Husbands & Wives-Part One

As I was reading Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee (2018, 2019), I had the idea of writing about husband-and-wife creative teams. Then I read After Utopia by Mack Reynolds, and after that about Reynolds, his wife, and their families. I decided that my idea could make a short series on this blog. So, first, I'll write about Mack Reynolds and his wife, then about some other husbands and wives.

After Utopia by Mack Reynolds (Ace, 1977) has some autobiographical content. For one, the protagonist, Tracy Cogswell, is about the same age as the author when he was presumably writing his book. Cogswell is also a socialist, an agent or operator or activist on the leftward end of the political spectrum. Reynolds' novel is set not in the 1970s when it was published but sometime earlier, in the 1950s, I think, so that Cogswell is old enough to have been a soldier in the Spanish Civil War and an operative during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Cogswell is from Cross Plains, Indiana. We learn as much on page 91 of the Ace edition. I'm a Hoosier and so my ears prick up whenever I hear the name of my native state. I've been to Cross Plains, too. It's a small place in southeastern Indiana. A long time ago I worked in the forestland around there. Those were two happy years in my life. They happened before a great loss and real sadness set in. You probably know of another Cross Plains, the town where Robert E. Howard lived. That one is in Texas.

On page 92, Cogswell mentions a man named Lon Wooley who raised champion-sized shorthorn cattle on his farm in Cross Plains. I had never heard of Lon Wooley, so I looked him up. He was real. So were his cows. His old farm is on County Road 900 South, east of town. As it turns out, Lon Wooley was also the father-in-law of Mack Reynolds. I'm not sure I have ever read a novel of any kind in which the author inserted the name of a family member into his or her fiction.

Lon Wooley was Alonzo Warren Wooley, Sr. Born in 1875, he lived nearly a century, dying in 1967. His wife was Jennie (Alberding) Wooley, who was born in 1884 and died in 1953. They had several children. The one at hand was Helen Jeanette Wooley Reynolds, wife of Mack Reynolds. She was born on August 23, 1919, either in Cross Plains or in Friendship, Indiana. Muzzle-loading rifle enthusiasts know about Friendship. They hold a meet there twice a year.

Helen Wooley went by the name Jeanette Wooley. (I wonder if that was in honor of Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress.) Jeanette Wooley's father got his name in a science fiction novel. She got hers in a bigger book called Hearings Regarding Communist Activities in the Cincinnati, Ohio, Area, Sat., July 15, 1950, U.S. House of Representatives (p. 2784). According to a witness named Marjorie Elaine Steinbacher, Jeanette Wooley attended meetings of communists in the Cincinnati area, presumably in the first half of 1947. "What her work was," Marjorie said, "I don't know. She left quite soon because she had to go to Kentucky. She was having some kind of serious operation performed." You can read Miss Steinbacher's testimony in the original. You might also look at an article called "Nearly 30 Are Called Reds" in the Cincinnati Enquirer, July 16, 1950, page 28.

Jeanette Wooley's father raised cattle. Her mother was involved in other activities, and maybe that's where Jeanette came by her interest in communism. In 1920, Jeanette lived in Cross Plains with her family, all together as families do. But in 1930, she was far away, at a place called New Llano Cooperative Colony in Lousiana, with her siblings and her mother, who worked as a kindergarten matron. Alonzo was meanwhile back home with his son, Alonzo, Jr. The New Llano colony was actually a utopian commune founded in California by Job Harriman (1861-1925), a member of the Socialist Labor Party and a vice-presidential candidate on the ticket with Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) when he ran for president in 1900. The colony was in operation in Louisiana from 1917 to 1937. It failed, of course, as communes do. By the time that happened, Jeanette Wooley was on the verge of adulthood. By the way, Harriman and Debs were also Hoosiers. And Mack Reynolds was later a member of the Socialist Labor Party. He had his own Indiana connections, separate from his wife, as we'll see.

Mack Reynolds (1917-1983) married Evelyn Marie Sandell (1918-1987) on October 14, 1937, apparently in New Hampshire. By March 1939, Jeannette Wooley was married, too, to a man named Smith. By July 1943, she was Jeannette Wooley again. I don't know where or how she and Mack Reynolds met. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he worked as a national organizer for the Socialist Labor Party. At about that time, he gave talks in the Cincinnati area. Maybe that's where they met. But Reynolds was a rambling man. Maybe they had met a decade before in that Arkansas commune or some similar place where socialists flock. In any case, Mack Reynolds and Jeannette Wooley were married on September 15, 1947, in Cincinnati. They participated in that very bourgeois institution of marriage for the rest of their lives.

In 1949, the Reynolds moved to Taos, New Mexico, where Mack Reynolds met fellow writers Fredric Brown (1906-1972) and Walter James Sheldon, known as Walt Sheldon (1917-1996). Brown (also from Cincinnati and also with an Indiana connection) is supposed to have persuaded Reynolds to switch from writing detective stories to science fiction. In the Federal census of 1950, Mack and Jeanette Reynolds were enumerated in Arroyo Seco in Taos County. Jeanette worked as a soda fountain manager. He was of course a writer. His first published science fiction story was "Isolationist" in Fantastic Adventures, June 1950.

In 1953, the Reynolds moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. They moved away, then back again in 1965. Reynolds wrote and published for the rest of his entirely too brief life. He died on January 30, 1983, at age sixty-five. His widow died in November 1992 at just seventy-three years old. Both are buried in San Miguel de Allende, at a cemetery called Panteón de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, in the Gringo Section, Graves 703 and 704. That's a Catholic cemetery by the way, a nice place for two materialists to come to rest.

Mack Reynolds was the son of Verne La Rue Reynolds (1884-1959) and Pauline (McCord) Reynolds (1889-1991). (Reynolds' full name was Dallas McCord Reynolds, hence the "Mack." Both he and his wife went by their middle names.) Verne L. Reynolds' parents were Isaac Quincy Reynolds (1853-1890) and Phoebe Etta (Hawkins) Reynolds Reynolds (1856-1937). Both were Hoosiers, and so in having his fictional counterpart born in Indiana, Mack Reynolds was simply returning to the land of his grandparents. By the way, Phoebe Reynolds married Isaac Reynolds' brother John first. He died in 1877. She and Isaac tied the knot in 1879, but he died, too, in 1890. She married again in 1892, her last husband being Albert Frost (1841-1907), a Civil War veteran of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry. I wouldn't rule out that he was related to May Eliza Frost, better know to readers of Weird Tales as Eli Colter (1890-1984). One more by-the-way: Phoebe Etta Hawkins was a missionary for the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Africa.

Now one last thing: Hoosiers remember Eugene V. Debs as one of the many famous people from our state. I can't say that I'm proud of him, but at least there's this: In 1919, Debs went to prison for exercising his right to speak freely, a natural and unalienable right bestowed upon us by our Creator and affirmed by and in the Constitution. President Woodrow Wilson didn't like that, though, and so, essentially, he became Debs' jailer. I guess that means that Wilson's party and belief system--progressivism--have been imprisoning and trying to silence their opponents for at least the past century. They're still at it today. Debs' sentence was commuted, by the way, by a Republican and a conservative.

Further Reading

"Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds as Forteans" by Joshua Blu Buhs on his blog From an Oblique Angle, April 14, 2017, here.

I don't know whether Jeanette Reynolds ever cowrote anything with her husband, but he must have bounced ideas off of her and had her read his manuscripts: a wife (or husband) is often the writer's closest critic. In any case, they seem to have shared beliefs and ideas. He put her father into one of his novels. Maybe he drew on her life in a commune to write another: Commune 2000 A.D. (1974), cover artist unknown.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley