Robert S. Carr (1909-1994)-Part 1

Robert Spencer Carr
Né Theodore Bonifield

Novelist, Short Story Writer, Poet, Editor, Movie and Television Scriptwriter, Movie Director, UFOlogist
Born March 26, 1909, Washington, D.C.
Died April 28, 1994, Dunedin, Florida

Robert Spencer Carr was a prodigy who had magazine stories published at age ten, his first published story in Weird Tales at fifteen, and his first published novel at eighteen. Born on March 26, 1909, in Washington, D.C., he delved into fringe beliefs throughout his life. In 1932-1937, he lived in the Soviet Union, apparently as a convert to Communism. In the 1940s, he joined the Fortean Society. After the war, Carr moved to Glorieta, New Mexico, to start a lamasery. Once in New Mexico, Carr may have heard stories of flying saucers crashing to earth. Much later in life--in October 1974--he made national headlines when he claimed that alien bodies had been recovered from a crashdown near Aztec in 1948 and removed to Wright Field, later called Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The story was a revival of a hoax perpetrated at the beginning of the flying saucer era but treated as fact in Behind the Flying Saucers by Frank Scully (1950). Though discounted in the 1950s and in the 1970s, the story helped fuel conspiracy theories about the supposed crashdown at Roswell in 1947. Late in life, Carr attended the Science of Mind Church in Florida, not to be confused with Scientology.

Robert Spencer Carr was born Theodore Bonifield in Washington, D.C. He was, according to his son, Timothy Spencer Carr, "the son of a pharmacist and the pretty young Mrs. Bonifield. His real father was Ceylon Spencer Carr, who was Mr. Bonifield's employer in Ashley, Ohio, where they produced naturopathic nostrums. Ceylon, who was sixty, paid for the Bonifields to move to Washington until the birth. Ceylon adopted the baby the day after his birth [so, March 27, 1909], named him Robert Spencer Carr, and they moved back to Ashley with [Dr. Carr's] wife Ida Angeline [(Smalley) Carr]. Ceylon died when Robert was five."

If Robert Spencer Carr was attracted in his life to fringe beliefs, he seems to have been an apple who hadn't fallen far from the tree. His father, Dr. Ceylon Spencer Carr, was born on January 6, 1850, in Herrickville, Pennsylvania. Carr attended schools in Towanda, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Chicago Homeopathic Medical College in 1877. He received a license in Ohio 1896, presumably to practice medicine of some kind or other. We can hardly call homeopathy a branch of medicine, though. Dr. Carr practiced in Columbus, Ohio. He was editor of The Columbus Medical Journal in the early 1900s, but he made at least part of his living by manufacturing and selling patent medicines, including Peruna, Kubara, which continued to sell after his death, and The National, advertised as "The Only Real Bust Developer." He was a preacher and a teacher, a writer and editor on religious, philosophical, and I think we have to say pseudo-medical subjects. He was also involved in philanthropy.

Dr. Carr and his wife had four children, at least two of whom died when they were quite young. Born on June 11, 1878, in Elmira, New York, Marion Carr Schenck died of a blood clot and hemorrhage of the brain while in the Society Islands. The date was December 20, 1936. Her husband was Hollywood actor Earl Oscar Schenk (1889-1962), a man who had switched careers in mid-life and was working in the South Pacific as an explorer and ethnologist when his wife died. He was also a writer.

Next in line was Jennie Carr Sarver (1879-1960). She was married to Dr. Pearl Marvin Sarver (1883-1961). Her younger sister was Helen Carr, born in July 1888. She died suddenly on September 11, 1904, at age sixteen. Her death was rumored to have been by suicide, but the cause was instead given as uremic poisoning. "She had become somewhat melancholy," her father reported. "I am satisfied that kidney trouble was the cause of her death." He added, "Singularly, her brother died in much the same way." (Source: "Love Affair," in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Sept. 13, 1904, p. 6.) It looks like the unnamed brother will go on unnamed, for he seems to have fallen into the gap between the 1880 and 1900 censuses.

Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994), subject of this article, was the last of Dr. Carr's children. Robert was just six years old when his father died on September 6, 1915. According to an online source, Directory of Deceased American Physicians, 1804-1929, the cause was a nervous breakdown. A contemporary newspaper article gave the same cause. An advocate of natural living and an opponent of drinking coffee and getting vaccinations, he had planned to live to one hundred. He fell short by thirty-five years.

His surviving son, Robert Spencer Carr, seems to have been a searcher and a wanderer. He lived in Ashley, Ohio, as a child and attended high school in nearby Columbus. Carr also lived in Chicago (as an associate and friend of Farnsworth Wright, E. Hoffman Price, and other Weird Tales writers); New Orleans; Hollywood; and New York. As mentioned, Carr spent half of the 1930s in the Soviet Union. He drew on his experiences there for a novel, The Bells of St. Ivan's (1944). In the same week that the book was published--on May 5, 1944--Carr enlisted in the U.S. Army at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, California. He separated about a year later and soon after went to New Mexico, where he lived for two years with a family of his own. Carr "yearned to live in a spiritual community," writes his son, "and occasionally spent time at a Catholic monastery in nearby Pecos."

Carr was a prolific author. His first published story, "The Composite Brain," was in Weird Tales in the same month he turned sixteen. That puts him in a category with William A.P. White (Anthony Boucher) and Thomas Lanier Williams (Tennessee Williams) as authors published in "The Unique Magazine" while they were still teenagers. From 1925 to 1928, Carr had six stories and four poems in Weird Tales. The Rampant Age, a novel about young people, was published in early 1928 when Carr was only eighteen and with the editorial help of Farnsworth Wright. The book was adapted to a movie of the same name. You can watch it in its entirety on YouTube.

After World War II, slick magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, began publishing science fiction, evidence that a pulp genre was gaining in respectability in the postwar world. Robert A. Heinlein is credited as the first postwar science fiction writer in the Post. His story "The Green Hills of Earth" from February 8, 1947, (1) beat Robert Spencer Carr's initial effort, "Morning Star," from December 6, 1947, by ten months. Carr is unusual in that--as a science fiction writer of the Golden Age--he broke into slick magazines and only later was published in pulps or digests. His three magazine novellas or novelettes--"The Laughter of the Stars," "Morning Star," and "Those Men from Mars"--plus a new story, "Mutation," were collected in book form in Beyond Infinity in 1951. In reading a synopsis of "Morning Star," I'm reminded of Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953) and Queen of Outer Space (1958).

Tim Carr writes: "His last publication was a serial, 'Porpoise to Starboard,' that ran in Florida Outdoors [circa 1980]." Carr's wife died in 1983. Carr continued living in "a showcase house overlooking Clearwater Bay." Carr spent the last year of his life in a nursing home in Dunedin, Florida. He died in that city on April 28, 1994, at age eighty-five.

To be continued . . .

Note

(1) The title "The Green Hills of Earth" is from a song sung in the Northwest Smith series by Weird Tales writer C.L. Moore.

The Rampant Age (1928) by Robert Spencer Carr.

An advertisement for The Room Beyond, from the New York Times (1948).

And the book itself, The Room Beyond by Robert Spencer Carr (1948).

Please note: I have corrected, revised, and updated this article on October 31-November 1, 2024, based on information provided by Timothy Spencer Carr, son of Robert Spencer Carr.

Text copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley