Junius B. Smith (1883-1945)

Author, Magazine Columnist, Stenographer, Attorney, Poultry Farmer, Builder and Contractor
Born  September 29, 1883, Salt Lake City, Utah
Died  April 3, 1945, Mapleton, Utah

Junius Bailey Smith was born on September 29, 1883, in Salt Lake City, Utah. I believe he is the first native-born Utahan I have written about in this blog and the first Mormon. His father was Samuel Harrison Bailey Smith (1838-1914), born two days before Mormons were driven from Nauvoo, Illinois, and carried thirty miles in a snowstorm to a place of refuge. Samuel H.B. Smith was a son of Samuel Harrison Smith (1808-1844) and a grand-nephew of Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805-1844), founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Junius B. Smith's mother was Mary Catherine (Bailey) Smith (1842-1916). He had nineteen siblings and half-siblings. Smith was married at least three times. His daughter Mary Kay Smith was also a writer and won an award from Seventeen magazine for her poetry.

Junius B. Smith attended school in Salt Lake City and studied law at the University of Utah. He was admitted to the bar on April 9, 1914, and practiced law until 1939. He was the author of dozens of stories published in fiction magazines from 1910 to 1936 and by his own estimate 8,000,000 words in all. Titles included All-Story Weekly, The Argosy, Breezy Stories, The Cavalier, Hot Stories, Love Story Magazine, Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories, Thrilling Western, Top Notch Magazine, and of course Weird Tales. According to one obituary (below), he was a columnist for Street & Smith magazines.

Bailey is best known and had real success with his stories of the occult detective Prince Abdul Omar of Persia, better known as Semi-Dual. The first of these was "The Occult Detector," part one of which was published in The Cavalier on February 17, 1912. Smith collaborated with another teller of weird tales, J.U. Giesy (1877-1947), on the Semi-Dual stories and on other stories, too, including their serial "Ebenezer's Casket," which appeared in Weird Tales in April-May/June/July 1924. (The two earned mention in the June 7, 1924, Deseret News for their efforts [p. 7].) Smith also wrote two stories and a letter published in Weird Tales. One of these was of "The Man Who . . ." type. Following is the text of Smith's lone letter to "The Eyrie":

Junius B. Smith, author of An Arc of Direction in the June issue, writes: "I wish to congratulate you on the perfect typesetting of this story. It so frequently happens in all-fiction magazines that errors creep in which mutilate the story, that it is a pleasure to find a story set so well that not even a minor defect greets the eye as it is read. I think the magazine is improving in appearance all the time. The cover on the June number easily catches the eye of one interested in things that are weird."

After his retirement, Smith lived in Springville, Utah, and on a ranch in Hobble Creek Canyon before moving to Mapleton, Utah. Junius B. Smith died on April 3, 1945, in Mapleton, and was buried at Salt Lake City Cemetery. He was just sixty-one years old. By the way, Smith was a champion checker player.

Junius B. Smith's Stories & Letter in Weird Tales
"Ebenezer's Casket" with J.U. Giesy (two-part serial, Apr.-May/June/July 1924)
"The Man Who Dared to Know" (Apr. 1924)
"An Arc of Direction" (June 1925)
Letter to "The Eyrie" (Aug. 1925)

 

Further Reading

• "Our Home Writers" in The Deseret News, June 19, 1926, section 3, page VI.
• "In Our Town . . . Junius Smith" in the Springville (Utah) Herald, June 1, 1944, page 1+.
• Numerous obituaries and other articles.

From the Salt Lake Tribune, April 5, 1945, page 9.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

PulpFest This Week

PulpFest, the annual pulp-fiction and pulp magazine convention, happens this week, from Thursday, August 7, to Sunday, August 10, 2025, in the Pittsburgh area. This year, PulpFest celebrates the sesquicentennial of the births of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), Edgar Wallace (1875-1932), and Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950). There will be programming on all three of those authors as well as on Doc Savage and Philip José Farmer. And there will be film screenings. PulpFest will be held at DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Pittsburgh--Cranberry, located north of Pittsburgh. You can read more about PulpFest by going to their website. Click here for a link.

Strange Rays & Weird Waves in Weird Tales

Weird Tales was a different kind of magazine when it came back in November 1924 than during its first year-and-a-third in print. There was a new look and a different format. Although some of the previous authors had returned, the cover artist, Andrew Brosnatch, was new. And of course there was a new editor in Farnsworth Wright. Weird fiction wasn't fully developed in the early days of "The Unique Magazine." You could say that the development of weird fiction as a genre actually happened in its pages from 1923 onward. Nevertheless, the stories published in Weird Tales between March 1923 and May/June/July 1924 tended to be weird-fictional. Things changed a little when Wright came on.

Farnsworth Wright contributed to Weird Tales in its first incarnation. His first story, "The Closing Hand" (Mar. 1923), is pretty conventional. His second to last, "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" (Oct. 1923), is far less so, for it treats the concept of a fourth dimension and touches on Einsteinian or relativistic physics. It's clear that Wright had an interest in stories of that type, which were called at the time pseudo-scientific stories or scientific romances. When he became editor, he set out to publish more in the pages of Weird Tales.

As I have been going through the issues published in 1925, I have noticed a recurring word: rays. I figured I had better make a search for that word and related words and concepts. Radio was big and new in the 1920s. Radium and radioactivity were in the news and in our culture, too. (Radium was discovered in 1898, X-rays in 1896.) We think of "Radium Girls" as a name for the young women of the 1920s who painted glow-in-the-dark watch dials and fell ill--and died--as a result. But in the early twentieth century, "Radium Girls" were performers on stage, their bodies literally highlighted by phosphorescent paint. Phosphorescence isn't the same as radioactivity. I can't say that Radium Girls on stage or in ballrooms were painted with radium-paint (despite the newspaper article shown below). Radium silk, of the same vintage, was not radioactive at all. But there seems to have been a fad for radium and a wider craze for radio. Maybe that's where all of the strange rays and weird waves in Weird Tales came from.

I can't say that this is a comprehensive list, but here are some ray and wave stories in Weird Tales from 1924 to 1926: 

• "The Purple Light" by Ralph Parker Anderson (Nov. 1924) 

• "Radio V-Rays" by Jan Dirk (Mar. 1925) 

• "The Electronic Plague" by Edward Hades (Apr. 1925) 

• "Under the N-Ray" by Will Smith & R.J. Robbins (May 1925)--Cover story. 

• "The Ether Ray" by H.L. Maxson (Sept. 1925) 

• "Red Ether" by Pettersen Marzoni (two-part serial, Feb.-Mar. 1926)--Cover story.

• "The Devil Ray" by Joel Martin Nichols, Jr. (May 1925)--The title doesn't refer to a type of fish but to a devastating form of radioactivity.

• "Queen of the Vortex" by F. Williams Sarles (May 1926)--This story had a sequel in "The Foe from Beyond" (Dec. 1926).

Stories of vortices lead into another category of proto-science fiction, one related to multiple dimensions of space and what we would call space warps. But that's a topic for another time.

 

Weird Tales, May 1925, with a cover story, "Under the N-Ray," by Will Smith and R.J. Robbins and cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. There aren't any rays shown here, but there are waves.

 

Weird Tales, February 1926. The cover story was "Red Ether" by Pettersen Marzoni. The cover artist was C. Barker Petrie, Jr. Here again, there aren't any rays and the only waves are in the distance. Maybe artists of the 1920s had trouble depicting rays, waves, and radioactivity.

 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

 

And because I have messed up the formatting of this article and can't figure out how to fix it, a picture after the copyright notice: 

 

"Will Dance in a Glow of Radium," from the San Francisco Examiner, May 25, 1905, page 4. "Radium Girls" were in burlesque and vaudeville shows in America and Great Britain from 1904 into the 1920s. By 1930, "Radium Girls" were the young women poisoned by their use in industry of radium-paint. If there was a fad for radium, maybe it reached its end with the well-publicized lawsuit filed by and the deaths of the "Radium Girls" in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This illustration shows two "Radium Girls" in the original sense of the phrase. (The Margaret Hamilton shown here was not the same actress who played the Wicked Witch.) It also hints at "Radium Girls" in the second sense, showing as it does a young woman with a paint brush. By the way, there was revue called "The Radium Girl" performed in Britain in the early 1900s. The girl of the title is dosed with radium by the villain Zigani and "she becomes a girl fond of a butterfly existence." (Source: "The Hippodrome Visit from 'The Radium Girl'," in The Derby Daily Telegraph, May 2, 1916, page 2.)

 

Mortimer Levitan (1890-1968)

Abraham Mortimer Levitan
Author, Lecturer, Attorney, Banker, Gourmet, Book Collector, Traveler, Amateur Photographer
Born February 21, 1890, Leavenworth, Kansas
Died February 16, 1968, Madison, Wisconsin

Mortimer Levitan had a long and distinguished career completely outside the realm of magazine fiction. His writing career was brief, but it included a story, "The Third Thumb-Print," in Weird Tales, his only one for "The Unique Magazine" and his last listed in The FictionMags Index. It's worth noting that Levitan was born in the same year as H.P. Lovecraft and Jacob Clark Henneberger. I have found only one Mortimer Levitan in public records. I assume him to be our man.

Abraham Mortimer Levitan, also called Abe Mortimer Levitan, was born on February 21, 1890, in Leavenworth, Kansas. (Some sources say Glarus or New Glarus, Wisconsin, a place that has its own interesting history.) He was the son of Solomon Levitan and Dora T. (Andelson) Levitan of Leavenworth. Born in the Russian Empire, Sol Levitan (1862-1940) came to America as a child, his journey coming as a reward for having saved his uncle from a pogrom carried out in Crimea. The older Levitan started out as a laborer and a "pack peddler." He worked his way up into prominence, twice serving as Wisconsin state treasurer and working as a bank president. He was also a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1924, which chose Calvin Coolidge as its candidate. Coolidge was of course president during some very good months and years at Weird Tales, from August 1923 to March 1929. We don't often consider the historical context in which Weird Tales was published.

Mortimer Levitan attended grade school in Glarus and graduated from Madison High School. He went on to study at the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1913, and Harvard University, from which school he received his law degree in 1915. Levitan had his own private practice in law in Chicago and Madison until 1932, when he became Wisconsin state assistant attorney general, a post he held for twenty-five years. In his career he handled over 600 cases before the Wisconsin Supreme Court and several before the U.S. Supreme Court. His career as an attorney was interrupted only by his service in the U.S. Navy during World War I.

The FictionMags Index lists six short stories by Mortimer Levitan, all published from 1918 to 1925:

• "The Stop-Over," in Young's Magazine (Mar. 1918)
• "The Manliness of Mr. Barney," in Young's Magazine (May 1919)
• "Daniel Decides," in Snappy Stories (1st, Jan. 1920)
• "Crawford Gets Paid," in Short Stories (Nov. 10, 1921)
• "Legerdemain," in McClure's Magazine (May 1925)
• "The Third Thumb-Print," in Weird Tales (June 1925)

His story for Weird Tales touches on eugenics and phrenology. It involves a means of determining whether a man is a criminal before he commits his crime, as in the movie Minority Report (2002), based on the novella by Philip K. Dick.

Levitan was a world traveler and amateur photographer, but his main avocation was as a gourmet and collector of cookbooks. These eventually numbered 2,615. In 1965, he donated his collection to the University of Wisconsin in honor of his mother.

Mortimer Levitan never married. He died on February 16, 1968, just five days before his seventy-eighth birthday, in Madison. He was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison.

Mortimer Levitan's Story in Weird Tales
"The Third Thumb-Print" (June 1925) 

Further Reading

• "U.W. Savors Gift of 2,615 Cook Books from City's No. 1 Gourmet" by Vivien Hone, in The Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin, January 14, 1965, page 1. This article includes a photograph of Levitan in his kitchen.
• "Mortimer Levitan, 77, Former Attorney General's Aide, Dies," in the Wisconsin State Journal, February 17, 1968, page 15. This article also includes a photograph of Levitan.
•  Many other newspaper articles.

(Abraham "Abe") Mortimer Levitan (1890-1968), his yearbook photograph from his senior year at the University of Wisconsin, 1913.

 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Charles Hilan Craig (1901-1970)

Author, Magician & Performer, Newspaper Reporter, Editor, & Publisher, Radio News Director, Congressional Aid 

Born December 23, 1901, Madison, Nebraska
Died June 21, 1970, North Platte, Nebraska

Charles Hilan "Charley" Craig, also called "Hi" Craig, was born on December 23, 1901, in Madison, Nebraska, and grew up in Morrill on the opposite end of the state. His parents were Charles C. Craig and Chrissie M. Craig, and he had two brothers and two sisters. Although he was known later in life as a newspaperman, Craig began as an author of fiction. It's pretty early in this biography to write of obituaries, but here's an account of Craig's start as a writer from his obituary:

     He once calculated that his writing career began in 1915, at the age of 13 when he purchased for a penny his first copy of "Lone Scout" in the community of Morrill where he was raised.

     "Discarded were my ambitions to become a lawyer, astronomer, policeman, locomotive engineer, millionaire, postmaster or train robber," he would say later in telling of his first by-line.

     "Instead I was going to write."

     And write he did.

From: "Charley Craig, former Telegraph editor, dies," in the North Platte Telegraph, June 22, 1970, page 1, the same source as the photograph below.

The Lone Scout was the national publication of the Lone Scouts of America, an early scouting organization designed for boys who lived in rural areas of the country. For The Lone Scout, Craig wrote a football story, "Fighting for Bradley," and a second serial called "The Spell of Sahara." The former won him a Quill award from the magazine. The latter was called by a historian of the Lone Scouts "probably the finest individual narrative to appear in Lone Scout." (Source: "'The Golden Years' of Lone Scouts," part two of a four-part series by Lucien W. Emerson, published in Southern Utah News, August 13, 1959, page 1+.) Craig prized his membership in the Elbeetian Legion, an association for former Lone Scouts of America. I have written before about the Lone Scouts in my mini-biographies of Ralph Allen Lang (1906-1987) and Merlin Moore Taylor (1886-1939). Click on their names to find your way to them.

Charles H. Craig attended Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska. He was editor of the Hastings Collegian in 1922-23. On August 16, 1928, he married Rose Nellie Cecil in Castle Rock, Colorado. Craig had previously performed as a magician named Aladdin on on the Chautauqua and Lyceum Circuits. After their marriage, they performed together. They had a son, David Alan Craig, a railroad worker, angler, woodworker, and hobbyist, and a daughter, Diane R. Craig.

Charles Craig worked as a newspaperman for most of his life. A summary of his career: publisher, Morrill Mail (three years); editor, Bridgeport News Blade (three years); reporter, North Platte Daily Bulletin (three years); editor of the same paper (1943-1946); news director, KODY radio, North Platte (1946-1956); with the North Platte Telegraph Bulletin before leaving to become an administrative assistant to U.S. Representative A.L. Miller in Washington, D.C. (1956-1958); news staff, North Platte Telegraph Bulletin (1958-1961); editor of the same paper from 1961 until his retirement in 1967. Craig was also involved in his community, and he considered North Platte to be home, even though he had lived in far-flung and perhaps more exciting places.

Charles Hilan Craig wrote under his own name during his career as a pulp-fiction author. He had eight stories in Weird Tales and one in its companion title, Detective Tales, as well as one in its successor, Real Detective Tales. From The FictionMags Index: 

• "Old Man Davis Goes Home," in Detective Tales (Nov. 16/Dec. 15, 1922)
• "The Wanderer," in The Black Mask (Dec. 15, 1923)
• Letter in The Black Mask (Dec. 15, 1923)
• "The River," in Real Detective Tales (May 1924)
• "Damned," in Weird Tales (May 1925)
• "Darkness," in Weird Tales (Sept. 1925)
• "Stealer of Souls," in Weird Tales (Jan. 1926)
• "The Curse," in Weird Tales (Mar. 1926)
• "The Ruler of Destiny," in Weird Tales (Apr. 1927)
• "The Gray Rider," in Weird Tales (Nov. 1927)
• "The Man Who Walked Upon the Air," in Weird Tales (July 1930)
• "The Red Sail," in Weird Tales (Oct. 1931)

Those are enough to make a collection if anyone had the mind to put one out. Notice that one of his stories is in the category of "The Man Who . . .".

I think any of us would be happy to have the writing career he had, especially beginning as it did when he was a child and full of dreams.

Charley Craig died on June 21, 1970, in North Platte, Nebraska, after a long illness. He was sixty-eight years old. 

As you can see, Craig's first story in Weird Tales was published in May 1925, one hundred years ago now. He is the last of the authors in that May issue about whom I will write for now. Next I'll write about June.

Charles Hilan Craig's Stories in Weird Tales
See the list above.

Further Reading
See the sources cited in this biography and other newspaper articles, too.

Here's a very early item on the contribution of a local author to Weird Tales magazine, from the Hastings [Nebraska] Daily Tribune, December 2, 1925, page 7.

That newspaper item refers to Charles Hilan Craig's long short story "Stealer of Souls," which was the cover story and lead story of the January 1926 issue of Weird Tales. The cover artist was Andrew Brosnatch.

Charles Hilan Craig (1901-1970).

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Susan Andrews Rice (1865-1938)

Author, Poet, Teacher of Music & Voice
Born September 1865, New York State, possibly in Croghan
Died October 5, 1938, at home, Washington, D.C.

Susan Andrews Rice was born in September 1865, possibly in Croghan, New York. Some sources give her birth year as 1866, but the U.S. census of 1870 indicates 1865 as the actual year. Her parents were Yale Rice, a farmer, and Helen Marie (Curtis) Rice. She had three sisters and a brother. The family moved from New York State to Falls Church, Virginia, in the 1870s or '80s.

Susan A. Rice studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she was a pupil of Lyman Wheeler (1837-1900). She taught vocal culture in Washington, D.C., and wrote articles on music. She was also the author of poems and short stories. Her credits include:

• "Music in America," article in The National Tribune (Washington, D.C.) (June 9, 1892)
• "To Write or Not to Write," article in The Writer (1892)
• "How to Entertain," article (syndicated) (1893)
• "All Saints Day," poem in the Boston Evening Transcript (Jan. 2, 1896)
• "Patty Jasper's Idea," short story (syndicated, including in The Independent [New York, New York]) (Aug. 20, 1896) 
• "A Missionary Story," short story in the New Orleans Times-Democrat (ca. Nov. 1897)
• "The One Who Knows Me Not," poem in the Boston Evening Transcript (Feb. 13, 1901)
• "His Particular Detestation," short story in the New Orleans Times-Democrat (Nov. 3, 1901)
• "Delia Duty's Defection," short story in the New Orleans Times-Democrat (Oct. 22, 1911)
• "The Girl in the Wheeling-Chair," short story in Harper’s Bazaar (June 1913)
• Letter in All-Story Weekly (July 27, 1918)
• "The Ghost Farm," short story in Weird Tales (May 1925)
• "A Day in the Life of Aurelia Durant," short story (syndicated) (Oct. 1925)

Thanks to The FictionMags Index for some of these credits.

Her story for Weird Tales, entitled "The Ghost Farm," is short but good, I think, and memorable. I like the tone and the sentiment. It's an example of why weird fiction should come also from women and from writers outside the realms of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. It was reprinted in 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories (1993), even if it isn't ghastly at all. "The Ghost Farm" has as its background the many losses of the Great War. That an unavoidable theme and subject of many stories and poems in Weird Tales during the 1920s.

Susan Andrews Rice died at home in Washington, D.C., on October 5, 1938, at age seventy-three. She was buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Falls Church, Virginia, where her family had lived for many years.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

James C. Bardin (1887-1959)-Part Two

Following are some of the writing credits of James C. Bardin, first from The FictionMags Index:

• "Blue Shade," poem in Harper's Monthly Magazine (Mar. 1911)
• "The Watcher," poem in Harper's Monthly Magazine (Aug. 1911)
• "In the Magnolia Gardens," poem in The Smart Set (Sept. 1912)
• "The Strange Philanthropy of Juan Del Coronado," short story in Snappy Stories (1st, Jan. 1916)
• "Tiger-Lily," poem in Snappy Stories (2nd, Aug. 1916)
• "The Construction Gang," poem in Railroad Man's Magazine (Nov. 1916)
• "The Philanthropist," short story in People's (Nov. 1916)
• "Barren Sands," short story in Sea Stories Magazine (Feb. 1925)
• "Death," article in Weird Tales (Feb. 1925)
• "The Sobbing Bell," short story in Weird Tales (May 1925)
• "The Golden Fleece," short story in The Golden West Magazine (Jan. 1928)

Bardin's contributions to Virginia Quarterly Review, from the website of that journal:

• "The Last Available 'Place in the Sun'" (Autumn 1926)
• "The Hate of Those Ye Guard" (Spring 1927)
• "Lawrence" (Summer 1927)
• "Before Columbus" (Spring 1928)
• "Black Valley and the Tree of Life" (Autumn 1928) 
• "Gongorism? -- What of It?" (Summer 1929)
• "Mexico--And Indianismo" (Spring 1932)
• "The Mexican Revolution" (Winter 1934)
• "Thunder Over Latin America" (Winter 1939)

In Scientific American:

• "The Amazingly Accurate Calendar System of the Maya Indians" (Nov. 1925)

In The Bulletin of the Pan American Union:

• "A Song from Sor Juana" (1942) 

I have also found that Bardin wrote at least two stage plays:

• Penningtons, Too: A Play in One Act
• Second Samuel

I'm sure he had other writing credits, too.

James C. Bardin's Article & Short Story in Weird Tales
"Death" (Feb. 1925)
"The Sobbing Bell" (May 1925)

Further Reading
Numerous newspaper articles and, if you can find them, Bardin's own works.

Scientific American, November 1925, in which James C. Bardin's article on the Mayan calendar appeared. I don't know the name of the artist, but change the dress of the men in this illustration to something futuristic and it could easily have been on the cover of a science fiction magazine of the 1920s and '30s. This was when science was done in buildings that looked like barns by men and women who were true scientists. Now supposed "science" is carried out in multi-million-dollar facilities by people who believe in pseudoscience, anti-science, non-science, or simple nonsense. I can't tell what the two objects on the table are supposed to be, but they remind me of the Trylon and Perisphere at the New York World's Fair of 1939.

Acknowledgments to The FictionMags Index and the websites of Virginia Quarterly Review and Scientific American.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley