Poems for Poe, No. 2

At the Grave of Poe

by William James Price
Composed in June 1911. Published in The Baltimore Sun, December 25, 1911. 

Here, with a few forgotten one, reposes

A bard whose fame our long neglect defies

To him the selfish world gave thorns for roses.

And nations wonder where his body lies.

 

His haunting melodies, too few in number,

In alien hearts beyond the ocean live,

While we his virtues doom to endless slumber,

Condemn his faults, and no reward will give.

 

Ere Time's relentless tread at last has crumbled

These hallowed stones into the silent dust,

Will Pride awake, Ingratitude be humbled,

And Truth compel our spirits to be just?

Ah, grant him now a nobleman's estate,
Lest all the dead arise to prove him great!

* * *

Please note: I have inserted breaks where I believe the poet intended to but which the newspaper may have removed for the sake of conserving space in print. Note that Price's poem is in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, which is broken into stanzas as I have done here.

Posted by Terence E. Hanley on the anniversary of Poe's death, October 7, 2025.

Poems for Poe, No. 1

To Edgar Allan Poe

By Howard Elsmere Fuller

Originally in Contemporary American Poets, edited by Horace C. Baker (Boston, 1928). From the website Poetry Explorer.

Thou art a thing of Death--
Born of the love of Life,
Born of the love of Life-in-Death . . . .

Denizen of a world which hath no name,
Which hath no being out of Mind--
Far-flung, with the mad ecstasy of youth,
To the Attic hills where Pan first sang
To a dew-drenched world
The amorous strains of Creation.
Above, in the star-tossed main,
Thou must have sat,
In the cool grey dawn of things
And watched with knowing Messianic eye
The swirling mists of chaos
Stiffen into a world profane.

With a haunting, dreamy sadness
Is bared thy cryptic soul;
With a rhythmic rune of madness,
Thy melancholy soul.

Sea things with seaweed hair
And faces blanched with pale-eyed Death
Sleep on the motley sands--
The crested wave of the sobbing sea
Hath lapped their blood like wine.
Draped in whispering robes of satin,
There dream in weird, fantastic chambers,
Maidens with waxen faces, fragile fingers,
Drained of life by hectic living
In mansions, grim and sunless.

World-old newness exotic
To this sordid clime
Sprang to thy lips erotic
And flowed like ruby wine.

Sweet gamboler in the dewy gardens
Of jeweled Paradise,
Where ruddy roses ebb and flow
In the cheeks of sylph-like children.
Elves, in their amours sweet with thee
Fresh with the matin dews of time,
Whisper to thee things unknown
To the sodden soul of man.

Demons, ghastly, foul and gory
Infest the Stygian gloom,
Spectres, grim and grey and hoary
Come shrieking from the tomb--

Come shrieking from mouldering mausolea,
Whence vague shadows of the uneasy dead,
Eluding Cerberus, the red-eyed watcher,
Fare forth on the sable wings of night
Peopling the sentient blackness
With ghoulish wraiths of terror.

Tears unceasing, bitter sorrow
Hath seared thy lonely years--
The leprous touch of sorrow,
The agony of tears.

The love of woman was to thee
Divinest torture of the soul.
Radiant life was but to thee
The sad betokening of death.

Soft as the sighs of Eros
Is the music of thy pain,
Sweet as the breath of Zephyr,
Fresh as the cooling rain.

Pilgrims journey far to mourn thee
As they would a thing divine,
And they that sought to scorn thee
Pay thee homage at thy shrine.

* * *

 Posted by Terence E. Hanley, 2025.

The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe

The last poem printed in Weird Tales in 1925 was "The Haunted Palace" by Edgar Allan Poe. It first appeared in a magazine published in Baltimore by Nathan C. Brooks (1809-1898). The original title of the magazine was The North American Quarterly. In or about 1838, Brooks renamed his new charge The American Museum of Science, Literature and the Arts, or The American Museum for short. Evidently, the magazine was also referred to as the Baltimore Museum. That's a lot to go through, but it seems like there is a lack of clarity and precision out there on the Internet as to the original source of "The Haunted Palace." The date of publication by the way was April 1839.

Poe soon incorporated "The Haunted Palace" into his short story "The Fall of the House of Usher," first published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in September 1839. "The Haunted Palace" is a poem in six stanzas of eight lines each. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," the stanzas are numbered. In Weird Tales, they are not. Without going through these two versions, I can't say whether they are word for word the same.

I have written before about "The Haunted Palace." First I listed it in Poe's works reprinted in Weird Tales. In writing about Charles Beaumont (1929-1967), I listed some of that author's screen adaptations of other works. These included the screenplay for The Haunted Palace (1963), which is actually an adaptation of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, May-July 1941).

In 2021, I wrote about Les Baxter (1922-1996). Baxter wrote the scores for many Hollywood movies, including The Dunwich Horror, from 1970. Inasmuch as The Haunted Palace was the first film adapted from a work by Lovecraft, the composer of that score, Ronald Stein (1930-1988), should probably get credit for the first recorded musical adaptation of a work by Lovecraft, assuming a movie score is a kind of program music and therefore an adaptation. Prior to that, I had written about what I called "The Other Forms of Lovecraft," listing The Haunted Palace as the first adaptation on film of a work by Lovecraft.

That's a lot about Lovecraft and less about Poe. I'll close by letting you know that, according to Wikipedia, "The Haunted Palace" has been adapted to music four times, first in 1904 by French composer Florent Schmitt (1870-1958).

The cover of an album of musical works based on two stories and a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, including Florent Schmitt's symphonic poem Le Palais hanté, Op. 49, based on "The Haunted Palace" by Poe. I have this image from a very thorough blog entry called "Florent Schmitt and the French Fascination with Edgar Allan Poe: Le Palais hanté (1904)" by Phillip Nones, posted on December 10, 2012, here. Thank you to Mr. Nones and the conductor(s) of that blog. This is the kind of thing the Internet was supposed to be instead of what it is.

 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

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 

George T. Spillman (1909-1964)

Author, Telegrapher, Newspaper Writer & Editor, Champion Bridge Player
Born June 15, 1909, Vendor, Arkansas
Died February 11, 1964, at home, Shadyside, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

George Thornfern Spillman was born on June 15, 1909, to John J. Spillman, a schoolteacher, and Julia Maude (Davis) Spillman, a housewife. He had two brothers, Jerome Spillman and James Spillman, and a sister, Julia Spillman, later Julia Herndon. 

George T. Spillman wrote to Weird Tales as a fifteen-year-old in 1925. His letter was published in the August 1925 issue, one hundred years ago last month. He followed that up with a short story, "Retribution," published in December 1925, and a second letter published in January 1925. Those are his lone credits listed in either The FictionMags Index or the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

Spillman graduated from Roosevelt High School in Kent, Ohio, and attended Brown University. He worked as a telegrapher for Western Union from 1926 to 1952. In 1952, he went to work for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He was employed there for twelve years, 1952 to 1964, as a copy editor and makeup editor. He also wrote articles on bridge for the Post-Gazette and was recognized as one of the best bridge players in Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh area. In 1955, he achieved the rank of Life Master in the American Contract Bridge League. His career was interrupted by service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He enlisted on June 21, 1941, as a private and was stationed at Camp Warrenton, Virginia. He served two years in East Africa and was discharged in 1946 as a captain.

Here is an excerpt from "The Eyrie" from August 1925:

George T. Spillman, of Kent, Ohio, put WEIRD TALES to practical use recently. He is fifteen years old and a senior in high school. "Last week I gave a talk on reincarnation before my classes which astounded the entire high school," he writes. "Ha! most of my information for that talk was gleaned from your story, Under the N-Ray, by Will Smith and R. J. Robbins. That's the kind of story I like; let's have more of them. Your page of contents is a veritable Hall of Fame. I have read nearly every magazine on the market, but none is half as high in my esteem as WEIRD TALES, not only because I am a lover of the bizarre, but also for the masterly style the authors employ in the stories you choose. It is not only the most interesting pastime I can imagine, but it is also an education to read your magazine. Many of the authors whose names you are displaying will go down the pages of literary history on a par with Poe. Your ghost stories and your werewolves are so convincing that I almost think I believe in both." [Boldface added.]

"Retribution" is a very brief tale; the table of contents in that December 1925 issue calls it a "two-minute tale." It ends in suicide.

Spillman wrote his first letter from Kent, Ohio. His second came from Providence, Rhode Island. He was only fifteen years old and a senior in high school when he wrote his first. The second must have come after he had matriculated at Brown University. H.P. Lovecraft lived in New York City in 1925-1926; I guess that means Spillman missed being in close proximity to Lovecraft during his brief tenure at the university. In 1926, he went to work as a telegraph operator, though I don't know where. It's nice to think that Spillman and Lovecraft met somehow, but maybe it never happened.

George T. Spillman died at home, in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, on February 11, 1964. His cause of death was barbiturate poisoning: he had overdosed on Tuinal. A sad end. Spillman was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Boardman Township, Mahoning County, Ohio.

George T. Spillman's Story & Letters in Weird Tales
Letter to "The Eyrie" (Aug. 1925) 
"Retribution" (Dec. 1925)
Letter to "The Eyrie" (Jan. 1926)

 

Further Reading 

"Bridge Expert, Newsman Dies Here" in the Pittsburgh Press, February 12, 1964, page 33.
"G.T. Spillman, P-G Makeup Editor, Dies" in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Feb. 12, 1964, page 6.

 

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Alice I. Fuller (1870-1928) (George Fuller, too)

Alice Irene (Webb) Fuller, aka Alice I. Clark, Mrs. George H. Fuller
Author, Poet, Housewife & Mother
Born May 11, 1870, Hardin County, Ohio
Died November 30, 1928, Loxley, Alabama

Alice I. Fuller had one story in Weird Tales. She was also the mother of a man who had one story in the magazine. And we shouldn't rule out that a third story came from the Fuller family, this one with the byline of a man named George Fuller. That was also the name of Alice's husband. I'm beginning to think that Howard Elsmere Fuller wrote all three stories and submitted them to "The Unique Magazine," first under his parents' names, then under his own. We shouldn't take anything away from Alice I. Fuller, though, for she is known to have written for popular magazines of her day.

Alice Irene Webb was born on May 11, 1870, in Hardin County, Ohio, to Jesse and Virginia Webb. She was orphaned as a child and at age six was taken into the home of John W. Clark and Mary Ann (Webber) Clark of Powell, Ohio. Apparently they did not adopt her but only kept her as a foster child. Nonetheless, she used their last name and was known as Alice I. Clark at the time of her wedding.

Alice worked in the office of W.S. Burkhart in Cincinnati for two years. He was a manufacturer and seller of patent medicines, his vegetable compound advertised as "the greatest blood purifier ever discovered." On October 20, 1891, she married George Henry Fuller (1863-1944) in Delaware County, Ohio. They had two sons, Clarence Clark Fuller (1893-1980) and Howard Elsmere Fuller (1895-1985). In 1908, the Fuller family moved to Loxley, Alabama. There was a family connection in that place, for Alice's foster mother, Mary Ann (Webber) Clark, was the sister of Arms Royal Webber (1838-1923), a man of Loxley.

Alice I. Fuller was a wife and a mother, but according to her obituary "found time to write articles which were readily accepted by the popular magazines." (Source: "Mrs. George H. Fuller," in The Onlooker, Foley, Alabama, Dec. 6, 1928, p. 2.) Unfortunately, that source doesn't give any examples of "the popular magazines," and The FictionMags Index lists nothing by her except for her lone story in Weird Tales. That story was "The Tomb Dweller" in the February 1925 issue. It was preceded by a story called "Yellow and White" (Mar. 1924) by an author named George Fuller and followed by her younger son's story "Wolfgang Fex, Criminal" (Aug. 1925).

Alice Irene Fuller was invalided for more than a year at the end of her life. She died too young, at age fifty-eight, on November 30, 1928, in Loxley, Alabama. She was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in her hometown.

Alice I. Fuller's Story in Weird Tales 
"The Tomb Dweller" (Feb. 1925)

 

Further Reading
Obituary, The Onlooker (Foley, Alabama), December 6, 1928, page 2.

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George Henry Fuller
Born October 15, 1863, Franklin County, Ohio
Died August 30, 1944, Loxley, Alabama
Buried at Greenwood Cemetery, Loxley, Alabama

There was a story called "Yellow and White" by a George Fuller in the March 1924 issue of Weird Tales. I can't say that this George Fuller was the same George Fuller who was married to Alice I. Fuller, but it's an interesting speculation that he was. And if he was, maybe the story was actually hers and she submitted it using his name. Or maybe as I wrote above, their son was the true author of the George Fuller story. But as in the case of the great question of how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.

----- 

The Fullers' elder son was Clarence Clark Fuller (1893-1980). He graduated from Ohio State University and was an engineer, inventor of automobile accessories, and radio technician. In 1922, he married Adele Irene Mahler. I wrote the other day that the Fullers seem not to have been involved in the utopian community at nearby Fairhope, Alabama. But in 1936, Fuller submitted to The Onlooker his "Fuller Plan" regarding taxation. Fairhope was founded on principles laid out by Henry George (1839-1897) in his single-tax scheme. I have read about the single tax and still don't understand it. I can't say whether the "Fuller Plan" had anything to do with George's ideas. By the way, in 1922, Clarence C. Fuller and his wife were guided through Kentucky caves by Floyd Collins (1887-1925), who later died while being trapped in a cave. There was a media circus around Collins' predicament. In 1951, Paramount Pictures released a movie, The Big Carnival (aka Ace in the Hole), based on the event. It was directed by Billy Wilder and starred Kirk Douglas. Another by the way: "The Tomb-Dweller" is about a man who gets trapped in a tomb. The story appeared in Weird Tales in February 1925, the same month in which Collins died.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Howard Elsmere Fuller (1895-1985)

Author, Poet, Rural Letter Carrier
Born March 30, 1895, Worthington, Ohio
Died July 19, 1985, Baldwin County, Alabama

Howard Elsmere Fuller is a pretty easy case. I found him pretty quickly but only after finding his mother, Alice I. Fuller. As it turns out, she contributed to Weird Tales, too. And maybe her husband got in on the action as well, though I can't say that for sure. Or if the story by George Fuller came from the Fuller family, maybe it was Alice or Howard who was behind it. Or maybe Howard was behind all three Fuller stories. But then his mother was a writer for magazines, too. Anyway, I'll write first about Howard Elsmere Fuller, who contributed to the August 1925 issue of Weird Tales, one hundred years ago last month. (I'm catching up.)

Howard Elsmere Fuller was born on March 30, 1895, in Worthington, Ohio, to George Henry Fuller (1863-1944) and Alice Irene (Webb) Fuller, also known as Alice I. Clark (1870-1928). (She had lived with foster parents when she was young, thus the two different last names.) Fuller had one older brother, Clarence Clark Fuller (1893-1980). He was an engineer and inventor. I had a close call when I looked up a possible relationship of the Fuller family to Curtis G. Fuller (1912-1991), editor of Fate magazine. That Fuller's father was also named Clarence C. Fuller, but he was a different Clarence and apparently no relation at all.

The Fuller family moved to Loxley, Alabama, in 1908. Although Loxley is close to the utopian community of Fairhope, I didn't get any sense that the Fullers were utopian in their views. As we have seen, tellers of weird tales very often had an affinity for utopian and other fringe beliefs. I have written about Fairhope before. Volney George Mathison (1897-1965) lived there as a child. Ethel Morgan-Dunham (1880-1960) was buried at Fairhope. She, too, lived in Loxley, and now I wonder if she and the Fullers could have known each other. 

Howard E. Fuller served in the U.S. military from August 27, 1918, to December 24, 1918, beginning at Camp Pike in Little Rock, Arkansas. I don't know in which branch he served, but I'll assume it was in the army. The war ended less than three months after he joined. Being discharged on Christmas Eve in 1918 must have been a welcome gift to him and his family.

Fuller worked as a rural letter carrier, apparently for all of his working life. His writing was on the side. He had one story in Weird Tales, "Wolfgang Fex, Criminal" (Aug. 1925). He also had a letter published in "The Eyrie," in May 1925. He traveled to various places in the United States and went to the New York World's Fair in June 1939. The 1st World Science Fiction Convention was held a month later, from July 2 to July 4, 1939. Maybe Fuller was too early to meet any of its attendees.

An item from The Onlooker of Foley, Alabama, July 16, 1925. The newspaper botched Fuller's title and misspelled the word weird, but at least it was something.

 

Fuller was a member of the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA). In November 1953, he had a book of his poems published, Excursions in Arcady. A better claim to fame was his authorship of a poem, "To Edgar Allan Poe," published in Contemporary American Poets, edited by Horace C. Baker (Boston, 1928). I have these four lines from the website of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore:

With a haunting, dreamy sadness
Is bared the crytic [sic] soul;
With a rhythmic rune of madness.
Thy melancholy soul.

You can read the whole poem on a website called Poetry Explorer by clicking here. 

Howard Elsmere Fuller died on July 19, 1985, in Baldwin County, Alabama, at age ninety. He was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Loxley like his parents before him.

Howard Elsmere Fuller's Letter & Story in Weird Tales
Letter to "The Eyrie" (May 1925)
"Wolfgang Fex, Criminal" (Aug. 1925)

Further Reading
Only a few newspaper items, plus his poem, "To Edgar Allan Poe."

Next: Alice I. Fuller

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Spear and Fang

100 Years of Robert E. Howard in Weird Tales

No discussion of the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales would be complete without mentioning "Spear and Fang," the first story by Robert E. Howard published in "The Unique Magazine."

Howard was nineteen and a half years old when "Spear and Fang" was published. Because my books are in storage, I will have to rely on online sources of information on Howard and his career to write this. Those sources indicate that "Spear and Fang" was not Howard's first published story but suggest that it was his first professional sale. According to one source, which is always suspect, even on the most well-documented of facts, Howard submitted "Spear and Fang" to Weird Tales in 1924, when he was just eighteen. The new editor of the magazine, Farnsworth Wright, accepted it and informed Howard as much at Thanksgiving time in 1924. I wonder if that means that Howard submitted his story while Weird Tales was still in hiatus, from about June or July to November 1924. If so, that would make for the most serendipitous of developments for Howard, Wright, and Weird Tales, all three, for the then teen-aged author would prove to be one of the most popular and prolific of those who contributed to a magazine that had almost disappeared in 1924. For his efforts, Howard was paid $16, a nice sum for a beginning pulp author of the 1920s.

"Spear and Fang" is a caveman story, though not the first to appear in Weird Tales. That honor goes to R.T.M. Scott and his "Nimba the Cave Girl" from March 1923. It's not very long, five printed pages in all, but it tells a complete story, essentially of a love triangle, if you can call it that, or the eternal triangle, and the rescuing of a damsel in distress.

"Spear and Fang" is, on its surface, a conventional story, but I noticed some things in my reading of it that I think are worth writing about. First, Howard was well known in his later writings for his identification with barbarians and what some people would call savages. That isn't the case with "Spear and Fang," for the hero is a more advanced Cro-Magnon man, while the villain is a primitive, even bestial, Neanderthal man. It's clear that the Cro-Magnon man, called Ga-Nor, is more civilized. He is, after all, an artist. (More on that in a minute.) He is the man of the future. Both he and A-aea, the woman he rescues, are referred to as "mark[s] of progress." The Neanderthal man, on the other hand, is the man of the past. His days are numbered, even if he still has the power to terrify his enemies. It seems to me that at age eighteen Howard still believed in the idea of progress. This was, after all, a progressive era, even if that era was nearing its end and even if Calvin Coolidge, a conservative, was then president. We should remember, too, that, even if weird fiction is at its heart a conservative or anti-progressive genre, Weird Tales was co-founded by a man, J.C. Henneberger, who had worked for a progressive and prohibitionist newspaper. I would guess that many of the magazine's authors held progressive views, too, including unsavory ones such as eugenics.

Second, there is a racial aspect in "Spear and Fang," though not in the way people now talk about race. The idea expressed in Howard's story seems older and broader, maybe more like an old Anglo-Saxon or even biblical view, expressed pretty well in this sentence:

     Both the girl and the youth were perfect specimens of the great Cro-Magnon race which came from no man knows where and announced and enforced their supremacy over beast and beast-man.

Just as we shouldn't interpret "race" in our contemporary terms, we also shouldn't interpret "supremacy" in those terms. I wonder if Howard thought of the original Cro-Magnon men as being racially pure and that only afterwards was there some kind of degradation or descent: in our pre-civilized state, we were "perfect," or at least near perfection, and only later did decadence set in. I wonder if ideas like those were related in any way to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Maybe those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau are at work here, too.

Third, Howard probably catches a lot of flak now for his depictions of women. I don't have anything to say about that. I'll just point out that, although A-aea needs rescuing, she is not a passive character. In fact, she risks disapproval and punishment for going after what she wants, which is to draw the attention of Ga-Nor, the man she loves.

Finally, Ga-Nor, like I said, is an artist, even if he is tall and well built. (That's not a knock at artists. I'm one after all.) I take him to be a stand-in for the author of the story. He seems oblivious to A-aea at first. He's more caught up in his creation of a cave painting. But when she needs rescuing, he's there, and he succeeds where his taller and stronger rival, the reckless, cruel, and proud Ka-nanu, fails. Call it a revenge of the nerds and the fantasy of creative, gentle, or less than adept men when it comes to winning the hearts of beautiful women. This is what so much pulp fiction is about.

Although "Spear and Fang" was written by a teen-aged author (before teenager was a word), it shows some unusual depth and complexity, I think, and is more than a mere tale. It shows that there were larger things behind Howard's writing, larger than just a desire to tell a story or to earn some income. Howard seems to have begun forming a worldview and a foundation for his later writings. And he was just seven years away from "Worms of the Earth" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1932), which can be called one of his masterpieces, if there is such a thing as a masterpiece in pulp fiction.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

John Lee Mahin, Jr. (1902-1984)-Part Two

John Lee Mahin, Jr., had one story in Weird Tales. Entitled "The Red Lily," it appeared one hundred years ago last month, in July 1925, when its author was just twenty-two years old. The FictionMags Index has two more credits for him, the short stories "Yo-Ho-Ho, and a Bottle" in Ladies' Home Journal (Feb. 1928) and "Back to Glory" in Liberty (Feb. 7, 1931).* By the time that second story appeared, Mahin was moving towards a date with destiny as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Mahin wrote newspaper reviews of movies and plays during his two years at Harvard University. He worked two more years as a journalist in New York City before switching to the advertising business. Maybe that was in his father's business, but Mahin's father died in late 1930. Maybe Mahin Junior needed a new line of work as 1931 rolled around. Luckily for him, he became acquainted with Ben Hecht, a former Chicago newspaperman who was rapidly becoming one of the most accomplished and successful of Hollywood screenwriters. According to his obituary in the New York Times (Apr. 21, 1984), Mahin "was brought to Hollywood by the screenwriter Ben Hecht, who had read one of Mr. Mahin's short stories." Mahin assisted Hecht in writing the screenplay for The Unholy Garden, which was released in October 1931. That suggests that Mahin began working as a movie scenarist in 1931. The New York Times doesn't say which story by Mahin that Ben Hecht had read. Maybe it was "The Red Lily," a bitterly ironic tale that would easily have lent itself to a treatment for the screen. We know that Hecht was interested in genre fiction, including weird fiction.

I won't list Mahin's screenwriting credits except for a few near the beginning of his career. They include: The Beast of the City (1932), Scarface (1932), Red Dust (1932), and Bombshell (1933). The Beast of the City is a memorable crime drama with a very memorable ending. The male lead was played by Walter Huston. A quarter of a century later, Mahin was nominated, along with Huston's son, John Huston, for an academy award for best screenplay for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957). He had previously won a Christopher Award for his screenplay for Quo Vadis (1951). Mahin was friends with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, among other actors and actresses, and was a favorite writer among Hollywood directors. He wrote screenplays for several crime dramas but only one for a fantasy or horror movie as far as I know, this one for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941). In this month of anniversaries regarding the atomic bomb, I can say that Mahin was brought in early on in the making of The Beginning of the End (1947), about the Manhattan Project. However, he was not credited for any work he might have done on that film.

In 1937, Mahin married Patsy Ruth Miller (1904-1995), who years before had played Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). They had a son, Timothy Miller Mahin (b. 1941), who appeared as a baby in the movie Thoroughbreds in 1944. In addition to being a movie and stage actress, Patsy Ruth Miller wrote radio scripts, short stories, and books.

From the Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1937, page 3.

The Mahins' marriage must have ended in divorce by 1948, for Mahin remarried on June 16, 1948, in California. His new wife was named Barbara A. Bonnett, and if I have all of this right, they had a daughter named Margaret Lee "Maggi" Mahin (b. 1949). Mahin's fourth wife--and widow--was Muriel M. "Micca" McKinnon Mahin (1914-1984), whom he had married on October 16, 1954, also in California. She had previously been married to Argentinian swimmer and actor Justo José Caraballo (1914-2003). But maybe that's enough Hollywood gossip and name-dropping for now.

By the way, Mahin served in the U.S. Army Air Force from September 14, 1942, to August 13, 1945. I believe he was stationed in Los Angeles, where he wrote scripts for training films and rose to the rank of captain.

John Lee Mahin, Jr., died on April 18, 1984, in Santa Monica, California, at age eighty-one. He was survived by his fourth wife, but only for a few months. Mahin was also survived by three of his four children. His remains were cremated and his ashes scattered at sea.

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*I also found a poem by Mahin called "The Song of the Bridge and the River," published in the Twin City Sentinel of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and dated September 27, 1922 (page 10). Mahin's poem was undoubtedly syndicated. 

John Lee Mahin, Jr.'s Story in Weird Tales
"The Red Lily" (July 1925)

Further Reading

There is a lot of reading on John Lee Mahin, Jr., in newspapers alone. Maybe he is in books about the Golden Age of Hollywood, too.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

John Lee Mahin, Jr. (1902-1984)-Part One

Author, Poet, Journalist, Reviewer, Screenwriter, Movie Producer, Stage Actor, Performer, & Director
Born August 23, 1902, Evanston, Illinois
Died April 18, 1984, Santa Monica, California

I have been writing about lesser-known writers who contributed to Weird Tales. John Lee Mahin, Jr., isn't one of them. He was in fact very well known in Hollywood for his dozens of screenplays. Even so, there aren't any biographical facts for him in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb). The ISFDb could link to Wikipedia, for there is an entry on Mahin on that website, but they don't. I don't blame them, for the entry on Mahin is typical Wikipedia. When Wikipedia doesn't lie, by omission or commission, or spout left-wing propaganda, its information is often incomplete, erroneous, or self-contradictory. So I guess I'll write about Mahin here.

John Lee Mahin, Jr., was born on August 23, 1902, in Evanston, Illinois, to John Lee Mahin, Sr. (1869–1930) and Julia Graham (Snitzler) Mahin (1867-1934). A native of Muscatine, Iowa, Mahin Senior got his start in the newspaper business but made a name for himself in advertising. He had his own advertising firms in Chicago and New York and wrote books on advertising and sales. His father had been a newspaperman before him. If you go searching for Mahins and related families, you won't lack for newspaper accounts of their activities.

John Lee Mahin, Jr., got his name and face in the newspaper at age eleven when his picture and a boosterish but vague profile of him appeared in the Chicago Tribune along with those of a dozen other children, all of whom were candidates for future fame. This thing--I'm not sure whether to call it a feature article, contest, promotion, publicity campaign, or what--is so foreign to me that I have a hard time understanding its purpose. In any case, it appeared as a full-page spread in the Chicago Tribune on June 14, 1914. There at the bottom of the page is a portrait photograph of John Lee Mahin, Jr., No. 12, dressed in a suit and tie, posed and serious, sitting, as a child, below a possible pinnacle of future fame. I haven't checked out the other candidates, but his candidacy for fame proved to be a good one, for he became well known for his work in Hollywood.

Mahin graduated from Middlesex School in Massachusetts in 1921, giving the valedictory address for his class. One of his classmates was Finley Peter Dunne, Jr., another future screenwriter and son of the famed humorist and author. Mahin was in the Harvard University class of 1925, but I don't know that he ever graduated. His life began taking another turn during that roaring decade.

In his early career, Mahin was a poet and a stage actor. He was with the Clark Street Players in Brooklyn, New York; the Provincetown Players; and the Fenimore Players, of which he was also director. He was also an actor with MacGowan, O'Neill and Jones, a firm that may or may not have been the same as the Provincetown Players. (Macgowan was Kenneth Macgowan, O'Neill was Eugene O'Neill, and Jones was Robert Edmond Jones.) Mahin played on Broadway in Bad Habits of 1926, a revue that ran for only nineteen performances in April and May 1926. He was in other revues and played with stock companies in the East during the 1920s.

Mahin married Hume Nancy Derr, also known during her life as Hume Dixon (1903-1955), on June 25, 1926, in Greenwich, Connecticut. She also performed on the Broadway stage, also in Bad Habits of 1926 with Mahin and Robert Montgomery. Later she wrote radio scripts for Robert Ripley's radio show, called Ripley's Believe It or Not!, just like his syndicated comic panel. She was involved in promotions for Karo syrup and other products. Hume Derr had her own radio show in later years. After her divorce from Mahin, she married Alfred Dixon. She and Mahin had two sons, future editor and screenwriter Graham Lee Mahin (1927-2008) and Michael John Mahin (1928-1965). Hume Derr Dixon died entirely too young in 1955.

To be concluded . . .

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley