R.G. Macready (1905-1977)-Part Two

R.G. Macready contributed to student publications at all of the schools he attended. He also contributed to the Volta Review, a publication for the deaf and hard of hearing that is still being published today. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1945, he went to work as a teacher of English, history, and journalism at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf. He planned to write in his spare time.

Macready contributed just one story to Weird Tales. Entitled "The Plant Thing," it was published in July 1925 when its author was just twenty years old. "The Plant Thing" is a brief tale of a large, carnivorous plant, bred by a scientist who lives in a walled estate with his daughter and a Malay servant. The narrator of the story is a newspaper reporter. "The Plant Thing" has similarities to "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud (Weird Tales, Mar. 1923), as well as to "The Hand" by Guy de Maupassant (1883). Stories of murderous or carnivorous plants are common in weird fiction, horror fiction, and science fiction. I have written before about plants like these that appeared on the cover of Weird Tales. Click here to find your way. And of course there is in "The Plant Thing" the scientist and his beautiful daughter, with his wife and her mother nowhere to be found. Women in popular culture should know better than to marry scientists and to give them beautiful daughters. They're likely to end up like Dr. Morbius' wife in Forbidden Planet (1956) or Dr. Medford's wife in Them! (1957).

"The Plant Thing" has been reprinted several times since its original publication, as early as 1925 in Not at Night, edited by Christine Campbell Thomson, and as late as 2022. In a newspaper article from 1946 ("Deaf Man Receives M.A. in Journalism," in The Deaf Mississippian, Feb. 1, 1946, p. 1), Macready was described as having written "two horror novels and numerous short stories and novelettes, as yet unsold." I wish that these novels and stories were still in existence, but I fear they have been lost, for Macready never married and died without issue. He was survived only by two brothers and several nieces and nephews.

Macready had two letters in "The Eyrie." Here is the text of his first, from June 1925:

You are to be commended on the determined stand you, as well as the great majority of WEIRD TALES readers, have taken against those who protest at the weird quality of the stories printed in your periodical. Why do not these people, who are trying to wipe out of existence the only magazine of its kind, turn their artillery upon the sex-exploiting magazines that are crowding the best magazines out of place on our news stands? Anyway, a mind that can go undiseased through that so-called literature should be able to survive the pleasantly exhilarating 'kick' of a good horror tale. There can be no question as to the literary status of WEIRD TALES. In it have appeared stories worthy of Kipling himself, to say nothing of Poe.

Macready worked as telegraph editor at the Galveston Daily News in 1948 and at the Big Spring Daily Herald in 1949 and after. I don't have anything on his career after 1950. Reginald G. Macready died on May 10, 1977, in Arlington, Texas, at age seventy-two and was buried at Southland Memorial Park in Grand Prairie, Texas.

R.G. Macready's Story & Letters in Weird Tales
Letter to "The Eyrie" (June 1925)
"The Plant Thing" (July 1925)
Letter to "The Eyrie" (July 1925)

Further Reading

Many interesting and detailed newspaper articles about him and his career as a student and journalist. You might start at the website of the Oklahoma Historical Society and its archive of newspapers.

 Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

R.G. Macready (1905-1977)-Part One

Reginald Goode Macready
Author, Linotype Operator, Newspaper Writer & Editor, Teacher
Born April 18, 1905, Silo, Oklahoma
Died May 10, 1977, Arlington, Texas

Reginald Goode Macready was born on April 18, 1905, in Silo, Oklahoma, to Edward Daniel Macready (1849-1927) and Sallie Mattie (Goode) Macready. Born in New York State of an English immigrant father and an American mother, Edward D. Macready was an Oklahoma pioneer, arriving in the territory in the 1890s. He taught school for many years and was a newspaper editor and publisher. He also wrote poetry. His poem "Dream Valley," from 1912, was described as illustrative of "the weird, brooding spell of the Sonora Desert." (Source: "Necrology," in Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol. 5, No. 3, Sept. 1927, pp. 354-355.) My source for this poem is too faint in parts for me to read, but I can say that "Dream Valley" is in the genre of hidden valleys and lost worlds.

Reginald Goode Macready, called Goode in his youth, grew up in Bryan County, Oklahoma, where his father taught school. When he was seven, Macready contracted meningitis and as a result was made completely deaf. He studied at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf in Sulphur, where he was president and valedictorian of his graduating class of 1922. For his high honors, he was awarded a scholarship of $500 per year to attend Gallaudet College in Washington, D.C., where he began in the fall of 1922. His course of study was to be for five years.

Upon his father's death in 1927, Macready went to work in the newspaper business in order to support himself. He worked as a linotype operator at the Durant Daily Democrat, Madill Record, and Holdenville Tribune, all in Oklahoma, and at the Denver Post. In 1939, he matriculated at the University of Oklahoma, where he studied journalism, English, and psychology. His ambition was to become a writer and teacher. Macready supported himself by working as associate editor and linotype operator for the Oklahoma Daily student newspaper. For his journalistic work, he received a Citation for Professional Achievement from Sigma Delta Chi. His studies were interrupted by injuries sustained when he was hit by a car in June 1942. Macready returned to school in 1943 and graduated with a bachelor of arts in journalism on June 26, 1944. He continued with graduate work and received his master of arts in journalism from the University of Oklahoma on July 31, 1945.

To be concluded . . .

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Harold E. Somerville (1885-1935)

Author, Newspaperman, Editor, Amateur Astronomer & Mathematician

Born March 1, 1885, Vermont
Died April 26, 1935, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I will assume that the Harold E. Somerville who contributed to Weird Tales in July 1925 was the same Harold E. Somerville who worked as a newspaperman and editor in New England and Philadelphia from the early 1900s to his death in 1935.

Harold Ernest Somerville was born on March 1, 1885, in Vermont, possibly in Waterbury. His parents were Josiah Somerville and Florence L. (Brown) Somerville. He had two older brothers, Charles Edward Somerville (1866-1929), a telegraph operator, and Frederick Holland Somerville (1872-1937), a schoolteacher. The younger boys were apparently orphaned. In 1900, they were enumerated in the U.S. Census in the household of their aunt, Louisa S. Watts, in Waterbury, Vermont.

Harold E. Somerville was something of a prodigy. In 1901, he had letters in the Boston Globe regarding astronomy. These included a letter of March 11, 1901, about the planet Venus. He graduated from Waterbury High School in June 1901 at age sixteen. In 1902, he provided solutions to mathematical problems posed in a column called "Puzzle Problems" in the Boston Globe.

Somerville began working in the field of journalism as a young man. His first newspaper job was with the Waterbury Record. He matriculated at the University of Vermont in 1904, winning honorable mention in his freshman entrance examination in mathematics. While at the university, Somerville served as treasurer of the Green and Gold Debating Club (1906); associate editor of The Vermont Cynic, a weekly journal (1906-1908); and editor of The Vermont Handbook, yearbook published by the university Y.M.C.A. (1908). He graduated in 1908.

In 1908, Somerville secured a position as a teacher in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where his brother Fred had taught before him. By 1910, he was back in Waterbury, in the household of his aunt, and working as a window sign painter.

Somerville's newspaper career began in earnest on January 1, 1914, when he became night editor of the Burlington Free Press. He resigned in July 1915 to take a job with the New Bedford Evening Standard in Massachusetts. In 1918 and 1920, he was working in Boston as a journalist and editor. This must have been with the Boston Herald. By 1930, he was living in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and working as a newspaper editor. Somerville was night editor for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. At the time of his death, in 1935, he was an editor with the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.

As a New Englander, a writer, and an amateur astronomer, Somerville would seem to have been in the right time and the right place, and interested in the right things, to have come in contact with H.P. Lovecraft and others of his circle. But I haven't found any connections between them. Somerville contributed one story, "The Sudden Death of Luke A. Lucas," to Weird Tales. This was in July 1925. His story is very short and lightly humorous. It's about life in a small town and includes a visit to a newspaper office. Maybe it's an episode from Somerville's youth or from the town in which he grew up. The FictionMags Index has two other credits for Somerville, "Coming!--a Lunar Eclipse," in The Scrap Book (May 1909) and "Wreck at Clay," a short story in Overland Monthly (Aug. 1919).

Harold E. Somerville died on April 26, 1935, at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital and was interred at Northfield, Vermont. He was at the time of his death just fifty years old.

Harold E. Somerville's Story in Weird Tales
"The Death of Luke A. Lucas" (July 1925)

Further Reading
Only a few newspaper items.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Adrian Pordelorrar (?-?)

I would like to start out writing about the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales by writing about the last author listed in its table of contents. He or she was Adrian Pordelorrar.

Adrian Pordelorrar was almost certainly a pseudonym. I haven't found anyone by that name or surname in my searches of newspapers and public records. The last name Pordelorrar is unusual to say the least. Nothing comes back for it in an Internet search, either. That makes me think that there is meaning in the name, and so I have tried breaking it apart and entering its parts in an online translator. I had thought that the name could be from the Esperanto, but I didn't get very far in that. Por and del are easy enough. They are prefixes in Spanish. That leaves -orrar as the main part of the name. Orrar isn't a word in Spanish, but llorar is. It means "to cry."

If the last name Pordelorrar has significant meaning, then maybe the given name Adrian does, too. It's an ancient Latin name, a variation of Hadrian or Hadrianus. The root word seems to be adur, meaning "sea" or "water." Together, maybe the poet's name means something like "water of the crying" or "water for the crying." Maybe someone who knows Spanish can propose a better meaning or translation. As an alternative, maybe Adrian refers to the Roman emperor Hadrian as a conqueror as Time seems the conqueror in the poem.

The next step in all of this would seem to be: read the poem. And so here it is, a sonnet:

The Conqueror
By Adrian Pordelorrar 

Dark, even in the sunset's crimson glare,
     There grows, unknown, an ancient forest grove; --
A voice of myst'ry murmurs in its air
     Where Night for centuries has whispered love!
Dim mirrored in a crystal pool, found there,
     Lie strange, forgotten worlds, and things, whereof
One dares not dream. Dark eyes, through matted hair,
     Laugh from its depths, to mock at Life above.

Soft words, from unseen lips, make known their thought--
     The uselessness of lab'ring through the years,
While worlds and men and kingdoms they have wrought,
     Their efforts, and their loves, and secret fears,
Crumble before the sweep of Time, as nought,
     Despite their anguish, and unnoticed tears!

If -lorrar is a play on llorar, referring to crying, and Adrian refers to water also, then the imagery of crying and water in the name of the pseudonymous poet is also in the poem.

We will probably never know who was the author of "The Conqueror," but why not consider Farnsworth Wright as a possibility?

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Leavenworth MacNab (1872-1933)

Archibald Leavenworth MacNab
Author, Poet, Newspaperman
Born December 21, 1872, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada
Died June 25, 1933, Illinois Masonic Hospital, Sullivan, Illinois

Archibald Leavenworth MacNab was born on December 21, 1872, in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. His parents were Alexander MacNab and Margaret (McArthur) MacNab. MacNab was educated at the University of Toronto. He came to the United States in June 1895 and was naturalized as an American citizen on May 25, 1923, at the age of fifty.

MacNab dropped his first name, sometimes or often, and went by Leavenworth MacNab. He worked as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco for ten years or more. He reported on the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906. MacNab also worked for the St. Louis Globe Democrat, the Chicago Chronicle, and The Music Trades. He also contributed to The Argonaut.

MacNab had stories in National Magazine and Sunset in the period 1902 to 1904. More than two decades passed before he had his next magazine credits, this according to the list in The FictionMags Index. These were four poems and a short story in Weird Tales, beginning in June 1925.

MacNab's story, "The Hanging of Aspara," isn't a short story so much as a slightly fictionalized piece of reporting. A footnote to the story tells us as much. The reporter in the story is named MacTavish, or Mac, a pretty transparent disguise made by the author. Mac works for a newspaper called only "the News." The subject of the story is Sam Aspara, also known as Sam Sparo or Sam Asparo. Or maybe "Aspara" was just another alias. In any case, he was hanged on April 28, 1905, in New Orleans for the murder of a mafioso named Antonio "Tony" Luciano. You can read more about the whole thing on a website called Mafia Genealogy, published by Justin Cascio, by clicking here. I take all of that to indicate that MacNab worked as a newspaperman in New Orleans, circa 1905.

Archibald L. MacNab died on June 25, 1933, at Illinois Masonic Hospital in Sullivan, Illinois. He was buried at Prospect Cemetery in Toronto, Canada.  

Leavenworth MacNab's Short Story & Poems in Weird Tales
"The Hanging of Aspara" (short story, June 1925)
"Lake Desolation" (poem, Aug. 1927)
"Despair and the Soul" (poem, Nov. 1927)
"Dirge" (poem, Aug. 1928)
"Let Night Have Sway" (poem, Jan. 1929)

Further Reading
A few newspaper articles.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Junius B. Smith (1883-1945)

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

Junius Bailey Smith was born on September 29, 1883, in Salt Lake City, Utah Territory. 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.

Correction (Aug. 18, 2025): Thanks to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database for pointing out that when Smith was born, Utah was still a territory. I have made the correction.

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.)