Zahrah E. Preble (1880-1934)

Née Ethel L. Preble
Singer, Dancer, Music Teacher, Camp Counselor, Playground Director, Author, Public Speaker & Performer
Born August 17, 1880, Berkeley, California
Died April 27, 1934, South Pasadena Sanatorium, South Pasadena, California

Zahrah Ethel Preble was born on August 17, 1880, in Berkeley, California, to Charles Sumner Preble (1855-1939), a civil engineer and former surveyor-general of Nevada, and Ella Melana (Thompson) Preble (1851-1929) of Ohio. Zahrah appears to have been an assumed name. In the U.S. census of 1900, a twenty-year-old Zahrah was enumerated as Ethel L. Preble. Ethel L. Preble graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. A mezzo-soprano singer, she studied under Lydia Sturtevant (1876-1938). 

Zahrah E. Preble taught music in the public schools of Escondido, California. She was also a camp counselor with the Camp Fire Girls in California. From January to November 1921 or after, she was a playground director with the Bureau of Clubs and Playgrounds in the Panama Canal Zone. Zahrah interpreted the song and dance of American Indians, including the Zuni tribe of the American Southwest, for children and adults. Her lifelong interests seem to have been music, dance, childhood education, and American Indian culture. She was a member of the Casa de Adobe committee and Los Fiesteros de la Calle Olvera in Pasadena or South Pasadena, California.

Zahrah wrote her first letter to Weird Tales from New York City. It was published in the issue of July/August 1923. By the time her second letter was published in September 1923, she was on expedition with her future husband in the American Southwest. Here is the complete text of her letters as they were published, with introductory comments by the editor, Edwin Baird:

Letter to "The Eyrie," July/August 1923, page 91:

We recently had something to say on this page about the amazing similarity of stories written by dissimilar people, and Miss Zahrah E. Preble, 12 West Seventy-seventh Street, New York read those remarks and sent us a neat solution of the mystery:

"Dear Mr. Baird: I was particularly interested in what you had to say about the sameness of the manuscripts you have to read.

     "Perhaps this will offer at least a partial explanation. All the stories are attempting to portray a mysterious or weird happening. Did you ever think about the tone of voice people invariably use when they begin to tell you about such things? It immediately takes on a quality which indicates the abnormal theme they are going to give you. That tone of voice unconsciously colors the very words which are used, whether written or spoken, and so we find diverse stories told to achieve the same effect will he told in the same tone quality.

   "Another reason is that the human brain will respond to repetition of ideas just so many times before becoming half-hypnotized. After singing through a dozen songs, no matter how different they may be, I find that my sense of hearing is so drugged by sound that the freshness of perception is worn off, and so the songs all appear alike. Also, when typing for several hours in succession, the sound of the machine drugs my senses, and I find it hard to follow the sense of the words I am copying., although I try to keep alert, so as to make alterations as I copy.

   "This may help you to solve the problem. Anyway, I have enjoyed WEIRD TALES, and as I have taken them in small doses, with sufficient intervals between, they strike fresh each time, so are more enjoyable."

I understand what Zahrah Preble was trying to say, and she makes some good points. Nonetheless, I think that a lack of imagination is the best explanation for the sameness of stories, themes, language, and concepts in the early Weird Tales.

Letter to "The Eyrie," September 1923, page 79:

Among these letters that we mention is one from Zahrah B. Preble of New York City, who recently joined the Hendricks-Hodge [sic] Archeological Expedition that journeyed to New Mexico for the purpose of digging into the prehistoric customs of an ancient people. Miss Preble is now with the expedition at Zuni, New Mexico, and from there she writes us thus:

     "My dear Mr. Baird: I am convinced that the Zunis are adepts at rain making. The sky had been cloudless until the old priests started to the Sacred Lake, 60 miles away. Then faint wisps began to form into clouds. But no rain fell until day before yesterday, when the rain priests from Zuni came out to the sacred spring in Ojo Caliente, and met the returning pilgrims from the Sacred Lake. Here we were allowed to witness a most wonderfully impressive and reverent ceremony. I think we are perhaps the only white people, with the exception of Frank Hamilton Cushing and Mrs. Matilda Stevenson, who have ever been allowed to see this part of the ceremony. But our camp was given not only that privilege, but the one of taking motion pictures of it, so that the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, would have the record. Before we left the mountain ride the rain was falling in torrents. [Boldface type added.]

     "Yesterday the ceremony was augmented by the more spectacular and better-known 'Rain Dance,' in Zuni. It is a beautiful and solemn performance. Rain fell last night in copious quantities. Today it is raining as I write this, and the music of the waters is drumming on my tent fly. I say that the Zunis are great rain makers, and that Faith is the keynote of their ability!

     "So far, I have been too busy absorbing new sights and sounds to do much writing, but, if the wind does not blow too hard each day, I hope to accomplish something before long.

     "There is an interesting historical tale of the murder of Father Latrado, right in front of the old Spanish Mission church, in 1670, which is one of the most picturesque parts of the Hawikuh ruins. Perhaps I can reconstruct that scene sufficiently weirdly to make a good yarn for you. I will keep it in mind."

The implication here is that Zahrah had written to Baird before and would continue to write to him, also that this letter at least, as published, was only an excerpt from a longer letter left unpublished. If correspondence like this was in the papers that Leo Margulies kept in his garage and that he ended up destroying because they became infested with insects, then we have just one more reason to withhold from him our forgiveness. What a terribly irresponsible thing to have done.

By the way, the expedition was actually called the Hendrick-Hodge expedition, but I haven't been able to find out who was Hendrick. Hodge was Frederick Webb Hodge, Zahrah's future husband. Frank Hamilton Cushing (1857-1900) was an American anthropologist and ethnologist who lived among the Zuni people. Matilda Coxe (Evans) Stevenson (1849-1915) was an American ethnologist, geologist, and explorer who also lived among and studied the Zunis.

* * *

Tall and aristocratic in her appearance, Zahrah had blue eyes and brown hair. She was one of four girls. Her sister Amy Elizabeth Preble married Waldo Edgar Dodge on January 11, 1913. Zahrah married a man with a rhyming surname, archaeologist, ethnologist, and author Frederick Webb Hodge (1864-1956), on September 2, 1927, in Bexar County, Texas. At his wife's death in 1934, he was director of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. Mark R. Harrington (1882-1971), Bruce Bryan (1906-2004), and Johns Harrington (1918-1992), who also wrote for Weird Tales, were also at the Southwest Museum. Johns Harrington's middle name was Heye, presumably for George Gustav Heye (1874-1957), who, despite his very teutonic name, was a native-born American, as well as an archaeologist, collector, and founder of the Museum of the American Indian in New York City. At one time, he had the largest private collection of American Indian artifacts in the world. There is an extant photograph of him and his wife with Hodge and a number of Zuni men.

Zahrah Preble wrote a children's book called Tomar of Siba: The Story of a Gabrielino Indian Boy of Southern California (1933). It was illustrated by her sister, Donna Louise Preble (1882-1979). She had planned to write more, but death intervened. Zahrah's husband handed her notes over to Donna, telling her that she was the one to finish her sister's work. The result was Yamino-Kwiti, Boy Runner of Siba by Donna Preble (1940), which I believe was reprinted as Yamino-Kwiti: A Story of Indian Life in the Los Angeles Area.

Zahrah E. Preble wrote magazine and newspaper articles, including the following:

• "Jottings from the Pacific Coast" in The Oil Miller (Jan. 1921)
• "Burbanking Your Child" in The Juvenile (June 1923)
• "Child Culture's Oldest Cradle" in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (June 24, 1923)
• "Simple Camp Cookery" in American Cookery (1923) 
• "Catching Motion on the Wing" in Complete Novel Magazine (Nov. 1925)
• "Eight Lives for a Horse" in Fawcett’s Triple-X Magazine #21 (Feb. 1926)
• "The Art of Indian Women" in The Forecast (June 1929)
• Articles on Indian life and culture for Compton's Cyclopedia

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Thanks to the FictionMags Index for the two pulp magazine credits.

Zahrah Ethel Preble Dodge died on April 27, 1934, at South Pasadena Sanatorium, South Pasadena, California. She was just fifty-three years old.

Zahrah E. Preble's Letters in "The Eyrie"
July/August 1923
September 1923

Further Reading
"Zahrah Hodge, Museum Head's Wife, Mourned" in the Pasadena (California) Post, April 28, 1934, page 4.

Zahrah E. Preble (1880-1934), in a passport photograph from 1921.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Capt. George Warburton Lewis (1878-1963)-The First Femme Fatale

Carpenter, Typesetter, Soldier, Author, Poet
Born February 20, 1878, near Old Fairview, Kansas
Died November 1, 1963, U.S. Veterans Hospital, The Bronx, New York

George Warburton Lewis was born on February 20, 1878, in prairie country, southeast of Old Fairview, Kansas. He was the son of Robert Lewis (ca. 1831-1893) and Rhoda E. Massey Lewis (1838-1890), both of whom died when he was still in his adolescence. Lewis attended school at Old Fairview and Fairview and worked as a typesetter at the Powhattan Bee. On April 30, 1898, he enlisted in the Kansas National Guard, beginning as a private with the 20th Kansas Infantry Regiment. Shortly after his enlistment, Lewis' unit was activated in the U.S. Army. He served under General Frederick Funston in the Philippines during and/or after the Spanish-American War. He was also in China during the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901).

George W. Lewis seems to have been in and out and then back in the Army. By the time his first story for Weird Tales was published in March 1923, he had attained the rank of captain. Although he was nicknamed "General" by friends and acquaintances, Lewis rose no higher in rank than major or colonel. His headstone calls him captain. Impressively tall and slender, he was a drum major in the U.S. Infantry Band. He served in the military police in the Panama Canal Zone under George W. Goethals and in Haiti in about 1914. He was director general of revenue and acting treasurer of the Dominican Republic. In Puerto Rico, he was police chief and inspector general of the Puerto Rican Insular Police. Lewis also served in Liberia for two years and wrote a manual of instruction for the Liberian Army. By 1938, he had retreated to Arkansas for the sake of his health, also to write. During World War II, he was with the U.S. Department of War in the censorship division in New York City.

On December 22, 1930, Lewis married Zoraida Matus (1903-1984), a native of Puntarenas, Costa Rica, in Monrovia, Liberia. She was the daughter of Nicaraguan general and undersecretary of state Juan de Dios Matus. Zoraida studied at Columbia University and taught Spanish in Arizona and in New York City. Her husband spoke Spanish and several other languages. The Lewises lived in New York City. George W. Lewis died on November 1, 1963, at U.S. Veterans Hospital, in the Bronx, New York, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His wife survived him by more than two decades and now lies by his side.

George Warburton Lewis had stories and articles published in magazines from 1909 to 1949, including three in Weird Tales and three in Detective Tales, all in 1923. He also had stories, articles, and poems in Action Stories, Adventure, The Cavalier, Ghost Stories, Homicide, The Kansas Magazine, Top-Notch Magazine, and other titles. He wrote a book about his life, Fifty Most Thrilling Experiences of My Life, plus at least three volumes of verse, including Poems of Panama (1916) and Songs of Tropic Trails (1928).

Capt. George Warburton Lewis' Stories in Weird Tales and Detective Tales

Weird Tales

• "The Return of Paul Slavsky" (Mar. 1923)
• "The Blade of Vengeance" (June 1923)
• "The Outcasts" (July-Aug. 1923)

Detective Tales

• "Doctor Dunraven's Discovery" (Mar. 1923)
• "The Pink Mirador" (Apr./May 1923)
• "The Snitchers" (July/Aug. 1923)

Further Reading

"Col. George W. Lewis" (obituary) in the Fairview Enterprise, November 21, 1963, page 2, plus several brief newspaper articles about his service in the U.S Army.

Capt. George Warburton Lewis' Story:

"The Return of Paul Slavsky" is a short story about crime and murder. There are six characters in Lewis' story, three detectives and three terrorists recently arrived in the United States from Russia. The terrorists are Paul Slavsky, his sister Olga, and an unnamed brother who looks like Paul. You can tell they're Russians because their name is Slavsky. Like the Germans in The Big Lebowski (1998), they are Nihilists.

"The Return of Paul Slavsky" is told cleanly and efficiently and without any of the purple prose so common in pulp magazines. Paul Slavksy is dispatched in less than a page. One and a half pages later, two of the detectives have Olga in custody. But then there is the ride on the train. Olga tells them that her dead brother is coming back to deliver vengeance on his killer. Then they see a man who looks a lot like him riding with them on the train. One of the detectives leaves the car to smoke. When he comes back, his partner is sleeping with his hat pulled down over his face. The third detective nabs the third Slavsky and brings him into their car. He isn't Paul after all. But why won't the sleeping detective wake up? And why does Olga have that look on her face? Why has she bitten into and drawn blood from her carmine lips? A final sentence, printed in italics, provides an explanation as to just what has happened here.

Captain Lewis was a police detective in Panama and Puerto Rico. His experience shows through in "The Return of Paul Slavsky," not only in his depiction of his three detectives but also in the efficiency and conciseness of his story, as if he were writing a police report. There are no writer's tricks, self-indulgences, or extravagances. "The Return of Paul Slavksy" is out of the ordinary for the first issue of Weird Tales. Yes, it's set in the United States and is a story of crime and detection, but there is an international element and an element of suspense in the story, and in Olga there is the first of her type in the magazine, the femme fatale. She might be the best and fullest of the female characters so far in the magazine. And of course there is the first example of the final, italicized sentence, printed that way for effect.

George Warburton Lewis (1878-1963).

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Herbert J. Mangham (1896-1967)-The Basket

Herbert J. Mangham, author of "The Basket," was actually Herbert Joseph Maughiman or Joseph Herbert Maughiman. He was born on April 27, 1896, in Des Moines, Iowa, and lived in Salina, Kansas, as a child. In the first decade of the twentieth century, his family moved to Kansas City, Missouri. His mother died there of cancer on the last day of May, 1909. If childhood is, as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, the kingdom where nobody dies, then Herbert Maughiman began his life in exile at age thirteen.

Maughiman studied journalism at the University of Missouri. On June 11, 1918, he entered service in the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of sergeant and serving with the medical department at Camp Pike, Arkansas. Maughiman separated from the Army after exactly one year and one month of service, on July 11, 1919. By 1921, he was in San Francisco and working as a writer.

Maughiman got his start as a professional writer at age sixteen when he began selling jokes to Life and Ladies' Home Journal. He had a poem called "Brazen" in Snappy Stories on July 2, 1918. His first published story was "Everybody's Laughing Stock" in Argosy Allstory Weekly, December 17, 1921. He also had humorous items and poems in Life, Liberty, Judge, and The Saturday Evening Post. He had only one story in Weird Tales, "The Basket," from March 1923. His accomplishment earned Maughiman mention in a contemporary newspaper article about writers from Missouri. That's the first newspaper article I have found about the first issue of Weird Tales. Maughiman sometimes wrote under his own name and sometimes under the pen name Herbert J. Mangham. His credits listed in The FictionMags Index are scant. They include stories and poems in titles as low as Breezy Stories and Snappy Stories and as high as The Smart Set and The New Yorker. He seems to have been mostly a humorist, and in later years a journalist.

Maughiman lived, worked, and wrote in New Orleans and New York City. Later in life, he traveled and sent back to the United States feature articles on Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. He died in Guatemala City, Guatemala, on September 14, 1967, and was buried at the American Cemetery in that city. I have written about Herbert J. Maughiman before. Click here to read what I wrote.

Herbert J. Mangham's Story:

"The Basket" is a short story of just three and a half pages. It's set in a hotel in San Francisco. Its subject is a resident of the hotel, the quiet and mysterious Dave Scannon of Catawissa, Pennsylvania, but the main character is the woman who runs it, Mrs. Buhler. Much of Herbert Maughiman's early output was humorous. "The Basket" is not except perhaps in a black and bitter and ironic way. Maybe Maughiman was writing in the mode of Ambrose Bierce, also of San Francisco and also the author of very brief, bitter, and ironic tales.

You should read "The Basket." It's one of the best stories I have covered so far in this series. Along with "The Grave" by Orville R. Emerson, it was included in The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, edited by Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt (1997). In his introduction, the late Mr. Kaye called "The Basket," "a hauntingly understated vignette that reminds me of the bleak existential fiction of Albert Camus."

Jesse James' corpse basket, now at the Jesse James Home Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. The basket in Herbert J. Mangham's story is just such a basket, once used by coroners for the removal of bodies. Mangham, aka Maughiman, lived in Missouri during his teenaged years and early adulthood. Maybe he knew of the Jesse James basket. Even if he didn't, baskets such as this one must still have been in use in the 1920s, just another artifact of a culture and a society that have disappeared from the earth, swept away by the passage of time.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Willard N. Marsh (1922-1970)

Musician, Teacher, Author, Poet
Born March 5, 1922, Oakland, California
Died May 27, 1970, Guadalajara, Mexico

Willard Noah Marsh was born on March 5, 1922, in Oakland, California. His parents were Louis and Goldie D. (Greene or Green) Marsh. Louis Marsh, a native of France, died on May 13, 1928, in San Mateo, California. I don't know what happened to Goldie, but in 1930, Willard and his brother, Matthew E. Marsh, were enumerated in the Federal census with their aunt and uncle, Henry and Lenora M. Green, in Berkeley, California.

Willard N. Marsh graduated from Garfield Junior High School and Berkeley High School. A description of his papers at the University of Iowa Libraries notes Marsh's talents as a musician:

While in Oakland High School he displayed a virtuosity with trumpet and trombone which led to an era as musician-impresario--the launching of "Will Marsh and the Four Collegians" in an Oakland roadhouse--which subsequently financed his education at the State College at Chico.

Marsh was two years into his program at Chico State University when his country came calling. On September 18, 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. He received his technical training at Scott Field in Illinois and served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in the South Pacific in the field of radio communications. The Oakland Tribune printed his letter, entitled "Life on an Atoll," on May 5, 1944 (p. 28).

On September 10, 1948, Marsh married George [sic] Rae Williams in California. She was a former actress with the Pasadena Playhouse. By then, Marsh's writing career had already begun to take off. His first work listed in The FictionMags Index is in fact his poem "Bewitched," which appeared in Weird Tales in March 1945. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Marsh wrote prize-winning stories and poems. In 1950, he was living with his wife in Contra Costa County, California, and calling himself a novelist.

Marsh studied at Chico State University, San Francisco State College, and State University of Iowa. From 1950 to 1958, he gave private instruction in creative writing in the United States and Mexico. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1959 and his master's degree in 1960. In September 1959, he began as an assistant professor of English at Winthrop College in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Marsh spent two years at Winthrop, three at the University of California, Los Angeles (1961-1964), and two more at North Texas State University, Denton (1968-1970). He retired to Mexico very near the end of his life and died of a heart stoppage on May 27, 1970, in Guadalajara, Mexico. He was buried at Municipal Cemetery, Ajijic, Mexico, a fitting place for him to come to rest, for Ajijic has been a place for writers and artists for more than one hundred years.

* * *

From 1945 to 1969, Willard Marsh wrote dozens of stories and poems published in pulp magazines, men's magazines, slick magazines, and literary journals. The FictionMags Index and the Internet Speculative Fiction Database list the following stories in fantasy and science fiction magazines:

• "Bewitched" in Weird Tales (poem, Mar. 1945)
• "Moon Bride" in Different (vignette, Sept./Oct. 1946)
• "Astronomy Lesson" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (short story, June 1955)
• "The Ethicators" in If (short story, Aug. 1955)
• "Machina Ex Machina" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (vignette, May 1956); reprinted in Fiction #39 (1957)
• "Poet in Residence" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (short story, Sept. 1958); reprinted in Venture Science Fiction (June 1964)
• "Forwarding Service" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (short story, June 1964); reprinted in Wanderer durch Zeit und Raum (Oct. 1964)
• "Everyone's Hometown Is Guernica" (or "Cuernica") in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (short story, Aug. 1965)
• "Stay Out of Our Time!" in Worlds of Tomorrow (novelette, June 1964)
• "Inconceivably Yours" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (short story, Sept. 1964)
• "The Sin of Edna Schuster" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (short story, Feb. 1965)

His story "The Ethicators" was in SF: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Judith Merril and published in 1956.

Marsh also wrote for:

Mystery, crime, and detective magazines: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Mercury Mystery Magazine.

Men's magazines: Adam's Bedside Reader, Cavalier, The Dude, Gentleman, Rogue, Sir Knight, Spree.

Slick magazines: Esquire, Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post.

Literary journals: Antioch Review, Approach, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, Transatlantic Review, University of Kansas City Review, Yale Review, and others.

And his stories were in: Best American Short Stories: 1953, Best Saturday Evening Post Stories: 1954, and Prize Stories, 1957: The O. Henry Awards.

He had at least two published books to his credit: a novel, Week With No Friday (Harper & Row, 1965; Avon Books, 1967), and a collection of stories, Beached in Bohemia (Louisiana State University Press, 1969). He also wrote drafts for an unpublished novel, Anchor in the Air.

Willard Marsh was born during the interwar period and was one from those generations that accomplished so much and helped to make America such a prosperous, creative, fun, and interesting place in which to live. His career perhaps encompassed what we might consider a golden age for writers and artists in our country, a time when there were workshops, university programs, correspondence courses, night schools, and so on in which to learn the crafts of writing, drawing, and painting; also contests and competitions, fairs, shows, and exhibits; writer's and artist's groups, colonies, conferences, and conventions; and perhaps most importantly, magazines, fanzines, journals, and newspapers, big, small, and very small, printed on pulp and slick paper and everything in between, publications to receive the work of so many talented, energetic, and ambitious people. What a grand time it must have been, though grand perhaps only in retrospect, as grand times usually are.

* * * Happy New Year! * * *

Further Reading

• "Changing Trend in Reading Said Encouraging to Writers" [by Ann Blackmon] in The State (Columbia, SC), October 20, 1959, section B, page 15.
• Description of Willard N. Marsh's papers, University of Iowa Libraries, here.

SF: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy (1956), edited by Judith Merril and with Willard Marsh's name on the cover. His story "The Ethicators" was inside. Cover art by Ed Emshwiller.

Willard Marsh's Week with No Friday was originally in hardback, but paperback covers are usually more interesting. That proved to be the case here in Avon's edition of 1967. Artist unknown.

Willard Marsh seems to have had high literary ambitions, but he wasn't above writing for men's magazines. Here is his name on the cover of Gent for August 1958. Those were the days.

Willard N. Marsh (1922-1970)

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Husbands & Wives-Part One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales Books-Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks

Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks was published in 1966 by Arkham House of Sauk City, Wisconsin, in an edition of 2,000 copies. Arkham House books are typically rare, costly, and prized by readers and fans of weird fiction. I was lucky enough to find recently a reasonably priced copy of Black Medicine. I finished reading it on March 11, 2017, and can report on its contents. I had hoped to find zombies in the stories of Arthur J. Burks. I'll cut to the chase and let you know there aren't any.

Burks was born in Washington State and served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War I. He also served in occupied Hispaniola or Santo Domingo, probably in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Burks served in other places as well, possibly in the Pacific. These locales show up in the stories in Black Medicine, of which there are eleven. The first, "Strange Tales of Santo Domingo," is actually in six parts, so it might be more accurate to say there are sixteen stories in the book.

The sixteen stories in Black Medicine fall into three groups, plus one story that stands alone. One group of stories is set in the Dominican Republic. They include "Strange Tales of Santo Domingo" in its six parts and "Three Coffins." Another group is set in neighboring Haiti. These include "Voodoo," "Luisma's Return," "Thus Spake the Prophetess," and "Black Medicine." The third is a looser group of unrelated stories set in different places: a time-travel fantasy called "When the Graves Were Opened"; a dream-fantasy called "Vale of the Corbies"; an oceangoing ghost story, "Bells of Oceana"; and a ghost story set in Burks' own Washington State, "The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee." I consider "Guatemozin the Visitant" to stand alone for different reasons, first because of its length (72 pages in Black Medicine, or of novelette length); second, because it's the only story in the book not to have appeared in Weird Tales; third, for its setting in Mexico; and fourth for its unusual themes and unusual power.

One very appealing characteristic of Burks' writing is its even-toned and effortless authenticity. As a military man serving on board ship and in exotic locales, he had a rare familiarity with his subjects and settings. He didn't have to do research on what his characters do and where they live and work, for he did those things and lived and worked in those places himself. It's refreshing to read genre fiction of such authenticity and verisimilitude. Burks was given to pulpish and purplish prose at times, but those aspects of his writing are easily outweighed, I think, by his skill at describing real places and real situations.

Arthur J. Burks was one of the first authors--if not the first--to have a story on Voodoo in Weird Tales. His first two stories in "The Unique Magazine," published under the pseudonym Estil Critchie, were "Thus Spake the Prophetess," from November 1924, and "Voodoo," from December 1924. "Thus Spake the Prophetess" is set in Haiti, but there is no explicit mention of Voodoo or any of its practices, figures, or spirits. "Voodoo" is of course a different story (no pun intended). It, too, is set in Haiti and involves the search for a Voodoo priest by an American serviceman. The serviceman, Rodney Davis, infiltrates a Voodoo ceremony, where he sees a Maman Loi, "the priestess of the serpent," a Papa Loi, her male counterpart, and the sacrifice of a "goat without horns," that is, a human being, in this case an adolescent girl. Davis returns to his commanding officer to report, laconically, that justice has been served.

Other tales of Voodoo followed, the longest and most detailed of which is "Black Medicine," the title story of this collection and the cover story for the August 1925 issue of Weird Tales. I had speculated before that the larger figure in that cover illustration might be a zombie. As it turns out, he isn't, for there are no zombies in Black Medicine. As it turns out, the figure is a man, Chal David, "chief Papa Loi of Bois Tombé." The woman in front of him is a Maman Loi, "high priestess of the cult of voodoo." In the background of the cover illustration are the "followers of the Great Green Serpent." If I understand Voodoo (also called Vaudoux and Voudon) correctly, the "Great Green Serpent" of Haiti might also be "Li Grand Zombi" of Louisiana. Nevertheless, zombies appear to be absent from the fiction of Arthur J. Burks, leaving William B. Seabrook as still the father of zombies in America.

One more thing: There are many good and enjoyable stories in Black Medicine, but one of my favorites and one of the most powerful, I think, is "Guatemozin the Visitant," a story of a revenant from the Aztec past who, when his burial place is disturbed, comes back to wreak a terrible vengeance on the Mexico City of 1931. I am reminded of The Plague by Albert Camus, a far more significant work to be sure, but I would not take anything away from Burks except for, again, his occasional pulpish and purplish prose.

Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks

(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1966), 308 pp.

Contents

"Strange Tales of Santo Domingo"

• "A Broken Lamp-Chimney" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1925)
• "Desert of the Dead" (Weird Tales, Mar. 1925)
• "Daylight Shadows" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1925)
• "The Sorrowful Sisterhood" (Weird Tales, May 1925) 
• "The Phantom Chibo" (Weird Tales, June 1925)
• "Faces"  (Weird Tales, Apr. 1927)

"Three Coffins" (Weird Tales, May 1928)

"When the Graves Were Opened" (Weird Tales, Dec. 1925; reprinted Sept. 1937) 

"Vale of the Corbies" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1925) 

"Voodoo" as by Estil Critchie (Weird Tales, Dec. 1924)

"Luisma's Return" (Weird Tales, Jan. 1925) 

"Thus Spake the Prophetess" as by Estil Critchie (Weird Tales, Nov. 1924) 

"Black Medicine" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1925) 

"Bells of Oceana" (Weird Tales, Dec. 1927; reprinted Apr. 1934)

"The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee" (Weird Tales, May 1926) 

"Guatemozin the Visitant" (Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, Nov. 1931; reprinted in Magazine of Horror, Sept. 1969)

Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks (1966), with cover art by Lee Brown Coye.

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Voodoo on the Cover of Weird Tales

I have covered zombies on the cover of Weird Tales. Now I'll cover Voodoo and the magic and sorcery of the Caribbean, Central America, and the American South. I have five covers here, but only three are obviously about Voodoo. The first may be related to Voodoo, while the last may not be related at all.

There are still more zombie topics on the way.

Weird Tales, December 1924. Cover story: "Death-Waters" by Frank Belknap Long. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. "Death-Waters" is not explicitly a tale of Voodoo, and there are no zombies, but the black man in the story is, evidently, a kind of sorcerer with power to call forth masses of snakes. The man's power may be related to the concept of Li Grand Zombi, the serpent spirit of Voodoo folklore in Louisiana. By the way, "Death-Waters" takes place in Central America, possibly in Honduras, and not in Africa.

A few weeks ago, a reader commented on this story. I read it so that I might understand better what's going on in the illustration. I can tell you that the story and its characters are complicated. The reader was right: the man in the middle is the least sympathetic character. (He may also be a more subtle racial stereotype than appears: named Byrne, he is stubborn and quick to anger, matching what many people thought--or think--of Irishmen.) The man in the rear is more or less inarticulate. Though loyal, he's kind of a numbskull. The man in front is not what I would call sympathetic exactly (the narrator--the man in the rear--sees or believes that he sees in the black man horrible things). However, he gets into a battle of wills with Byrne and is made to heel. The snakes come to avenge his humiliation. As you can tell, this is not a simple story and definitely not a simple case of racism or racialism against black people.

Weird Tales, August 1925. Cover story: "Black Medicine" by Arthur J. Burks. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. I haven't read this story yet, but I assume that it's about Haiti and that the figure in front is a Haitian magician or sorcerer. That would suggest that the figure in the rear is a zombie. I hope to read this story soon, so I'll let you know.

Weird Tales, March 1930. Cover story: "Drums of Damballah" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by C.C. Senf. Damballah is a god of Voodoo and may be synonymous with Li Grande Zombi. (I can't say as I don't know much about Voodoo.) The connection to snakes is evident in the illustration. Speaking of connections, I wonder if there is any etymological connection between Damballah and Allah.

Weird Tales, May 1941. Cover story: "There Are Such Things" by Seabury Quinn [?]. Cover art by Hannes Bok. According to Jaffery and Cook's index of Weird Tales, there is no cover story for this issue, but the illustration and the story named on the cover seem to go together.

Weird Tales, July 1951. Cover story: "Flame Birds of Angala" by E. Everett Evans. Cover art by Charles A. Kennedy. I don't know that this is a story of Voodoo. Published in 1951, it actually seems kind of late for the Voodoo/zombie craze of the 1930s and early '40s. But I'm putting it here until I know something different.

Text and captions copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

American Indians and the American West on the Cover of Weird Tales

American Indians and the American West appeared on four covers of Weird Tales. There is also one cover showing a scene from Old Mexico. Each of the four Western covers has a supernatural or weird element, signifying that they are part of what is now considered a distinct sub-genre, the weird Western. So what are the origins of the weird Western story? Well, if you look at the Wikipedia article "Weird West," you will see several lists of weird Westerns in different forms. The first chronologically on those lists is "The Horror from the Mound" by Robert E. Howard, published in Weird Tales, May 1932. It's clear by the following covers that there were Westerns with weird or supernatural elements before Howard's tale, but is a ghost story also a weird tale? I'm not sure that it is, if in fact weird fiction is a separate genre from the ghost story. That would bring up a question, then: What was the first weird Western story in the history of literature?

Weird Tales, January 1924. Cover story: None. Cover art by R.M. Mally. Like I said, a ghost story isn't necessarily a weird story. If an illustration doesn't have a story or poem as its subject--if it stands alone and tells its own story--then Mally's cover may be interpreted as a ghost story and may not be a weird tale. Or maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe this cover goes into the category of weird Western anyway.

Weird Tales, February 1924. Cover story: None. Cover art by R.M. Mally. Two successive months, two successive Western covers by R.M. Mally. First the cowboy, then the Indian. In fact, this is the first cover for Weird Tales showing what is now called a minority. I have written about it before in my entry on Ralph Allen Lang, here.

Weird Tales, January 1928. Cover story: "The Gods of East and West" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by C.C. Senf. I wrote about this cover recently. I find it bizarre, ugly, and poorly executed. I can't imagine what the editorial staff was thinking when they commissioned it.

Weird Tales, November 1928. Cover story: "The Mystery of Acatlan" by Rachael Marshall and Maverick Terrell. Cover art by C.C. Senf. This is a much better cover by Senf that the previous one, but I don't get the weird (meaning perverted) obsession pulp writers, artists, and readers had with whips, chains, bondage, and overall sadomasochism. You'll see more covers like this one soon. Too many in fact.

Weird Tales, September 1942. Cover story: "Satan's Bondage" by Manly Banister. Cover art by A.R. Tilburne. I have written about this cover before, too. It's partly a swipe. You can read more about it by clicking here.

Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Middle American Indians on the Cover of Weird Tales

Orientalists such as E. Hoffman Price and Otis Adelbert Kline were prominent in their contributions to Weird Tales. Less well known are the anthropologists and ethnologists who wrote for the magazine. Two of these writers were in fact father and son, Mark R. Harrington (1882-1971), aka Ramon de las Cuevas, and Johns Harrington (1918-1992). H.P. Lovecraft's friend, collaborator, and literary executor, Robert H. Barlow (1918-1951), was also an anthropologist and specialized in the study of early Mexico. Barlow contributed to Weird Tales posthumously, in 1981. Bruce Bryan (1906-2004) and Louis B. Capron (1891-1971) were also anthropologists. Although depictions of the native people of Middle America were not as common on the cover of Weird Tales as were those showing people from the Far East, they were still the subject of three illustrations, all from the early days of the magazine. Still more stories and poems of Aztecs, Mayas, and other peoples were on the inside of the magazine.

Weird Tales, November 1924. Cover story: "Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramon de las Cuevas (Mark R. Harrington). Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch, his first for the magazine.

Weird Tales, August 1930. Cover story: "The Curse of Ximu-Tal" by Harry Noyes Pratt. Cover art by Hugh Rankin, an uncharacteristically muddy picture by the artist.

Weird Tales, March 1932. Cover story: "The Vengeance of Ixmal" by Kirk Mashburn. Cover art by C.C. Senf. This is a seldom-seen cover.

Revised Dec. 15, 2016; September 30, 2022.
Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Herbert J. Mangham (1896-1967)

Herbert J. or J. Herbert Maughiman
Aka Herbert J. Maugham
Musician, Journalist, Poet, Writer
Born April 27, 1896, Des Moines, Iowa
Died September 14, 1967, Guatemala City, Guatemala

Herbert J. Mangham, author of a single story in the first issue of Weird Tales, has long been a fugitive from inquiry. Once again the Internet has allowed us to find him and to question him about his past.

First is the question of his name. In Weird Tales, it was Herbert J. Mangham. Thirty-one years later, in an article in the Kansas City Star, it was still Herbert J. Mangham. Long before that, however, in the magazine Motion Picture in 1915, the name was J. Herbert Maughiman. On his draft card, in 1942, the first and middle names were switched, and he was Herbert Joseph Maughiman. Whether the Herbert came first or second, we have a name, and from there the case is broken wide open.

Herbert Joseph or Joseph Herbert Maughiman was born on April 27, 1896, in Des Moines, Iowa, to Joseph S. Maughiman (1855-1924) and Nettie Voorhees Maughiman (1862-1909). He lived in Salina, Kansas, as a child. Both of his parents were buried there, at Gypsum Hill Cemetery. In 1915, at age nineteen, he gave his address (in Motion Picture) as 1305 Locust Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri. That location is significant because of its proximity to the old Central High School, located at the southeast corner of Locust Avenue and Eleventh Street. (1) I think it likely that Maughiman attended Central High School, graduating in about 1914. Whether he attended that institution or not, he continued his schooling at Kansas City Junior College, a college within the new Kansas City Polytechnic Institute. The Kansas City Polytechnic Institute occupied the same building as the old Central High School, which moved to new quarters in 1915. Maughiman lived only two blocks away.

Herbert J. Maughiman was in the Kansas City Junior College class of 1917. I can't be sure that he graduated, although there was enough time--from about 1914 to 1917--for him to have completed a two-year course of study. I'm almost certain that he served in the U.S. military during World War I, but I don't know any details on that. In the 1918 Savitar, the yearbook of the University of Missouri, Maughiman was listed as a member of the Dana Press Club. If he had already completed a two-year course of study plus time out for military service, he may have graduated from the University of Missouri in about 1919-1920. In the 1920 yearbook for Kansas City Junior College, Maughiman was listed as a newspaperman at the Kansas City Star, perhaps his first job in his chosen profession. (2)

Through high school and college, Maughiman supported himself by playing piano, at movie houses, nightclubs, concert halls, and "King Joy Lo’s restaurant on the second floor at Twelfth and Main streets" in Kansas City. (3) He also played on the Chautauqua and Lyceum circuits. In 1954, Mangham wrote to the editor of the Kansas City Star:

My fame is thin and localized, and my fortune is contained in a slim envelope of war bonds. But my life is richly threaded with travel, good friends, radiant women, varied foods and adventure. (4)

Writing was "his first love and he worked hardest at it." (5) In a newspaper item from 1929, he was described as a writer for "Life, Judge, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and other magazines." (6) Maughiman lived in New York at the time and as late as 1942, when he completed his draft card. Over the years, he sold news and feature articles to the Kansas City Star, the Kansas City Times, and other publications. His stories, articles, and poems include:

• "Annabelle Thinks He's Cute" (poem) in Motion Picture, 1915
• "Brazen" (poem) in Snappy Stories, July #2, 1918
• "Everybody's Laughing Stock" in Argosy All-Story Weekly, Dec. 17, 1921
• "The Growth of a Millet Seed" (article) in The Editor, Feb. 4, 1922
• "A Lesson in Melodramatics" in Argosy All-Story Weekly, June 24, 1922
• "His Public" (short story) in The Smart Set, Aug. 1922
• "The Short Short Story" (article) in The Editor, Aug. 12, 1922
• "So Different from the Rest" in Breezy Stories, Nov. 1922
• "The Basket" (short story) in Weird Tales, Mar. 1923
• "Fame or the Gate" in Top-Notch Magazine, May 15, 1923
•  "Chez La Guillotine" (short story) in The Saturday Evening Post, Apr. 19, 1924
• "Loon River Anthology" (poem) in Liberty, Sept. 5, 1925; reprinted in Zest, Jan. 1927
• "Twilight of a Poet" with Russell Maloney in The New Yorker, Dec. 5, 1942
• "The Life of Bobby Ortiz y Riley" in Prairie Schooner, Spring 1952
• "Latin America Hears Anti-Castro Rumbling" (article) in the Indianapolis Star, Oct. 31, 1961
• "Some Guatemalans Find Better Life by Begging" (article) in Kansas City Times, Feb. 3, 1966 

One of the reasons that Herbert Maughiman has escaped questioning over the years is that he was a world traveler and not always easy to find. His travels may have begun during World War I when he served in the U.S. military. He traveled to Mexico, South America, and all the countries of Europe. He may also have gone to New Zealand, and he may have been a pilot who knew or met Charles Lindbergh. Finally, Herbert J. Maughiman's life and travels ended overseas, his death coming on September 14, 1967, in Guatemala City, and his burial, with full military honors, at the American Cemetery in that city.

Here's a limerick by Maughiman:

Annabelle Thinks He's Cute
(from Motion Picture, 1915)
In the photoplays at the La Cynge
An actor appears on the scrynge
   Who's "great" only in size--
   He's got half-closed, dreamy eyes--
That I'd sure like to swat on the bygne!

Notes

(1) Central High School was established in 1867 at a different location. The building at the southeast corner of Locust and Eleventh was constructed in two phases, 1883 and 1892. In 1915, Central High School moved to a new location to the south. The Kansas City Polytechnic Institute (KCPI) opened that same year in the building at Locust and Eleventh. KCPI included a junior college, a normal school, a vocational school, a business school, and a regular high school. It is no longer in existence, nor is the fine brick building which housed it: it was torn down and replaced with a parking lot. Kansas City Junior College was known for its famous graduates. In 1967, a journalist wrote: "Mangham [Maughiman] was a member of one of the school's most illustrious classes. Included were Virgil Thomson, George Hamilton Combs, Richard Lockridge, Dale and Dorothy Brown Thompson, Alice Smith Edwards, Hubert Kelley, Wilson Hicks and Clarence Woodbury." There were others, though Walt Disney was not in fact one of them. (A number of sources make that claim.) You can read more about Kansas City Junior College and its graduates at a website called "MCC Newsroom 100 Stories" at the following URL:

feed://blogs.mcckc.edu/newsroom/category/100-stories/feed/

As for the names listed above: Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) was a composer; George Hamilton Combs, Jr. (1899-1977), a U.S. representative; Richard Lockridge (1898-1982), an author and with his wife, creator of the Mr. and Mrs. North detective series; Dale Moore Thompson (1897-1990), a banker; Dorothy Brown Thompson (1896-1994), a poet and genealogist; Alice Myrmida Smith Edwards (1899-1973), a great granddaughter of Joseph Smith; Hubert Kelley (ca. 1898-1959), a reporter and editor; Wilson Hicks (ca. 1897-1973), a photojournalist and picture editor of Life; and Clarence Woodbury (dates unknown), a writer.

(2) Nineteen twenty was probably too late for Maughiman to have worked with Ernest Hemingway at the Star. 
(3) From "About Town" by Ira B. McCarty, Kansas City Times, Sept. 28, 1967, p. 73.

(4) Quoted in McCarty.

(5) Ditto.
(6) From the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, Chillicothe, Missouri, November 25, 1929, p. 1.

Herbert J. Mangham's Story in Weird Tales

"The Basket" (Mar. 1923)

Further Reading

"The Basket" was reprinted in The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, edited by Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt (1997).

Zest, from January 1927. Herbert Mangham's poem "Loon River Anthology" was in its pages. The poem, at least by its title, is a takeoff on Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters (1915).

Thanks to Kate Hill, Lead Archivist, Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri, for cracking the case of Herbert J. Mangham.
Thanks also to Timothy Perry, Special Collections Librarian, University of Missouri Libraries; and Tina, reference librarian at Des Moines Public Library, both for further research.

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley