skidded on a slippery road and crashed over an embankment. A moment later, the Rev. Amos Oneroad, a Sioux Indian, dazed and bruised, crawled from the wreck, calling a name, listening for an answer. Then he struggled manfully, but in vain, to lift the mass of steel and release his dearest friend, who lay pinioned and silent beneath it. At length help was found, the car was raised, but it was too late. Alanson Skinner was dead--Alanson Skinner, sympathetic and appreciative friend of the Indian race, learned student of ancient America, prolific author of scientific works on Indian subjects, lecturer, fiction writer, poet. Gone forever was that wonderful memory, that bubbling humor, that active mind, that radiant, cheerful personality. He was only thirty-nine years old, just getting into his full stride, at the threshold of what promised to be the most brilliant and valuable part of his career. One of his last acts, before he left on the mission that cost him his life, was to send to WEIRD TALES The Tsantsa of Professor Von Rothapfel, an eery [sic] story of a South American Indian tribe that preserves and shrinks the heads of its dead enemies. This story will be published soon.

"Soon" was August 1926, a year after Alanson's death.

Reverend Amos Oneroad (1884-1937) was a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota, an artist, a public speaker and performer, and a writer, as well as a Presbyterian minister. In 2005, the Minnesota Historical Society Press published his book, co-authored with Alanson Skinner, called Being Dakota: Tales and Traditions of the Sisseton and Wahpeton.

Although winter begins and the sun and the day reach their nadir in December, it is--or should be--a happy month. I wish there could have been happier news in Weird Tales in December 1925. But this was as it will ever be.

From the Trenton, New Jersey, Times, March 23, 1917, page 15.

In this series I have gone month by month through 1925, now a century past. I have left out a lot of writers, but these I can still cover in the future.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Bertha Russell (ca. 1910-?)

Young Author
Born Circa 1910
Died ?

There is an extra story in the November 1925 issue of Weird Tales. It's not listed in the table of contents, and its author is not included with others who contributed to "The Unique Magazine." Her name was Bertha Russell and she was fifteen years old when her story was published. Editor Farnsworth Wright took the unusual step of publishing her story, entitled "Pity Me!", in its entirety not in the main body of the magazine but in "The Eyrie," the regular letters column. I have seen poetry in "The Eyrie" before, but this is the first time I have seen a short story.

"Pity Me!" is brief. Call it a short short story. It's in a necrophilic vein--pun partially intended. There were readers who liked and wanted stories of what they called necrophilia. There were others who did not. I don't think stories in this vein that appeared in Weird Tales were always sexual. I think when readers wrote about "necrophilia," they meant stories that were focused on death and corpses, maybe also stories that were especially gruesome. One of the first, if not the first, necrophilic story in Weird Tales was "The Loved Dead" by C.M. Eddy, Jr., assisted or revised by H.P. Lovecraft and published in the issue of May/June/July 1924. That story was supposed to have caused a wider controversy regarding pulp magazines. I'm not sure that that actually happened. Anyway, maybe what's needed here is some further research and a whole series devoted to stories of this type. But does anybody really want to read them?

We don't know anything about Bertha Russell except that she was fifteen years old in 1925, making her birth year about 1910 and making her yet another teen-aged author in Weird Tales. Usually "The Eyrie" included the city from which a correspondent wrote, but we don't have that for her. Suffice it to say that young Bertha Russell must have been thrilled and excited to have her story in Weird Tales.

Like I said, I have seen poetry in "The Eyrie." I have also seen it as an epigraph in various short stories. A list or discussion of poetry or lines of poetry that appeared in "The Eyrie" or stories published in Weird Tales would make for another essay or series. It would also make for an expanded list of authors whose work appeared in "The Unique Magazine."

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

William James Price (1875-1937)

Insurance Agent, Salesman, Bookkeeper, Poet, Editor, Book Reviewer
Born March 8, 1875, Maryland
Died June 2, 1937, Baltimore, Maryland

William James Price was a poet, editor, and book reviewer. He edited a quarterly magazine of verse called Interludes, published from about 1924 until the early 1930s by Interludes Publishing Company of 2917 Erdman Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland. That happened to be Price's home. In early 1923, Price had the idea of getting together a group of Maryland poets. Coincidentally, this was at around the same time that Weird Tales was first published. Price's idea came to fruition in the Verse Writers' Guild of Maryland. Interludes was its official publication. Price's own poems include the following:

• "Come Down to Maryland" (1920) 
• "A Walk Together" (1921)
• "Woodrow Wilson" (1924)
• "The Shot Tower Speaks" (1924)
• "The Wonder Song" (1926)
• "The Plight of John McBride" in Mystery Magazine (Mar. 1927)
• "The Ballade for the End of Battles" (1929)

"A Walk Together" reminds me of Robert Frost's poem "The Pasture," from 1915.

Price had four poems in Weird Tales from November 1925 to January 1927. See the list below. He also wrote a poem on Edgar Allan Poe, which was printed with his letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun on Christmas Day, 1911:

From the Baltimore Sun, December 25, 1911, page 6.

This is the second tribute to Poe written by authors of 1925 about whom I have written this season, Howard Elsmere Fuller (1895-1985) being the first. Price shared pages with Poe in the November 1925 issue of Weird Tales. Poe's poem was "The Conqueror Worm," from 1843, a powerful and devastating work.

 

William James Price was born on March 8, 1875, in Maryland. He worked as an insurance agent, salesman, and bookkeeper. On January 14, 1904, he married Mary Isabel or Isabella Painter or Paynter (1885-1980). Notice that Price's wife had the same (or similar) surname as Orrin C. Painter (1864-1915), who provided the bronze (or iron) gate for the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe and about whom Price wrote in his letter to the editor. Painter also provided a stone to mark Poe's grave, but for some reason it was put in the wrong place, bringing to mind Price's line, "And nations wonder where his body lies." By the way, Painter was also a poet.

 

I haven't been able to find a direct connection between Mary Painter or Paynter and Orrin C. Painter. Records for this family--or at least her branch--seem scarce, even if the latter wrote a history of them. (Where is it?) I should add that the artist, photographer, and explorer William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) married into the family of Orrin Chalfant Painter. William Henry Jackson, strangely enough, was the great-grandfather and namesake of cartoonist Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead. The connections to prominent people could go on, but this mini-biography has to turn back to its subject.

 

There was in Maryland a prominent family of men named William James Price. I don't know what relation, if any, these men had with the poet who shared their name:

• William James Price, Sr. (1831-1916) was a real estate broker and at one time the largest landowner and taxpayer in Queen Anne's County, Maryland.

• His son, William James Price, Jr., or the 2nd (1863-1928), was the editor and publisher of the Centreville [Maryland] Observer.

• His son, William James Price III (1899-1972), was a military man and an investment banker.

After following those leads for entirely too long, I discovered the identity of the poet. I wasn't prepared to rule out any of them in my search, even the Third. Money and versifying may not seem to go together, but they are also not mutually exclusive: let's not forget that Wallace Stevens, who worked in the insurance business, was also a poet of renown. Stevens famously wrote, "Money is a kind of poetry." That quotation brings us back to William James Price, or the Price of poetry, who was also in the insurance business but gave us verse to outlive all of his other work.

William James Price's Poems in Weird Tales
"The Ghostly Lovers" (Nov. 1925)
"The Ghost Girl" (Dec. 1925)
"Italian Love" (Feb. 1926)
"Ballade of Phantom Ships" (Jan. 1927)

Further Reading

• "A Maryland Society of Poets Is Suggested," letter to the editor in the Baltimore Evening Sun, February 14, 1923, page 15.
• Other brief articles and items, plus the poems themselves. 

Thanks to The FictionMags Index for the extra credit for William James Price.
Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

David Baxter (1882-1949)

Poet, Nature Writer, Author, Editor, Songwriter, Printer, Foundryman, Mechanic, City Parks Commissioner
Born October 27, 1882, Hutchinson, Kansas
Died June 9, 1949, Hutchinson, Kansas

David Baxter was born on October 27, 1882, in Hutchinson, Kansas, to Jackson B. and Mollie Baxter. I believe he was the oldest of eight children fathered by J.B. Baxter, who was later married to Rachel Horn. The elder Baxter was a blacksmith. His son followed in his footsteps. David Baxter married Myrtle B. Meyers. I believe they had just one son.

Although he traveled out of state, Baxter seems to have lived in Hutchinson for all of his life. He worked in mechanical fields, as a mechanic, a foundryman for twenty-three years, and a printer for eleven or more. He was the founder of Hutchinson Foundry and Machine Works in his native city. Hammer and tongs were his tools, but on the side, he wrote, and I believe he enjoyed a career in writing that might not even be possible now but was then, before we got caught up in other things. You could say that in his side career Baxter either hammered away at a typewriter or held a pen in the tongs of his forefinger and thumb. With these he forged words and lines.

David Baxter got started as a professional writer in July 1915 when his poem "A Globe-Trotter's Plaint" was published in Munsey's Magazine. He received $6 in return. From 1924 to 1940, he had poems, stories, and articles in The Blue Book Magazine, Weird Tales, and Argosy. He also contributed to Everybody's Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science Monthly, Field and Stream, The Outers' Recreation Book, Live Stories, Snappy Stories, Santa Fe Magazine, Every Week, Farm and Fireside, and other titles.

Much of Baxter's success came from writing poems and epigrams. He also wrote for trade journals, technical journals, and specialty magazines, including Blacksmith's Journal, Concrete Magazine, Journal of Acetylene Welding, Oxy-Acetylene Welding, International Molders' Journal, Cement Era, Welding Engineer, American Garage & Auto Dealer, and Motor in Canada. Still more of works appeared in The New York Clipper, Railroad Men's Magazine, and Fun Book. Baxter sometimes illustrated his own articles, or took the photographs that accompanied them in print. After only five and a half years as a published author, he had collected seventy-five poems, 500 epigrams, and as many as half a million words of stories and articles in his scrapbook. He averaged $80 per month in income from his writing.

Baxter wrote a song in ragtime, "You Ain't Talking to Me," published in Chicago by Success Music Company in 1905. In the 1920s, he edited "Attic Anthology," a column in the Hutchinson News composed of verses by members of the Hutchinson Writers Guild. Many of his own poems appeared in this column. I think they would be well worth collecting. Baxter was co-founder of the Hutchinson Writers Guild in 1927. He was also president of the Seventh District Club of the Kansas Authors Club and a member Authors League of America.

Baxter's  stories for Weird Tales are unusual in that they are animal stories. "The Brown Moccasin" (Feb. 1925) is about a snake, while "Nomads of the Night" (Oct. 1925) is about bats and other winged night creatures. These are not fables but nature writing. Both are set in Kansas, and that setting is what led me to their author. It has been a long, long time since I read anything by Ernest Thompson Seton, but I think Baxter's stories are in that mold. Later such writers, whose books I enjoyed as a child, included Herbert S. Zim, Charles L. Ripper, and Olive L. Earle. The Wonderful World of Disney showed films in a similar vein.

David Baxter was a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F.) and secretary-treasurer of the local Izaak Walton League. Late in life he ran for and was elected to the city parks commission in his hometown. David Baxter died on June 9, 1949, in the city of his birth. He was sixty-six years old.

By the way, the David Baxter of Hutchinson, Kansas, should not to be confused with the journalist and writer David Baxter (1908-1989) who was tried for sedition during World War II, along with George Sylvester Viereck, William Dudley Pelley, and others. That David Baxter seems to have had a Kansas connection, too, but don't go down the wrong road in looking for the man of the same name who contributed to Weird Tales. That other David Baxter had an interesting story to tell, too, and so you might want to read him as well.

David Baxter's Stories in Weird Tales
"The Brown Moccasin" (Feb. 1925)
"Nomads of the Night" (Oct. 1925) 

Further Reading

• "Works Days in Foundry; and Nights Writing Poetry: David Baxter, Hutchinson Foundryman, Making Profitable Sideline Out of Literary Work" in the Hutchinson [Kansas] News, December 28, 1920, page 9.
• "Mechanic Is Successful Writer for Magazines" in the Topeka [Kansas] Daily Capital, January 2, 1921, page 9.
• Many poems in the Hutchinson News.

 

From the Hutchinson News, March 25, 1939, page 8, when Baxter ran for city parks commissioner.

 Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Tessida Swinges (1881-1970)-Part Two

Tessida Swinges was actually Tessida Schwinges of Brooklyn, New York. For some reason, Weird Tales misspelled her last name when it published her story, "A Mind in Shadow," in October 1925.

Tessida Schwinges had an interesting career. It's too bad we don't know more about her or that we don't have more of her writings. Her lone story for Weird Tales is the earliest evidence I have found that she was a writer. She was already forty-four years old when it was published.

Married to German-American businessman Clement Schwinges (1871-1934), Tessida attended evening classes at the City College of New York in the 1920s. She was a member of the Short Story Group at the college in 1929. Her instructor was poet Marjorie Prentiss Campbell (1882-1967), who was the daughter of a poet, Caroline Edwards Prentiss (1852-1940).

Tessida Schwinges served as president of the All Writers Club, a small group in Brooklyn, in 1929. Annie B. Kerr, later author of Clear Shining After Rain: About Americans Born Outside America (1941) and other books, was associated with that group. As early as 1933 and as late as 1950, Tessida was a member of the Blue Pencil Club, a literary society that I believe grew out of the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA). Her story "Forbidden Fruit" appeared in The Brooklynite, the journal of the local Blue Pencil Club, in March 1936. She had an article in the September or October issue of 1936 as well. In 1950, she won prizes for her prose and poetry. If there are archives of the Blue Pencil Club anywhere, maybe we could recover some of Tessida's works.

I found newspaper articles about the local Blue Pencil Club from 1933 and 1936. In addition to Tessida Schwinges, members of the club included James Morton and Rheinhart Kleiner, so she knew them both. And in that way, Tessida Schwinges is connected in a roundabout way to H.P. Lovecraft.

Rheinhart Kleiner (1892-1949) was a poet, amateur journalist, and correspondent of Lovecraft. Kleiner and Lovecraft became acquainted by mail in 1915. They met in person sometime after that, although they are supposed to have been out of touch with each other during the 1930s. Kleiner wrote several essays on his friend after Lovecraft's death in 1937.

James Ferdinand Morton, Jr. (1870-1941) was also a friend of Lovecraft. Morton was lots of other things, too, including an anarchist; an esperantist; an advocate of the single-tax system of Henry George; a member of NAPA, the Kalem Club, the Blue Pencil Club of Brooklyn, and the Bahá'í faith; and the curator of the Paterson Museum in Paterson, New Jersey. That museum is mentioned in Lovecraft's long short story "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928). After his death, Morton's widow, Pearl K. Morton, was elected vice-president of the local Blue Pencil Club. So, as a member of the club and attendee of its meetings, Tessida Schwinges knew the Mortons, as well as Kleiner. So was she ever in contact with Lovecraft? And if not, did she know of him? These are open questions.

As the wife of a native-born German, Tessida Schwinges was in a position to renounce "absolutely and forever all allegiance and fidelity" to the German Reich on April 22, 1933. This was just three months after the Nazi party assumed power in Germany. She had previously claimed German citizenship, even if she was born in America. Even as early as April 1933, the United States must have recognized the threat of Nazism.

Sometime after her husband's death in 1934, Tessida became a lecturer and leader of groups for the Brooklyn Academy of Arts and Sciences, including on the topic of astronomy. She also served as head of the current events division at the academy. Tessida (Weczerzick) Schwinges died in August 1970 at age eighty-nine and was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

I don't have a photograph of Tessida Schwinges, but I do of her husband. I think I would rather not show it, not because I have anything against him or his cause, but because a biography of a woman should be about her rather than of men. And yet I have written about him and two of her male associates, as well as about Lovecraft. (Do all things Weird Tales come back to him?) There is so much available about her husband because of his business activities, yet no one today knows of him. Maybe this becomes a principle, that some people work in the concerns of the day, while others--specifically artists--work in things that, at their best, do not know time. People in both groups are remembered. People in both are forgotten. We can only hope that works of art live on.

Tessida Schwinges' story in Weird Tales is a confessional. It opens with a boy confessing that he is a murderer. There is shock value in that kind of thing. Joyce Carol Oates realized that when she wrote Expensive People (1968). I read that book recently and was struck by the similarity. "A Mind in Shadow" also reminds me of the Alfred Hitchcock film Spellbound (1945).

Tessida Swinges' Story in Weird Tales
"A Mind in Shadow" (Oct. 1925)

 

Further Reading

A few newspaper articles, some of which have lists of writers associated with writing clubs.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Tessida Swinges (1881-1970)-Part One

Tessida Catherine (Weczerzick) Schwinges 
Author, Poet, Lecturer, Group Leader
Born May 4, 1881, Hoboken, New Jersey
Died August 1970, presumably in Brooklyn, New York

Tessida Swinges, who wrote one story for Weird Tales, was actually Tessida Catherine (Weczerzick) Schwinges, daughter and wife of immigrants. She was born in May 4, 1881, in Hoboken, New Jersey, to Carl Weczerzick, an Austrian-born merchant or businessman, and Charlotte "Lottie" (Geisler) Weczerzik, who was born in Germany. Austria and Germany were of course shorthand terms for empires. I believe Weczerzick is a Czech name, but I'm not sure.

I don't know anything about the early life of Tessida Weczerzick. In 1900, she was with her parents in Brooklyn, New York. I believe she lived in that borough of the city for most of her life. In 1911, she met a German businessman named Clement Schwinges in New York. After just a three-week courtship, they were married on December 6, 1911, in Brooklyn. He was in business in the Philippines at the time. Tessida lived with him in Manila in 1913, probably before that, too. He came to America for good in June 1913, accompanied by his wife.

Clement Schwinges (1871-1934) was born in Aachen, Germany and studied at Heidelberg University and economics at the University of Bonn. He was a traveler and businessman before coming to America. He worked in the lumber business in Santo Domingo and Brazil. He was also involved in the rubber business during his career, and he wrote articles on rubber and other economic issues. His greatest success was as a manufacturer of mother-of-pearl buttons in the Philippines. In 1920, he was manager of a law office in Brooklyn. Later that decade, he took up the cause of middle-aged workers. Calling himself "Mr. Action," he advocated for those over forty in their search for work. (Schwinges was himself married at age forty.) He founded and was president of the Action Membership Corporation for just that cause. At Christmastime in 1933, he suffered a stroke and lingered in paralysis for several months. Schwinges died on April 21, 1934. His widow and her brother, Vincent Weczerzick, took over for him, but I don't think the Action Membership Corporation lasted for very long after that.

To be concluded . . .

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Laura O. Tuck (1901-1952)

Teacher, Newspaper Columnist, Amateur Singer, Violinist, & Stage Actress, Housewife & Mother, Factory Worker

Born October 14, 1901, Lincoln, Nebraska
Died April 25, 1952, Los Angeles city or county, California

Laura Opal Tuck was born on October 14, 1901, in Lincoln, Nebraska, to William Henry Tuck, a veterinarian, and Catherine (Cresse) Tuck. Laura O. Tuck attended schools in Seward, Sutton, and Weeping Water, Nebraska. She graduated from Weeping Water High School in May 1921, but not before playing on the girl's basketball team, acting in her class play, and reporting on school news for the Weeping Water Republican. She attended summer school at the Nebraska State Normal School, now Peru State College, in Peru, Nebraska, and began teaching primary school in 1921. Laura taught in Comstock and Walton, also near Murdock and Greenwood, all in eastern Nebraska. In 1927, she married Oria Elroy Spelman in Lancaster County, Nebraska. He was an automobile mechanic and carpenter. The couple were in California by 1930 or 1931. They had three children together, one of whom died at birth.

Laura was an amateur singer, violinist, and stage actress. She performed in her class play at Weeping Water High School and in a play called "Neighbors" at Chadderdon's Hall, Weeping Water, on July 27 and 28, 1922. Her travels and activities were well documented in her hometown paper. Her young life must have been an exciting one. There were hazards, too, a quarantine for smallpox, travel by car and train through the aftermath of a blizzard in order to reach the schoolhouse. An online photograph of her shows a pretty young woman with a mass of dark hair. I have a feeling she was well loved in her hometown.

Laura O. Tuck wrote a single letter published in Weird Tales. It appeared in September 1925, one hundred years ago this month:

Laura O. Tuck, of Weeping Water, Nebraska, writes: "I would suggest that you reprint some of Francis Marion Crawford's stories, for instance Man Overboard, The Upper Berth and The Screaming Skull. By pure accident I ran across WEIRD TALES last January: it is just what I have been looking for for years. I have looked in vain for this [sic] kind of stories in other magazines and digging in odd corners of libraries, but now I know just where to go to get 'my' kind of stories. Please let us have more stories like The Lure of Atlantis [by Joel Martin Nichols] (in last April's WEIRD TALES), which is my favorite of all the stories I have read so far." [Boldface added.]

We can only imagine the lives of those who came before us, of people who lived in places far-flung from the big cities of the East and Midwest. Weeping Water is still like a tiny island in a sea of farm fields. In letters sent to "The Eyrie," we can read about the joy and pleasure of these people at discovering and reading Weird Tales. We can imagine what it must have been like for them finally to find what Laura O. Tuck called "'my' kind of stories."

Laura Spelman went far from her home in the late 1920s or early 1930s. In later years, she worked in a pottery factory in California. I think she deserved better than what she got in life, but then that's so very often true on this earth, in this vale of tears. She died young, too young, on April 25, 1952, in Los Angeles city or county.

Laura O. Tuck's Letter in Weird Tales

• September 1925

(By the way, the name Weeping Water echoes ideas I wrote about recently about the pseudonymous author Adrian Pordelorrar. Strange coincidence.)

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley