1925

The artist Lou Feck was born in 1925, more than one hundred years ago now that November has arrived. I have been writing about Weird Tales in that year. Nineteen twenty-five has been in the back of my mind--and sometimes in the front--during 2025. Then something happened in October that made me think differently about 1925.

I was sitting in a room at the Veterans Administration (VA) clinic last month when I heard the receptionist down the hall ask a man's birthdate. He said, loudly and clearly, "February second, nineteen twenty-five." I got up and stepped into the hallway to have a look. He was seated in a wheelchair. There was some confusion about his name. He knew it. His caregiver didn't. She had been taking care of him for the previous six months and didn't know his real first name, for he goes by his middle name and probably has since before she was born.

We know that people can live to be one hundred years old. Actress June Lockhart, co-star of Lost in Space (1965-1968), who died just three weeks ago, reached that age in June of this year. (I guess her birth month was the source of her Christian name.) But to have that fact come almost right to where you're sitting, to see a centenarian in person, to hear a man tell his birthdate of one hundred years ago--that is something else.

So the man in the wheelchair was alive when Weird Tales of 1925 was on the newsstand. That led me to realize that there are almost certainly people still living who read "The Unique Magazine" in its first incarnation, which began in 1923 and ended in 1954. The youngest of them might be around eighty. The oldest might be the age of the man in the wheelchair. Several years ago I talked to a man who read Western pulps in the 1930s. (He was born in the West and flew bombers during World War II and in Korea. He later became an engineer and a university professor. In retirement, he built a one-seat airplane, no cockpit or canopy, in his large shed. There was a parachute behind the seat. It was not for the pilot but for the whole airplane, should it fail in flight.) But I have never talked to or heard from anyone who read Weird Tales except for the artist Jon Arfstrom (1928-2015), who was also a contributor to the magazine. Is anyone else out there? May I hear from you?

Weird Tales, February 1925, with a cover story, "Whispering Tunnels" by Stephen Bagby (a U.S. Army veteran) and cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. Bagby's story is about the Great War and a postwar search for a missing American soldier. The tunnels are under Fort Vaux, part of the battlefield at Verdun. After losing it to the enemy, the French recaptured Fort Vaux on November 2, 1916, one hundred nine years ago this month. This issue of Weird Tales was dated the same month in which the man in the wheelchair was born. He is a veteran, too, and at age 100 is old enough to have served in World War II.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley