Lou Feck (1925-1981)

For Remembrance Sunday, November 9, and Veterans Day, November 11, 2025

Yesterday I mentioned the artist Lou Feck in regard to his illustrations for The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth (Bantam Books, 1977). I would like to write about Lou Feck today, for he had an indirect connection to Weird Tales magazine, and I find that there isn't any biography of him on line, or at least as far as I have searched. He was a very good artist, especially good with airplanes and other machines, as well as with architecture. Like all really good artists, though, he was good at handling the human figure. He needed those skills in his work as a cover artist for science fiction and fantasy paperbacks. He did other paperback cover art as well.

Lou Feck's name can be added to the list of Conan cover artists. He also created the cover art for Kull, the Fabulous Warrior King by Robert E. Howard (Bantam Books, 1978). Feck's depictions of airplanes in flight, as well as of airfields, hangars, and other things related to aviation, are excellent. Now I find that he was acquainted with the field of aviation, as he had served in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II. Frederick Forsyth (1938-2025), by the way, also served in the air force, in his case the Royal Air Force, or RAF. He was commissioned three days after his eighteenth birthday and became a pilot a year later. At age nineteen, he was at the time the youngest pilot in the RAF. The late Mr. Forsyth flew the de Havilland Vampire, a graceful-looking, twin-tail, single-engine jet fighter. The pilot in The Shepherd flies the same type of aircraft. Frederick Forsyth died almost exactly one hundred years after Lou Feck's birth.

Louis Edward Feck was born on July 8, 1925, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Vela Bertyl (Edwards) Willett and Louis Fairfax Willett, Sr. The two were married on January 22, 1924, and divorced on or about March 15, 1930. Feck's name at birth was actually Louis Fairfax Willett, Jr. In the U.S. Census of 1930 (April 11), he was enumerated with his divorced mother in Norwood, Ohio. She worked then as an editor at a lithographing company. Three years later, a portrait of Vela Edwards Willett, painted by Glen Tracy (1883-1956), was included in an exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum. So, Lou Feck came from a family connected to the art world.

Vela Willett remarried in 1932. Her new husband was Edward A. Feck. The couple lived in Melrose, Massachusetts, in 1940 and 1950 when the census taker came around. By then they had had a daughter, Rosemary Vela Feck, later Caldwell. The former Louis Fairfax Willett, Jr., was by then going by the name Louis Edward Feck, nicknamed Lou.

Lou Feck studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts  in 1940-1941 and graduated from Melrose High School in 1943. From July 24, 1943, to February 17, 1946, he served in the U.S. Army Air Force. In 1947, he resumed his studies at Vesper George School of Art in Boston. In 1950, he graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

On June 18, 1950, Feck married Ruth Evangeline Cutkomp in New York City. Born on February 24, 1925, in Columbus City, Iowa, she was an artist, too. She graduated from Rock Island High School, in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1943 and attended the Chicago Art Institute in 1944-1945. From 1945 to 1946, she served in the U.S. Navy. Like her new husband, she graduated from the Pratt Institute in 1950. The young couple lived in Brooklyn and worked in advertising and illustration in New York City. I wonder if they knew John and Elaine Duillo, another husband-and-wife pair of illustrators who had also attended the Pratt Institute.

Lou Feck enjoyed a long and successful career as an artist. You have no doubt seen his work. Rather than list and show his credits here, I'll refer you first to a blog called The Paperback Palette and a long article called "The Fantastic Paperback Cover Art of Lou Feck" by Jeffersen, dated April 10, 2018, here; and second, to a blog called Poplitiko and an entry called "The Secret Work of Lou Feck, Cover Artist Supreme" by Alex Ness, dated August 25, 2025, here. You can also look at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

Lou Feck died suddenly and unexpectedly on November 4, 1981. He was just fifty-six years old. Ruth E. (Cutkomp) Feck died on May 11, 1990, in Broward County, Florida. Feck was buried at Huntington Rural Cemetery in Suffolk County, New York. His signature appears on his headstone. Next to his is another headstone with the signature of Anita D. Feck. Her dates are given as 1930-2016. Someone named Anita Feck wrote a letter to the science fiction magazine Locus, published in its issue of July 1982 (#258). I don't know what to make of all of that exactly. My best guess is that Anita D. Feck was Lou Feck's wife and widow and that she wrote to inform science fiction fandom of the death of her husband. I don't know anything else about her.

Kull, The Fabulous Warrior King (Bantam Books, 1978), with cover art by Lou Feck. Created by Robert E. Howard, Kull was first in Weird Tales in August 1929 in the novelette "The Shadow Kingdom." As you can see in this and other works by the artist, Feck painted using a dark, neutral or cool palette. Maybe he borrowed the red cape from Frank Frazetta's justly famous cover for Conan (Lancer, 1967).

Conan the Rebel by Poul Anderson (Bantam Books, 1981) with cover art by Lou Feck using his pseudonym Zorin. Someone is supposed to have figured out that Feck used this pseudonym, but the links in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database don't seem to go anywhere. Conan was of course also created by Howard. The character first appeared in Weird Tales in "The Phoenix on the Sword," December 1932.

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.

-----

 

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 

Robert W. Chambers & Lost Lands

One sub-sub-genre of fantasy and adventure fiction is the tale of lost cities, lost lands, and lost continents. Sometimes those places that are lost are sunken cities and submerged continents. Atlantis is a lost continent, lost in time and lost beneath the sea. You could say that Cthulhu's sunken island crypt is a lost land, too. In the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023), the cover story, "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story," by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, refers to Edgar Allan Poe's "City in the Sea," also to several other lost lands, continents, and islands. And this is where I would like to write about Robert W. Chambers again.

In Robert W. Chambers' collection The King in Yellow, first published in 1895, there is a story called "The Demoiselle D'Ys." This story is not within the King in Yellow series that opens the book, even if there is a character named Hastur in the story. Nor is it exactly in the Paris series that closes Chambers' collection. It actually sets itself apart from those two series. "The Demoiselle D'Ys" is a fantasy. It draws from the legend of Ys or Kêr-Is, a seaside city in Brittany that became disastrously inundated. Ys, then, is a city in the sea, a lost land, a drowned place.

The Demoiselle D'Ys of the title is lost, too, but lost in time rather than in space. Chambers' version of her story is a familiar one in which a man of our own world encounters a lovely and mysterious woman, either in the past, out of the past, or from some other fantasy land. Usually, but not always, she becomes lost to him. In Dian of the Lost Land by Edison Marshall (1935) there is an example of the woman who is not lost. Rather, the man becomes lost with her by giving up on his own world and remaining with her in hers. Maybe when Chambers returned to the United States in 1894 or so, he felt like he had lost a magical or mystical world, that of France, where he had studied art for some time.

Unlike Philip, the protagonist in "The Demoiselle D'Ys," Chambers fetched back a woman from his lost land. Her name was Elsie Vaughn Moller. She was born in Paris on March 22, 1881. The two were married on July 11 or 12, 1898, in Washington, D.C., when he was thirty-three and she was just seventeen. They had a son together, Robert Husted Chambers, also called Robert Edward Stuart (possibly also Stewart) Chambers (1899-1955). The younger Chambers' parents both died in the 1930s, Robert on December 16, 1933, Elsie on November 3, 1939, an unhappy decade for the Chambers family and for the Europe of their past. I have a feeling that the Chambers were unhappy anyway.

Robert Husted Chambers was a writer, too. He had four stories now listed in The FictionMags Index, these published from 1920 to 1934. Some of his stories were collected in a book, John Tom Alligator and Others, published in 1937. He does not seem to have had a very happy life. He was married at least three times and had at least one other engagement broken. He served in the U.S. Army during World War I and World War II, finally attaining the rank of captain, but he was discharged with a medical condition. He died fairly young, at age fifty-five, seventy years ago last month. He appears to have died without issue, and so Robert W. Chambers doesn't have any direct descendants. There may still be Chambers descendants, though, the progeny of his brother, architect Walter Boughton Chambers (1866-1945), with whom Chambers had studied in Europe.

Next: Four Men.

"La Cathedrale engloutie" ("The Drowned Cathedral"), a woodcut by M.C. Escher based on one of Claude Debussy's Préludes and before that on the legend of the lost city Ys.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

R.M. Mally & the Misattributed Cover

When I started writing this blog in 2011, one of my beginning sources was The Collector's Index to Weird Tales, written and compiled by Sheldon R. Jaffery and Fred Cook and published in 1985 by Bowling Green State University Popular Press. It's an indispensable book and the result of some real yeomanlike work. If you doubt that, consider sitting in a library, before there was an Internet, and making long lists from 279 issues and thousands of pages of a magazine that may very well have crumbled a little bit more every time you touched it. Even so, there are errors in the book. One of them involves a cover created by an artist that Jaffery and Cook called "Washburn." That cover was for the November 1923 issue of Weird Tales. We now know the real artist's name to have been R.M. Mally.

In this blog, I have perpetuated Jaffery and Cook's error. I'm in the process of correcting my errors. I believe it was a reader named Jean-Yves Freyburger of l'Île-de-France who pointed out my error to me. On December 13, 2014, I posted an entry called "Ghosts on the Cover of Weird Tales" in which I misattributed the authorship of Mally's cover to the presumably nonexistent Washburn. Jean-Yves wrote two comments, the first on September 15, 2023, the second on November 21, 2023. In his second comment, Jean-Yves referenced his post on Facebook under a group heading called "Pulp Magazines Imagination." He posted his message and images on October 7, 2023, in between his two messages posted on this blog. You can see what he posted by clicking on the following URL:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/pulpsmagazines/permalink/1063225801286581/?mibextid=oMANbw

Jean-Yves was kind enough to post nine images. In his second image, a close-up of the upper righthand corner of the November 1923 cover of Weird Tales, you can clearly see the artist's last name: Mally. I believe Jean-Yves received those images from David Saunders, who writes about pulp artists on his blog Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists. Mr. Saunders' entry on Mally is at the following URL:

https://www.pulpartists.com/Mally.html

In that entry, David Saunders identifies R.M. Mally as George William Mally (1892-1971). Even so, there is the question of the initials and Mally's use of a seal or cartouche below his signature. Mr. Saunders has identified that seal as containing the initials of Mally's wife, Ruth Lena Mikelson Mally (1896-1977). "R.M. Mally," then, would seem to be the initials of Mally's wife, in which case, we should consider the possibility that she was the artist, or that they were collaborators. David Saunders brings up that possibility as well, but I believe I read about it somewhere before he posted his biography of Mally, which has a copyright notice of 2023. Now we should go back in time again.

On June 9, 2013, Weird Tales scholar Randal A. Everts wrote to me asking my opinion of his supposition that Mally the Weird Tales artist was George William Mally of Chicago. He had received a message from Mally's granddaughter, who had consulted her own father, Mally's son, before responding. In reference to her grandfather, she wrote: "While he did live and work in Chicago his whole life, and was an artist, we don't think he is the person you are looking for. His work was mostly watercolors of farm or landscape scenes, with some oil portraits and etching of bridges." Based on the evidence, I expressed an opinion to Mr. Everts that George William Mally was not R.M. Mally. The difference in the initials alone would have argued against the idea. However, I did point out Mally's use of a seal or cartouche below the signature (I called it a "doo-dad"), writing that, if we knew what it says, "[i]t might offer a clue." In any case, if David Saunders is correct, then Randal Everts was correct before him, ten years before him in fact. That's nothing at all against Mr. Saunders, but I believe Mr. Everts deserves every credit for being the first (apparently) to solve the mystery of who was R.M. Mally. And I regret expressing my opinion that George M. Mally probably was not R.M Mally. I also regret, though I had nothing to do with it, that Mally's family seems not to have known that George W. Mally created covers for Weird Tales.

That still leaves open the question of Ruth M. Mally's involvement in the creation of those covers of 1923-1924. If she was in fact an artist--or the artist--then she was the first woman cover artist for "The Unique Magazine" and possibly one of the first--if not the first--for any pulp magazine. And I guess if she was the artist, I was right after all. But I take no pleasure in that.

The Mallys were young at the time they created their covers, George in his early thirties, Ruth in her late twenties. As an artist myself, I recognize the signs of a young, inexperienced, or untrained artist at work. The draftsmanship in Mally's cover, shown below, isn't firm, to be sure. There's barely enough torso under the man's coat to make him a fully normal human. The skeleton in the foreground is also not very well made. "Untrained" might be the operative word here, in which case we might conclude that Ruth Mally really was the artist. Maybe she created some of their covers, maybe her husband created some, and maybe sometimes they worked together. Or maybe as a commercial artist, he received the assignment and simply passed it on to her. By the way, there was a precedent for an artist's code placed below the artist's signatures: when Fontaine Fox, creator of Toonerville Folks, signed his work, he underlined his signature, sometimes a lot, sometimes with only a few lines. The more lines that appeared under his name, the more it was his own work rather than the work of his assistant.

Before closing, I should point out that there was a writer for Weird Tales named Kirk Mashburn. I wonder if Jaffery and Cook got their notes mixed up somehow, and on top of that, turned an M into a W. Another mystery.

I would like to thank Jean-Yves Freyburger for his contribution, but I would also like to thank Randal A. Everts for his own yeomanlike work over the last several decades in uncovering and discovering the authors and artists who contributed to Weird Tales, as well as for all of his contributions to this blog and to my understanding of the magazine. If you're reading, Mr. Everts, I would like to hear from you again.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett (1883-1948)-Part Six

Conclusion

Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett (1874-1910) was supposed to have been a writer for magazines. Maybe a shared interest in writing is how he and Gertrude M. Barrows (1883-1948) met. I have looked for his name in The FictionMags Index and have come up empty. I have also looked for different versions of his name and found an author named Charles Stuart who wrote several stories published in British story magazines in 1910-1911. Was he our man? Who can say?

Gertrude M. Barrows wrote a story under her own name published in 1904. As far as anyone knows, she did not have another of her stories published until 1917, and then only under the pseudonym Francis Stevens. Could she have collaborated with her husband in the time in between? Or if he was an author of stories for magazines, could she have actually been his ghostwriter?

In his introduction to The Heads of Cerberus by Francis Stevens, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach wrote: "He [C.M. Stuart Bennett] had been a newspaper reporter, a fact which probably led his widow to contribute feature articles to the newspaper" (Dover, 2014, p. 14). What newspaper? And if she wrote feature articles for newspapers, is that how she could have met A. Merritt (1884-1943), who worked as a journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Sunday Supplement and/or The Sunday American Magazine, forerunner to The American Weekly, of which he was later the editor? Again, who can say?

Speculations . . .

* * *

One of the themes in the fiction of Francis Stevens is that of old gods returning to earth after having been banished for many centuries, if not millennia. Her stories with this theme and the gods in them are:

• Nacoc-Yaotl in "The Citadel of Fear" (The Argosy, September 14-October 26, 1918)

• The scarlet archangel in "Claimed" (The Argosy, March 6-March 20, 1920)

• Serapion in "Serapion" (The Argosy, June 19-July 10, 1920)

These are dark gods, but they do not triumph in the end. For them to have triumphed would have been uncharacteristic of Francis Stevens, whom I feel certain did not work in the ill-defined, late-twentieth-century sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of dark fantasy. If you're looking for a triumphant old god, see Cthulhu in Strange Eons by Robert Bloch (1978). By the way, The Exorcist (1973), fifty years old this year, also involves the theme of the return of an old god, in this case the ancient Mesopotamian deity Pazuzu. Both "Serapion" and The Exorcist are about demonic possession.

* * *

Other motifs and recurring themes and settings in the work of Francis Stevens are those of treasure hunting, shipwrecks, and islands. Francis Stevens' stories in that vein include:

• "The Nightmare" (All-Story Weekly, April 14, 1917)

• "Friend Island" (All-Story Weekly, September 7, 1918)

• "The Citadel of Fear" (The Argosy, September 14-October 26, 1918)

• "Avalon" (The Argosy, August 16 to September 6, 1919)

• "Claimed" (The Argosy, March 6-March 20, 1920)

• "Sunfire" (Weird Tales, July-September 1923)

In "Friend Island," there is an Ancient Mariness who tells her tale and about her relationship with the eponymous island, which is actually a living being. I wonder if Gertrude Barrows Bennett could have known one of her husband's other wives, Marie La Ton (ca. 1886-?), who was a boat pilot and went with C.M. Stuart Bennett on one of his treasure hunting expeditions to the Carolina coast. If the Ancient Mariness was based on Marie La Ton, then maybe she comes by her feelings about men naturally, as Bennett seems to have been a real scoundrel, specifically when it came to women.

There is a group of treasure hunters in "Sunfire," Francis Stevens' only story in Weird Tales. Here I wonder if one of them could have been a portrait of her drowned husband. There would have been precedent for such a thing in fantasy and science fiction: I think of Victor Frankenstein as having been based in part on the authoress' husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). He drowned, too, by the way, probably also by misadventure.

* * *

I first wrote about Francis Stevens on March 10, 2015. In that posting, I listed her stories, the titles of the magazines in which they were published, and their dates of publication. Her career as a published author lasted a scant six and a half years, from 1917 to 1923, with a prior story having been published in 1904. This is the 100th anniversary year of the close of her career, which came when she was just forty years old. Francis Stevens' stories were rediscovered in the 1940s, though, and were reprinted during that decade, from January 1940 to November 1949 and as late as September 1950, in various pulp magazines. A. Merritt is supposed to have had a hand in that. The last two reprints were posthumous.

The writer behind the pseudonym, Gertrude Barrows Bennett Gaster, last wrote to her daughter, Constance Bennett Wilson, on September 1, 1939, coincidentally the day that Nazi Germany invaded Poland, thus setting off World War II. Thus also, Francis Stevens' stories were first published during World War I and in its aftermath, then published again during World War II and in its aftermath.

Gertrude Gaster lived in California during the 1940s, all or most of that time in San Francisco. If she was paid for her work, then payments would presumably have gone to her at her home in the Golden State. Would any payments made after her death, which came on February 2, 1948, have gone to her husband, Carl F. Gaster? Or to her daughter?

More speculations.

It appears that in writing his introduction to The Heads of Cerberus, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach was in contact with Constance, whom he called "Connie," quotation marks included. The whereabouts of Gertrude Gaster were then unknown, and only Connie could have told him the details of her mother's writing habits or about where and how they had lived in her childhood. Eshbach wrote that the stories of Francis Stevens have "a strong leaning toward the mysterious" (Dover, 2014, p. 13). She seems to have had the same kinds of leanings in her own life, for why ever would she have remained out of contact with her daughter for her last nine years on this earth? Did Constance see that her mother's stories were once again in print during the 1940s? Could she have tracked down Gertrude by going to the editors or publishers of the magazines that did the reprinting? And did Gertrude herself see that her stories were once again in print? Then in her fifties and sixties, could she have taken some final pride and satisfaction in that?

A last coincidence: Lloyd Arthur Eshbach's introduction to The Heads of Cerberus was dated February 1952, the same month in which Gertrude's widower, Carl F. Gaster, was found dead in his home on the other side of the country, in Portland, Oregon.

* * *

I have one more part in this series, inspired by a comment from a couple of weeks ago made by one of the readers of this blog.

* * *

Francis Stevens' Story in Weird Tales
"Sunfire" (two-part serial, July/August-September 1923)

Further Reading

• "Introduction" to The Heads of Cerberus by Francis Stevens, introduction by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. I have the Dover edition from 2014.

• "The Woman Who Wrote 'Citadel of Fear'" by Sam Moskowitz, his introduction to The Citadel of Fear by Francis Stevens (Paperback Library, 1970).

• The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens, edited and with an introduction by Gary Hoppenstand (2004).

• "Navigating the Weird Mind of Gertrude Barrows Bennett--the Mother of Dark Fantasy (pt. 1)" by Taylor, on the website Fandomentals, March 19, 2020, at the following URL:

https://www.thefandomentals.com/gertrude-barrows-bennett-1/

Taylor's title repeats what I see as a misreading and misinterpretation of Francis Stevens as the inventor of what is called dark fantasy.

• "Fantascienza, un genere (femminile). Gertrude Barrows Bennett, alias Francis Stevens" by Laura Coci, on the website Vitaminevaganti, December 5, 2020, at the following URL:

https://vitaminevaganti-com.translate.goog/2020/12/05/fantascienza-un-genere-femminile-gertrude-barrows-bennett-alias-francis-stevens/?_x_tr_sl=it&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc

• There are other websites and blogs that discuss Francis Stevens, some of which are Italian. It looks as though she and her works are of special interest to Italian fans and researchers. 

"The Funeral of Shelley" by Louis Édouard Fournier, 1889.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett (1883-1948)-Part Five

Second Husband

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett's second husband was Carl Franklin Gaster (1892-1952). He was born on November 7, 1892, in San Luis Obispo, California, to George Reed Gaster (1857-1916) and Rachel Isabel (Packwood) Gaster (1857-1927). Carl F. Gaster grew up on his parents' farm in Santa Barbara County, California. In 1900, he was in San Francisco with his parents, then, in 1910, in the household of his aunt, Eliza Scott. At age twenty-seven, Gaster had already been married and divorced.

Rather than write a narrative about Gaster's life and career, I'll just give some bullet points:

• In 1911, in Vallejo, California, Gaster stole from a man in an adjoining hotel room. He was arrested and put on probation.

• In 1917, he was a locomotive inspector with the Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

• In 1917, Gaster lived in San Francisco with his wife, Minnie Gaster.

• On November 21, 1919, Gaster applied for a seaman's certificate with the U.S. Department of Commerce. He had by then graduated from the U.S. Shipping Board Marine Engineering School.

• In 1920, Gaster lived in San Francisco and worked as a marine wiper. Once again, he was divorced.

• In March 1927, Gaster was arrested in Bellingham, Washington, for drunken larceny and illegal possession: he had stolen some bedding from a hotel while drunk.

• Gaster was otherwise employed from June 22, 1921, to July 5, 1927, as a 3rd assistant engineer, 2nd assistant engineer, and junior engineer aboard various oceangoing vessels.

• On March 27, 1930, Gaster was enumerated in the U.S. Census of merchant seamen. He was occupied as a 4th assistant engineer and based at Bayonne, New Jersey. His unnamed wife was in Merced, California. Twelve days later, on April 8, 1930, Gertrude Bennett, widowed, was enumerated in Mill Valley, California, where she was working at a trucking (?) company. So it looks like the two had not yet married.

• In 1933, Carl F. Gaster and his wife Gertrude were living in San Francisco, thus they must have married in the period 1930-1933. In 1933, Gertrude Barrows Bennett Gaster turned fifty years old. Her new husband turned forty-one that year.

• On June 12, 1938, Gaster wrote to U.S. Local Inspector of Boilers in San Pedro, California, requesting a record of his sea service. He explained that he needed that record in order to apply for a civil service job. He wrote with a return address of 642 9th Avenue, Prospect Park, Pennsylvania. Two years later, on April 16, 1940, Gertrude Barrows Bennett's daughter, then going by the Christian name of Constance and her married name of Wilson--Constance Wilson--was enumerated at that same address with her husband Walter Wilson and their children. So I wrote the other day stating that Gertrude and her daughter presumably never lived together again after the 1920s, but did they after all? On the other hand, a return address and a residence are not necessarily the same thing. In any case, Gertrude and Constance were presumably still in contact with each other as of June 1938. That same year, Gertrude Gaster was listed in the Sacramento, California, city directory, working in that city as a stenographer. According to Lloyd Arthur Eshbach in his introduction to The Heads of Cerberus, she wrote a final letter to her daughter from California on September 1, 1939, promising a longer one. It was either never written, never sent, or never arrived. I have not found either Gertrude Gaster or her husband in the census of 1940. She was very near to disappearing from the earth.

• On September 10, 1940, Carl Gaster arrived in New Orleans from Aruba, Dutch West Indies. He was then working as a machinist on board the Esso Bayway.

• In 1942, Gaster was in U.S. Army Transport (U.S.A.T.) Service at Fort Mason in San Francisco, afterwards with the Hawaiian Dredging Company in Honolulu, Hawaii. His wife was Gertrude Gaster, who had an address of 1351 Ellis Street, San Francisco.

• On November 21, 1944, Gaster arrived in Los Angeles from Honolulu on board the Makiki.

• From February to May 1947, Gaster appears to have made a trip by sea from Honolulu to Shanghai and back.

• Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett Gaster died on February 2, 1948, in San Francisco. It looks like she was Gaster's fourth wife.

• In 1952, Gaster worked as a Merchant Marine fireman.

Finally, on February 26, 1952, the body of Carl Franklin Gaster was found at 216 NW 3rd Avenue, in Portland, Oregon. He was fifty-nine years old at his death. He had a blood alcohol level of 0.13. A complete autopsy also found that there was "[m]arked coronary arteriosclerosis." However, no cause of death was found. There is also no indication of how long his body may have lain undiscovered. Both he and his wife died in the same month of the year, in February, and so he followed her to the grave shortly after the anniversary of her death.

Carl F. Gaster was buried at Greenwood Hills Cemetery in Portland, Oregon.

To be continued . . .

A photograph and physical description of Carl Franklin Gaster, from his application for seaman's certificate, November 21, 1919. Out of all of the principals in the life of Gertrude Barrows Bennett--herself, her parents, her brothers, her first husband Charles M. Stuart Bennett, her daughter--only Gaster is represented on the Internet with a photographic image.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett (1883-1948)-Part Four

First Husband

Gertrude M. Barrows (1883-1948) was married twice, first to Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett (1874-1910), then to Carl Franklin Gaster (1892-1952). She probably met her first husband on the East Coast and her second on the West. Her first drowned near Key West, Florida. Her second lies at rest on almost the exact opposite end of the country, in Portland, Oregon. It looks like liquid played a part in his death as well.

Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett was born in the period April-May-June 1874 in West Derby, Lancashire, England. His parents were Henry Mellor Bennett (1847-1938), an ironfounder like his father before him, and Catherine "Kate" (Stuart) Bennett (1850-1922). Both lived and died in England. Whether they ever came to America is open to question.

C.M. Stuart Bennett arrived in the United States possibly in the 1890s or about 1896. On October 6, 1897, he married Madeline A. Hobson (1872-1961) in Bristol, Virginia. According to a contemporaneous newspaper article, "The groom came to Bristol a few months ago with his parents, who recently completed a tour around the world." That article continued: "Mr. Bennett is a young man who has seen much of the world, but whose habits and manners are still those of the genial Englishman." The couple was to live in a newly purchased home in nearby Paperville, Tennessee. (Chattanooga Daily Times, Oct. 8, 1897, p. 3.) They had two daughters, Catherine "Kate" (Bennett) Burton Bachman (1898-1984) and Helen Marguerite (Bennett) Biden (1900-1988). I can't help but see omens in that newspaper article from 1897.

I haven't found the young Bennett family in the U.S. Census of 1900, but it's clear that their marriage didn't last long, for on August 3, 1904, Bennett married Luella Wilson Stewart (1881-1965), daughter of Sylvester Noble Stewart and Nannie (Wilson) Stewart (then deceased), at the Madison Avenue (Dutch) Reformed Church in New York City. ("Married" in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 7, 1904, p. 13.) By 1910, the couple were divorced.

Bennett's marriages kept coming. There are three more to go.

According to her friend, Emma Diffenderfer, Marie La Ton or Laton (ca. 1886-?) of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Manhattan married Charles M. Stuart Bennett in about 1909. Presumably that was in New York or New Jersey. Marie La Ton was supposed to have been the first woman to take out a boat pilot's license or skipper's license in Philadelphia. In 1909, she piloted a boat for her husband, then or later called "Captain," on a treasure-hunting expedition off the Carolina coast. That effort came to grief, and Marie returned to New York City, promising her stepmother that she would never again attempt such a thing. ("Manicurist Says That Laton [sic] Girl Had Given Up Search" in the Press of Atlantic City, Dec. 29, 1910, p. 1+.) On April 18, 1910, Marie La Ton was enumerated in the U.S. Census at 19 East Thirty-Second Street in Manhattan. She was the proprietress of a restaurant, the name of which we know by a later newspaper article was Dixie Kitchens. She was divorced at the time. A month later, on May 12, 1910, C.M. Stuart Bennett became a father again with the birth of his daughter, called Josephine Christy Bennett (1910-2001). The newborn's mother was Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett, whom Bennett had married in New Jersey in 1908. I guess that means that if he and Marie La Ton really were married in about 1909, he was a bigamist. Either that or he and Gertrude had divorced by the time he and Marie were married, and Josephine, later called Constance, was born out of wedlock. Or maybe the year 1908 is in error. Or maybe they were married twice and divorced once. Or twice.

It sure looks like Charles M. Stuart Bennett was what people called in those days a scoundrel. The name Constance would have been in strong contrast to his habits.

Despite Marie's promise to her stepmother, the treasure hunting continued, and on Christmas night, December 25-26, 1910, it came to an end when C.M. Stuart Bennett, also called Stuart Bennett, was drowned after his 45-foot launch, called the Lebra (referred to in some accounts as the Phra), was wrecked against the west jetty or northwest jetties near Key West, Florida. There were six people all together on the boat. Three were rescued the morning after the wreck, while a fourth, Herman Parker, drifted or swam to a nearby key and was thereby saved (or saved himself). Bennett was the first drowning victim that night. His wife, who clung to a mast of the wrecked boat but after six hours slipped into the water, was the second. Bennett's body was found near the western banks the day after the wreck. Hers was never found. He is supposed to have been buried at Key West city cemetery.

Emma Diffenderfer felt sure that the Mrs. Bennett who was lost was not Marie La Ton, even though she had not seen her in five months. For a time there were reports that it was Bennett's newer wife, Gertrude Barrows Bennett, who had drowned. Then, on December 29, 1910, Mrs. Jessie (Newnham) Pillault (1869-1952) of Jacksonville, Florida, came forth with word that it was her daughter, Beatrice Pillault Bennett (1890-presumably 1910), who had drowned. The Bennetts had been married in June without Mrs. Pillault's knowledge and had gone around in Florida by boat before setting off on that fateful voyage. Mrs. Pillault, by the way, was also English and also a proprietress, in her case of an ice cream parlor and/or a small bakery. ("Find Mother of Woman Lost in Key West Wreck" in the Miami News, December 29, 1910, p. 1.)

Christmastime must have been a sad and stressful time of year for Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Her older brother Reginald "Reggie" Barrows (1880-1896) had killed himself on December 23, 1896, in Minneapolis, where the Barrows family were living at the time. (There isn't any mention of her in newspaper accounts of his suicide, but at age thirteen, she must have been at home when the newspaper reporters came around with their terrible news.) And now, in 1910, with her only daughter not even a year old, she learned that her husband, by then obviously a philanderer and possibly a bigamist, had drowned while on a treasure-hunting adventure . . . like her grandfather sixty years before.

Next: The Second Husband.

A map of Key West and the area to the west, presumably the location of the foundering of the Lebra, "Captain" Charles M. Stuart Bennett's boat, on the night of December 25-26, 1910. Look for "West Jetty" in the upper left of this map from 1921.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Mary Sharon (1895-1962)

Pseudonym of Henrietta Prouty aka Henrietta Trefon
Author, Poet, Freelance Writer
Born December 29, 1895, Galena, Kansas
Died December 21, 1962, Los Angeles city or county, California

Mary Sharon was the pseudonym of Henrietta Prouty, who was born on December 29, 1895, in Galena, Kansas. Her parents were William Harrison Prouty, a mineworker, and Evalina Melvina "Dolly" (Maitland) Prouty. If I have counted correctly, there were eight Prouty children in all, seven girls and a boy. One of the daughters died on the day she was born.

In reading about Henrietta Prouty and her husband in contemporaneous newspaper accounts, you start to wonder what was true about them and what was mere fancy. Or maybe I should say that you start to realize how little seems to have been true and how much was very likely made up. Did she really know Douglas Fairbanks? Was she really a film actress? Did she really write scenarios and form her own movie production company during the early 1920s? I don't think anyone can say.

And then you run upon a fact:

On May 31, 1919, Henrietta Prouty married a man named Van Simon Trefon (1886-1971) in Los Angeles, California. He was supposed to have been French. In actuality, he was a native of Salonika, Greece. Maybe he was a Frenchman born in Greece.

Then the questions begin again. Did Trefon really arrive in America while working for the Pathé film company? Was he really a stage and movie actor who performed with Madame Petrova, Norma Talmadge, Mary Pickford, and Broncho Billy Anderson? Was he really a linguist, possessing a mastery of ten languages and attaining the rank of captain in the U.S. Army while working in the foreign secret service? Again, I don't think anyone can say.

Neither Mary Sharon nor Van S. Trefon is in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). That may not mean a lot. There are probably myriads of films, actors, directors, photographers, and so on not listed there. Besides that, IMDb has a screwy new format. You can't be sure of finding anything. Mary Sharon or Henrietta Trefon is supposed to have written the scenario for a movie called The Redemption of John Williams in which she was to have played the female lead and her husband was to have been "the heavy lead." Directed by Hoddy Milligan and produced by Ozark Film Company, the movie was shot, in part, in Galena in 1921. Hundreds of people were supposed to have witnessed all of that, but did it really happen? Maybe. Probably. Karl Hoddy Milligan (1881-1951) was a real person. He's listed as a maker of local movies in Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States by Martin L. Johnson (2018). Maybe The Redemption of John Williams is hiding in its pages under a different title. Maybe Desert Lure, also shot by Ozark Film Company in Galena, also with Van S. Trefon in the heavy lead, is there, too. Or maybe all of these things--all of the films and all of the facts behind them--are now lost.

A newspaper item from 1923 is more down to earth. It announced that Trefon and his wife were establishing an office in Galena for showing slide shows of comic moving pictures. This was to have been in outdoor venues in the city. Enumerated in the 1925 Kansas state census in Galena, Trefon called himself a film photographer. The couple had three young daughters at the time, a pair of twins aged four and a seven-month-old baby. Trefon's name showed up again in newspaper articles of the 1930s when he was a cameraman and independent film producer. Using the stage name Barbara Sharon, his youngest daughter was supposed to have been in the Our Gang comedies.

The Trefons were divorced on November 17, 1934. Nonetheless, Henrietta continued to use her husband's surname as her own. She lived in Culver City, California, as of April 1, 1935. In 1940, calling herself a freelance writer, she was lodging in Los Angeles with her daughters, Marjorie Derelys, aged fifteen, and Barbara Dolores, aged twelve. I don't know where her other two daughters, the twins Lorraine Erma and Maureen Mary, were at the time. If they weren't already married, they soon would be.

In 1945, Henrietta renounced any allegiance to a foreign country and was repatriated as an American citizen despite never having lived abroad. She may have been required to do this because of her marriage to a foreign national. She gave her occupation at the time as "free lance news and magazine feature writer."

In 1950, Henrietta was in Los Angeles and living with her daughter Lorraine Lawrence and Lorraine's two daughters. There had been some drama a few years before involving another of her daughters, Barbara McGlynn. At holiday time 1946, Barbara, separated from her husband and facing eviction from her tiny apartment, drank caustic poison. Fortunately for herself and her baby daughter, she only suffered a burned mouth. Unfortunately she was unable to avoid eviction.

Henrietta Prouty Trefon, aka Mary Sharon, died on December 21, 1962, in Los Angeles city or county, California. She was only a few days short of her sixty-seventh birthday. Tragedy struck a little more than a month later, on January 23, 1963, when her daughter, Barbara Dolores "Bobby" Trefon Eaton and Barbara's four-year-old son died in a house fire. Two of Henrietta's other daughters, Maureen and Marjorie, were blessed with very long lives. I don't know what happened to Lorraine, but I hope she enjoyed a long life, too.

Mary Sharon's Letter, Poem, & Stories in Weird Tales
Letter to "The Eyrie" (written from Galena, Kansas) (June 1923)
"The Ghost" (poem, Feb. 1924)
"The Door of Doom" (Feb. 1924)
"The Cat of Chiltern Castle" (Sept. 1926)

Further Reading

Many newspaper articles on her, her husband, and family from the 1920s through the 1940s.

Text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Frances Garfield (1908-2000)

Née Frances Marita Obrist
Aka Frances Wellman
Singer, Musician, Teacher, Author
Born December 1, 1908, Kansas, or Deaf Smith County, Texas
Died May 7, 2000, at home, "Dogwood Acres," Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Frances Marita Obrist was born on December 1, 1908, either in Kansas (by census records) or Deaf Smith County, Texas (by an entry on Find A Grave). Her father, Frank H. Obrist, worked for the U.S. Post Office. Frances received her middle name from her mother, Marita "Mettie" Burke Obrist. Her older brother, William "Bill" Obrist (1904-1981), was a ham radio operator.

Frances Obrist graduated from East High School in Wichita, Kansas, and from the University of Wichita, I believe in 1927. As a student, she was a singer and a musician, president of Epsilon Kappa Rho and secretary of the Woman's Pan-Hellenic Association. After graduating, she became director of piano at Reed Studios of Dancing, Dramatic Art & Music in Wichita. In about 1928, she became an assistant to Mrs. Thurlow Lieurance in the department of voice at the University of Wichita, where she taught voice and piano.

On June 14, 1930, at Fairmount Church in Wichita, Frances Obrist married Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986), who had also graduated from the University of Wichita (when it was still called Fairmount College) and who, at the time, was editor of the Sunday magazine section of the Wichita Beacon. The Wellmans lived together in Wichita for four or five years. In 1934 or 1935, Wellman went to New York to try his hand at professional writing. Frances remained in Wichita with her parents, though only long enough for her husband to sell some stories and earn enough of a living for the two of them. He sent for her and they lived together in New York, New Jersey, and, from 1951 onward, in North Carolina. Their son, Manly Wade Wellman, Jr., was born on November 13, 1939. Known as Wade Wellman, he was also a writer and a collaborator with his father on, among other things, the paperback novel Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds (1975). Wade Wellman died on January 25, 2018, in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Frances Wellman had her own career as a writer, actually two careers separated by nearly four decades. Using the nom de plume Frances Garfield, she had stories in Weird Tales and Amazing Stories in 1939-1940, then in Fantasy Tales, Whispers, and other titles from 1979 to 1988. Many have been reprinted. From the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The FictionMags Index:

Frances Garfield's Stories & Essays in Weird Tales & Other Publications

• "The High Places" in Weird Tales (Apr. 1939)
• "'Not Both!'" in Weird Tales (May 1939)
• "Gulpers versus Earthmen" in Amazing Stories (Dec. 1939)
• "Meet the Authors" in Amazing Stories (Dec. 1939) with Manly Wade Wellman and Don Wilcox
• "Forbidden Cupboard" in Weird Tales (Jan. 1940)
• "Don't Open That Door" in Fantasy Tales (Winter 1979)
• "The Elementals" also called "Jimmy and the Elementals" in Fantasy Tales (Summer 1980)
• "Sweet Grapes of Autumn" in Kadath (July 1981)
• "The House at Evening" in Whispers #15-16 (March 1982)
• "Come to the Party" in Whispers IV (1983)
• "Amorous of the Far" in Fantasy Tales (Winter 1985)
• "A Dream of Castles" in The 1987 World Fantasy Convention Program Book (1987)
• "Plaza Cosmetica" in The Tome #6 (1990)
• Review of Worse Things Waiting by Manly Wade Wellman in Horror: 100 Best Books (1988)

Many of these were published in association with her husband's work.

Manly Wade Wellman died on April 5, 1986, at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His wife survived him by more than fourteen years. She also died at home, on May 7, 2000. Like him, she was cremated and her ashes scattered on the grounds of their home, called "Dogwood Acres," in Chapel Hill.

Frances Marita Obrist (spelled O'brist), from the Wichita Beacon, January 16, 1929, page 6.

Thanks to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The FictionMags Index for Frances Garfield's compiled story titles.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Husbands & Wives-Part Five

Husbands and wives wrote for Weird Tales, sometimes together, sometimes separately, sometimes before they were even married. Following is a list. It is probably incomplete.

• H.A. Noureddin Addis (1884-1958) & Marguerite Lynch Addis (1880-1848)

• Frances Garfield, née Frances Obrist (1908-2000) & Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986), who also wrote under the pseudonym Gans T. Field

• Sonia H. Greene (1883-1972) & H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

• Allison V. Harding: Jean Milligan (1919-2004) & Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015)

• Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) & Leslyn MacDonald (1904-1981)

• Henry Kuttner (1915-1953) & C.L. Moore (1911-1987)

• Henry Lieferant (1892-1968) & Sylvia B. Saltzberg (1896-1952)

• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) & Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

There were other contributors to Weird Tales who were married to writers who did not contribute. For example, Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) was married to Lesli Perri (1920-1970), Judith Merril (1923-1997), Carol Metcalf Ulf (1927-2005), and Elizabeth Ann Hull (1937-2021), all of whom were also writers.

I think I'll find more husbands and wives who wrote for "The Unique Magazine." I'll add them to this list as I do.

* * *

I have written this series to show that wives have been instrumental in the success of their husbands as authors. I was on the lookout for that kind of thing while reading Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee (2018, 2019). And I found it in Robert A. Heinlein's own words regarding his second wife, Leslyn MacDonald, and in Mr. Nevala-Lee's words regarding John W. Campbell's first wife, Doña Stebbins. Campbell's second wife, Margaret "Peg" Winter, was more nearly a full and equal collaborator with him, at least in his pseudoscientific research. Heinlein's third wife, Virginia "Ginny" Gerstenfeld, was also a powerful influence on her husband. She helped him in life and she helped after his death to protect him and his reputation, to preserve his work, and to promote the study and appreciation of his work. All of these wives were personally, intellectually, and creatively formidable figures. I should add that L. Ron Hubbard also married strong and able women. But then these are things that we already knew about wives and women. I am reminded here of a quote by Alexis de Tocqueville:

And now that I come near the end of this book in which I have recorded so many considerable achievements of the Americans, if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.

That's not to take away anything from women of other nationalities, but it gets to a truth, and it's one worth remembering and keeping close at hand.

C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner, two married writers at work.

Text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Hubbard & Wives

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born on March 13, 1911, in Tilden, Nebraska. There are lots of lies and a lot of nonsense about his life. We'll skip over all of that and get to his wives and children.

First came Margaret Louise "Polly" Grubb. She was born on September 22, 1907, in Beltsville, Maryland. The two were married on April 13, 1933. They had two children, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, Jr. (May 7, 1934-September 16, 1991) and Katherine May "Kay" Hubbard (January 15, 1936-May 29, 2010). Both changed their names. Hubbard, Jr., nicknamed "Nibs," became Ronald Edward "Ron" De Wolf. Kay became Catherine May "Kay" Gillespie by a change to the spelling of her Christian name and her marriage to James P. Gillespie. L. Ron Hubbard and his first wife were divorced on December 24, 1947. She married John W. Ochs and died on November 17, 1963, in Valley, Pennsylvania.

Hubbard had already married his second wife by the time he was divorced from his first. She was Sara Elizabeth Bruce Northrup, former girlfriend of rocket scientist and occultist John Whiteside "Jack" Parsons (1914-1952). Sara was also an occultist and went by the witchy name of "Soror Cassap." Born on April 8, 1924, she was younger by half a generation than her paramours.

Sara and Hubbard were married on August 10, 1946, in Chestertown, Maryland. Their daughter Alexis Valerie Hubbard was born on March 8, 1950, in New Jersey. The attending physician was Joseph A. Winter (1911-1955), future brother-in-law of John W. Campbell, Jr. The infant Alexis came into the world in complete silence so that no engrams would be lodged in her brain. Dianetics was born two months later in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction, May 1950. It was, in contrast, damaged from the beginning. Anyway, Hubbard was more devoted to his brainchild, such as it was, than his real child. The way he treated her can be considered nothing less than a disgrace, but what else can we expect from one of the most monstrous figures in all of genre literature?

Hubbard and his second wife were divorced on June 12, 1951, in Sedgwick County, Kansas. She afterwards married Miles F. Hollister (1925-1998). Sara Hollister preceded her last husband in death, her end coming on December 18, 1997, in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1968, L. Ron Hubbard had this utterly bizarre exchange with an interviewer from Granada Television:

Hubbard: How many times have I been married? I've been married twice. And I'm very happily married just now. I have a lovely wife, and I have four children. My first wife is dead.

Interviewer: What happened to your second wife?

Hubbard: I never had a second wife.

L. Ron Hubbard's third and last wife was Mary Sue Whipp. Born on June 17, 1931, in Rockdale, Texas, she was younger still than Hubbard's never-was second wife. She became involved in Dianetics in 1951 and journeyed to Kansas to be with fellow believers. She and Hubbard were married on March 6, 1952, in Kay County, Oklahoma. They had four children together, Quentin, Diana, Mary Suzette, and Thomas. Quentin killed himself. The others are still living.

In 1981, Mary Sue Hubbard was maneuvered out of her position of power within Scientology. Not long after that, she served a prison sentence for crimes she had committed while occupying that position. I like the words of Mr. Justice Latey of the English High Court of Justice regarding a different legal matter. They bear repeating here and everywhere: "Mr. Hubbard is a charlatan and worse, as are his wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, and the clique at the top privy to the cult's activities." (Quoted in "Judge Raps 'Slave' Cult" by Maureen Knight, Daily Express, July 7, 1984.)

A dissolute and utterly corrupted L. Ron Hubbard died on January 24, 1986, in Creston, California. I picture him at the end as being in the same condition as M. Valdemar of Poe's story. Hubbard's second and third wives survived him. Mary Sue Hubbard died on November 25, 2002, in Los Angeles, California. Scientology is supposed to have prevented two out of the three of those deaths, I think. In fact, after his death, Hubbard's successor at the head of Scientology said in a public address to his followers that Hubbard had "discarded" his body because it "had become an impediment to the work" he was to do outside the confines of the universe. In other words, he didn't really die. (Quoted in Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee, p. 402).

In all of this, I'm reminded of other totalitarian and gnostic belief systems. Like Joseph Stalin and his Marxist-Leninism, Hubbard and his Scientology considered certain persons to be actually nonpersons and sought to scrub them from the record. That's what he attempted with his second wife. Sorry, Ron, the world remembers her. Like Karl Marx, Hubbard had seven children. Four of Marx's children died in infancy or childhood, partly because he was such a layabout. (Say what you will about L. Ron Hubbard, he was at least energetic and ambitious.) Two others died by suicide. Only one of Hubbard's children has died in such a way. And like Marshall Applewhite (1931-1997)--and the fictional villains of That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis--Hubbard believed that the body can be discarded and the soul live on within an otherwise material universe (although, as his successor pointed out, Hubbard is now working outside the universe, address unknown). There is in the world of today a similar gnostic belief in what is referred to as "gendered souls" stuck in bodies of the wrong sex. We're supposed to believe that altering and mutilating those bodies will set things right. In other words, the universe and nature are flawed, and we are wise enough and powerful enough to correct those flaws. We have believed these things since very near our beginning. Old ideas die hard.

That's enough of Hubbard for now and for a long time to come, I hope. I promise to write about some better things to end this year.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley