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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

----- 

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

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Howard Elsmere Fuller (1895-1985)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: Alice I. Fuller

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Dick Heine (1897-1977)

Author, Clock & Watch Maker, Meteorologist
Born November 25, 1897, Talladega, Alabama
Died May 15, 1977, presumably in Talladega, Alabama

Richard Toole Heine, Jr., who wrote as Dick Heine, was born on November 25, 1897, in Talladega, Alabama, to Richard Heine, Sr., a jeweler, and Carrie V. (Weatherly) Heine, a law secretary. Dick Heine graduated from Talladega High School in 1917, and by 1920 was in Phoenix, Arizona. He worked there as a meteorologist, a fitting occupation, I guess, for a man whose mother was named Weatherly. Heine was employed by the U.S. Weather Bureau, an agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, then the U.S. Department of Commerce. Heine was in Phoenix in 1920 and 1930. By 1940, he was back home in Talladega. Something must have happened to him, because he was then unemployed. In the U.S. Census of 1950, he was listed as unable to work.

Dick Heine had four stories in Weird Tales from 1925 to 1927, the first being "The Jungle Presence," a brief tale published 100 years ago this month, in February 1925. Heine's brother-in-law, Charles E. Planck, was also a writer. He wrote magazine articles on aviation, as well as a hardbound book, Women with Wings (1942).

The Heine family seems to have stuck together. It's nice to think that that's what really happened. Dick Heine died on May 15, 1977, presumably in Talladega, and was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in the city of his birth.

Dick Heine's Stories in Weird Tales
"The Jungle Presence" (Feb. 1925)
"The Fiend of the Seine" (Nov. 1925)
"A Creeping, Crawling Thing" (Sept. 1926)
"The Algerian Cave" (July 1927)

Further Reading
"Dick Heine, Jr. Writer of Mystery Stories" in Our Mountain Home (Talladega, Alabama), October 28, 1925, page 3. This is a very brief article. In it, Heine's stories are perhaps euphemistically called "mystery stories." This is also a very early example of a newspaper article that mentioned Weird Tales by name.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

"Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan-Part One

Caitlín R. Kiernan was born on May 26, 1964, in Dublin, Ireland, and came to the United States as a child with his mother and sister. I believe his is an assumed name. That's okay. There have been lots of tellers of weird tales with pseudonyms, adopted names, or assumed names. Last week I heard from the son of Robert Spencer Carr (1909-1994), who let me know that his father's name at birth was Theodore Bonifield. I used that knowledge to update my biography of him. So the truth has come out more than one hundred years after Carr's birth. We're probably not allowed to know Mr. Kiernan's real name. There is supposed to be truth in art. Artists, though, are human beings, and human beings keep secrets, sometimes for all of their lives.

Mr. Kiernan is a writer, publisher, paleontologist, and onetime musician. His credits include novels, short stories, comic book scripts, and at least one screenplay. His first published short story was in 1995 and his first published novel in 1998. Mr. Kiernan lives and works in Alabama. I believe he also lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Although he's still living, his papers are deposited at the John Hay Library at Brown University. If authors' papers are stored in that library alphabetically (I doubt that they are), then Mr. Kiernan's can't be very far away from those of H.P. Lovecraft. Anyway, the author is another comic book and movie person, but his credits are mostly in prose form. Good for him. He's pretty prolific, too, so double good for him.

Caitlín R. Kiernan's story in Weird Tales #367 is called "Night Fishing." It's nine pages long, plus a full-page, illustrated title page. This is the most psychologically and thematically complex of all of the stories so far in the Cosmic Horror Issue. It's probably the best in stylistic terms, too. I especially like an image from his story: "patient as a spider." "Night Fishing" is also the first to refer overtly to the two main themes or images I have identified in this issue. More on that in a while.

Like "A Ghost Story for Christmas" by Paul Cornell, "Night Fishing" begins with a meta image on its title page. In Mr. Cornell's story, that meta image is a picture of a television set showing on its screen an image of John Mills in the British TV serial Quatermass, broadcast in 1979. (Thanks to reader Mike Harwood for identifying the source and the actor.) In Mr. Kiernan's story, the meta image is a picture of an office with a picture on the wall, an image of the painting "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth (1948). So the illustration is a picture of a picture. We as readers, then, are looking at a picture of a picture of a woman looking at a house. Could there be in the house a picture on a wall? And in that picture could there be another picture, or even a picture of a picture?

(Actually, the illustration on the title page is a printed image made from an image engraved on a printer's plate and then transferred to a roller--assuming the magazine was printed by an offset process--of an original digital image that does not exist in the real world, showing a picture of an image of a woman looking at the image of a house. In other words, we are at remove after remove from any real, original, physical thing.)

"Night Fishing" is about a troubled man who is undergoing psychiatric treatment. Or is it merely psychological treatment? I have already written about some lack of precision in Weird Tales #367. In "Night Fishing," the narrator lets us know in his first sentence that he's going to a psychiatrist (pg. 33, col. 1). A while later, the psychiatrist is now a psychologist (pg. 33, col. 2). Then he goes back to being a psychiatrist again. There's an important difference to be made between the two, as a psychiatrist is a medical doctor who may treat his or her patients using drugs. In other words, psychiatry takes what could be interpreted as a materialistic approach to problems that may not be materialistic after all. I forgot to mention that Caitlín R. Kiernan is an atheist. And I forgot to mention that his narrator is a physicist.

There are lots of brandnames and a lot of product placement in "Night Fishing." Taco Bell, Coleman, Old Crow and Jack Daniels, Mason jars, Craftsman, Crayola crayons, Xanax, Case knife, TV Guide, Hershey's. There are other proper nouns, too: Snuffy Smith, Red Angus bulls, Sunset Boulevard, Mandelbrot set, Alabaman place names, Schrödinger and Heisenberg, Eisenhower, the King James Bible. Some of that is okay. Some of it makes for concrete detail and lends verisimilitude to a story. But to come across, as you read, a brandname in every few sentences or paragraphs in a story of just nine pages becomes a distraction. It points to something larger going on.

So why do they do it?

Why do writers of today so easily turn to using brandnames in their works? I guess it's a kind of conditioning. They grew up in a consumerist culture, and it all comes naturally to them. They think in terms of what they can buy, or what they might buy one day. In this culture, we are, every day, bombarded with commercial messages. Our favorite names are brandnames. Again and again in the comments section of this blog, I have asked readers to refrain from mentioning where they have bought this thing or that. If you're going to talk about a book, talk about the book, not about where you bought it. Sadly, even fans of fiction and readers of literature are commercially minded. I guess, too, that if your life is largely emptied out of real, human things, you have only commercial products with which to share your thoughts, your feelings, and your days. You develop relationships with them and they become your friends and lovers. Maybe that's one of the reasons that hoarding has become such a problem in our society. People objectify other people and humanize material things. We have it all backwards.

Many people, especially on the left, complain about materialism--commercial materialism--without understanding that to be of the left--Marxist, socialist, generically progressive--is to be, necessarily, a materialist. Erich Fromm, one of the Frankfurt School, was of the left. And yet in his book The Art of Loving (1956), he diagnosed a problem in which people see each other as material objects rather than as real human beings (a real human being being not material but non-material). In seeking after love, we commodify each other. We engage in decision-making as if we were in the marketplace. This is especially pronounced in a liberal, i.e., capitalist society. (This is obviously a Marxian critique. And now I wonder if there is product placement in the work of China Miéville, a known--and whiny--Marxist.) So maybe there is a similar kind of commodification carried out by the artists in our society, a commodification not only within and of their works but also of themselves. Commercial products have become an object of art, equal in importance perhaps to feelings, meaning, relationships, and so on, the original and true currency in the making of art. (Yes, I see the irony here in using the word currency.) And so writers in Weird Tales and elsewhere are like children watching Saturday morning cartoons, focused on the commercials and the brandnames as much as on their favorite shows. What's next as an epigraph? A jingle? A slogan?

But at least Caitlín R. Kiernan knows that there is a bird called a mockingbird and a snake called a water snake. Authors can name every brand of TV show, movie, comic book, and video game they have ever consumed, but they don't know the difference between a bass and a basswood. They should work on that.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Howard Ellis Davis (1883-1951)-A Third Story of the Southern Swamp

Howard Ellis Davis (1883-1951) was a military officer and an engineer who worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Although he was born in Florida, Davis lived and worked in Georgia and Alabama. He moved to Bay Minette, Alabama, north of Mobile, in 1945 and lived there for the rest of his life.

Davis wrote more than one hundred stories and articles published in various pulp and slick magazines. His lone story for Weird Tales was "The Unknown Beast," a tale of Southern swamps published in the first issue, March 1923. Although he was in places other than Birmingham, Alabama, Davis apparently had connections to that city, specifically to his contemporary, Artemus Calloway (1883-1948), who conducted the short story department at the Birmingham News-Age-Herald. Calloway also contributed to Weird Tales. There is reason to believe that he was on the Alabama end of a connection between Weird Tales and his fellow writers in the Yellowhammer State. Anthony M. Rud (1893-1942), who was from Chicago but wintered in and went on public speaking tours in Alabama (Georgia, too), may have been the one who established the connection between those two places. There don't seem to have been connections between tellers of weird tales in most cities and states in America. Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Milwaukee were exceptions. But so was Alabama, and that's why I have created a category and a label called "Weird Tales in Alabama." Howard Ellis Davis was a part of the Weird Tales scene in Alabama. I think Alabaman fans of weird fiction have reason to be proud of their home state.

I have written about Davis before. Click here to read what I wrote. Davis died of a heart ailment at a hospital in Mobile, Alabama, on April 25, 1951, seventy-two years ago this week.

Howard Ellis Davis' Story:

"The Unknown Beast" is another story of Southern swamps. It's set in a backwater place called Bayou le Tor along Mississippi Sound, probably in Alabama, possibly a fictionalized version of Bayou le Batre in Alabama. Davis must have been well acquainted with such places. He wrote effectively of a landscape of giant cypress trees, live oaks, and sedge grass. As a forester and nature lover, I like to read of real natural places and real plants and trees.

"The Unknown Beast" is something like a murder mystery. There are suggestions that the horrible murders taking place in the swamps around Bayou le Tor are supernatural or even cryptozoological in nature. A local man, driving in a borrowed car, makes a journey two counties away to fetch back a deputy sheriff named Ed Hardin. It is Hardin who investigates the murders. One evening, armed with a pistol and a broad hunting knife, he fearlessly rides on horseback into the swamp. He is almost killed in the effort, but he brings out the unknown beast for all to see. It is Old Rensie Bucker, a black man and a former sailor, who provides the explanation as to the nature and background of the beast.

Davis' story is a straight, uncomplicated, third-person narrative. It's told in linear fashion, with no flashbacks, framing devices, introductions, stylistic flourishes, or other author's tricks. The style is readable and literary. It's not sensationalistic and definitely not stricken with overwrought, pulpish prose as in Hamilton Craigie's story "The Chain." The author doesn't draw attention to himself, and there isn't anything standing between the reader and his narrative. Although "The Unknown Beast" is marred in my opinion by transcriptions of dialect and accented regional speech among its various characters, Davis' approach is refreshing in a collection that has, to this point at least, included too many contrived, complicated, self-conscious, unsophisticated, simplistic, or not fully realized narratives.

I should let you know that there is in "The Unknown Beast" the first occurrence in Weird Tales of the n-word. I won't defend that word or its use, but I can say at least that it is used only by characters within the story, first by Ed Hardin, a white man, then by Rensie Bucker, a black man. Both men use the word in a matter-of-fact way. It seems to be just a word that people use in their everyday speech. In contrast, the author didn't use the word in his narration at all. Instead, he referred to black people as negroes. That word might be considered in our time offensive as well, but it is still in use among black institutions.

"The Unknown Beast" is not predictable. We don't know what the beast is until Old Rensie explains it to us. There is a nice twist at the end involving a "chile-minded" black man (kind of like Sloth in The Goonies) and a bunch of drug smugglers aboard a schooner out of the East Indies. It seems to me that drugs would have been a taboo subject in mainstream magazines of that time. More than that, though, "The Unknown Beast" has a slightly weird element in it, and I think it found an appropriate place in Weird Tales. As in later tales by H.P. Lovecraft, there is the theme of degeneracy. There is also, again, the theme of the swamp monster, as well as references to the Orient, both of which were staples of pulp fiction.

"The Cypress Swamp" (1894) by Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr. (1862–1932).

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

David R. Solomon (1893-1951)-Another Story of the South

Author, Journalist, Military Officer, Attorney, American Legion Leader
Born July 9, 1893, Meridian, Mississippi
Died November 15, 1951, Birmingham, Alabama

David Rosenbaum Solomon was born on July 9, 1893, in Meridian, Mississippi, to Samuel Isadore Solomon, a bookkeeper/accountant and a native of Nisstadt, Germany/Poland, and Fannie (Rosenbaum) Solomon. I'm not sure where Nisstadt is or was. It may have been Neustadt, a district in Prussia.

David R. Solomon graduated  from the University of Mississippi with a bachelor of arts degree in 1915 and a bachelor of laws degree (Ll.B.) in 1916. He practiced law in Meridian from June 1916 to January 1918. While trying to enlist in the U.S. military during the Great War, he worked as a journalist with the Washington Times. On May 24, 1918, Solomon succeeded in enlisting in the U.S. Army and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He served in the 33rd Field Artillery from May 24, 1918, to December 12, 1918, and was stationed at Camp Jackson, South Carolina. He did not serve overseas.

Upon returning to civilian life, Solomon relocated to Birmingham, Alabama, and that's where he spent the rest of his life. On November 1, 1920, he married Madeline Alva Hirshfield in Birmingham. He was with a firm called Leader & Ullman in that city until November 1922, when he opened his own law practice. Even then he was known as an author of magazine short stories.

The first credit by David R. Solomon listed in The FictionMags Index is a vignette called "Her Visit" in Saucy Stories, April 1917. That was in the same month in which the United States entered the Great War. Solomon's next credit, a short story called "The Pikesteps of Pindar," didn't arrive until the May 31, 1919, issue of Argosy. From then until September 1934, Solomon had stories in Argosy, The Black Mask, Cosmopolitan, The Designer and the Woman's Magazine, Detective Story Magazine, Hearst's International, Munsey's Magazine, People's Story Magazine, Top-Notch Magazine, and other titles. He had just one story in Weird Tales and two in Detective Tales, both in the first year those two magazines were in print.

It looks like David R. Solomon's younger brother, Mendel Moses Solomon, was also an author of pulp stories. Born on August 20, 1895, in Meridian, Mississippi, he enlisted on the same day as his brother, May 24, 1918. Whereas David remained stateside, Mendel served overseas with the 152nd Infantry Regiment, from October 1918 to May 1919. He was discharged on May 12, 1919. From 1922 to 1931, Mendel had stories in Argosy Allstory Weekly, Detective Story Magazine, Thrilling Detective, and Top-Notch Magazine. He also had one story in Detective Tales, "The Double Cross," in March 1923, the same month in which David R. Solomon's story "Fear" was in Weird Tales. A businessman, author, and philosopher, he died in Meridian, Mississippi, on September 30, 1954. Neither man survived his fifties.

David R. Solomon was well known in Birmingham both as an attorney and as a writer. He was associated with other Birmingham writers, too, some of whom also contributed to Weird Tales. In October 1936, he served as a judge on the board for the fifth anniversary of the Birmingham News-Age-Herald's short story department. That department was conducted by Artemus Calloway (1883-1948). The other judges were Pettersen Marzoni (1886-1939) and Edgar Valentine Smith (1875-1953). The winner of the fifth-anniversary contest was Don Elwell. The story the following week was by Howard Ellis Davis, Jr., son of Howard Ellis Davis (1883-1948), who also had a story in the first issue of Weird Tales. That one is still to come in this series.

I have a couple of more credits for David R. Solomon, "The Official Ear," a short story syndicated by the Chicago Tribune in December 1923; and a short story called "Man Shy" which was to have been turned into a movie by the Birmingham Amateur Movie Association in 1928. "His short stories delighted readers of the big slick magazines," wrote the Birmingham News, "[b]ut he loved the law more than writing entertaining fiction, so he dropped writing altogether." (1) That appears to have been in 1934. Solomon afterwards devoted himself to serving his community and his fellow veterans.

Solomon was the commander of the Birmingham post and a member of Jewish War Veterans; commander of General Gorgas Post No. 1, American Legion; and state judge advocate of the Alabama department of American Legion. He also served with the Red Cross during World War II. He died prematurely, four days after Armistice Day, on November 15, 1951, in Birmingham. His hometown paper remembered him: "This community misses David R. Solomon--and he will long be missed. For Dave Solomon was one of those rare souls with a zeal for good work and a sense of humor that sparkled the path before him" (2)

David R. Solomon's Stories in Weird Tales and Detective Tales

Weird Tales

• "Fear" (Mar. 1923)

Detective Tales

• "The Invisible Assassin" (Feb. 1923)
• "Fog" (Mar. 1923)

Further Reading

A full and very interesting page on the Birmingham News-Age-Herald's short story department, October 4, 1936, feature and magazine section, page 2.

Notes
(1) "The doughboy's friend" in the Birmingham News, December 3, 1951, page 1.
(2) Ditto.

David R. Solomon's Story:

"Fear" is a very short story, taking up only three and a half pages in the first issue of Weird Tales. It's a pretty minor story, really just a brief tale. Once again, we have a story set in a Southern swamp. Once again, there is a conversation that begins around a campfire. Once again, we have a man and his daughter, who is named Ruth, with the mother nowhere in sight, just as in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes." (Surely there were other names for women besides Ruth in the 1920s.) And once again, there is a recounting of a man getting snake-bitten, just as in "Hark! The Rattle!" There is a mild, possibly humorous, twist at the end of "Fear." The story is only three and half pages long. You might as well read it as skip over it.

1922

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Origins of Ooze-Part One

If it had not been the cover story in that first issue of Weird Tales, Anthony M. Rud's "Ooze" might now be forgotten. Instead, it was reprinted in the expanded and enhanced edition of The Weird Tales Story (2021) and is now available as an ebook. It has also been the subject of recent commentary, analysis, and criticism.

A century separates us from "Ooze." The world from which it came is gone forever. What do we know--what can we know?--of its origins or the context in which it written? Only a little? Or maybe a lot? If we follow some lines of inquiry--if we investigate today in the same way Rud's narrator investigated the events at that ruined house on the edge of Moccasin Swamp--maybe we can discover more about the origins of "Ooze."

"Ooze" would seem to have been something fairly new in its time, a work of science fiction before that genre was so named. Remember that Weird Tales was the first American magazine devoted to stories of fantasy. In March 1923, Amazing Stories, the first American science fiction magazine, was still three years in the future, while the term science fiction would have to wait until near the end of the decade before it appeared. Although "Ooze" wasn't the first science fiction story to appear in an American magazine, we can call it the first to appear in Weird Tales. That's easy enough.

"Ooze" is more than just an early science fiction story, however. It's also an implicitly self-conscious story. It knows what it is, and because of that, it might also be called metafictional. (1) The first-person narrator in "Ooze" comments on his missing friend:

As readers of popular fiction know well, Lee Cranmer's forte was the writing of what is called--among fellows in the craft--[the] pseudo-scientific story.

He proceeds to define the pseudo-scientific story:

In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology, or what-not, which carries to logical conclusion improved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.

(That's a curious expression: "nadirs of fact." It makes me think of Charles Fort.)

In the paragraph that follows, the narrator mentions Jules Verne and "an Englishman named Wells" as authors of the pseudo-scientific story, observing:

In certain fashion these men are allies of science. Often they visualize something which has not been imagined even by the best of men from whom they secure data, thus opening new horizons of possibility.

(Remember that Charles Fort also called his clippings "data.")

I have said before that the artist is the canary in the coal mine of culture. Rud seems to have been saying the same kind of thing here.

It's no wonder that "Ooze" was the first cover story in Weird Tales, for here within a work of fiction rather than in any editorial or literary manifesto (such as in "Why Weird Tales?" from a year later) is a definition and a guide to the reader as to just what this is all about. It's a kind of announcement: in this magazine, you will read stories of a certain type, stories based on extrapolations of what we know about the physical universe. Significantly, Rud included anthropology in his short list of fields of inquiry: now the doors are thrown open to the human-inhabited universe as well.

The phrase "weird tales" appears in "Ooze." It is applied to stories told by locals about what they call "Daid House," Cranmer's mysteriously ruined backwoods lodge. If "Ooze" is metafictional in one way, it might be in another, too, for it is a science-fiction story told about weird-fictional events, using some of the conventions of weird fiction. The narrator solves the mystery at Dead House by conducting a series of interviews. In other words, using a scientific or journalistic approach, he gathers a series of weird tales about weird events that took place in a weird-fictional setting, involving a super-scientist and his son, a writer of pseudo-scientific stories, the result being an early science-fiction story published in a magazine called Weird Tales.

Again, "Ooze" is self-conscious. It seems to have served as a simultaneous statement of purpose and an introduction, welcome, and guide to readers. So, did Rud write "Ooze" specifically for publication in Weird Tales? Maybe. Maybe not. His narrator's investigations take place in 1913, a full decade before that first issue was published. Rud was still a student in 1913. He was also a budding teller of tales. We know from his first letter in "The Eyrie" that he wrote "A Square of Canvas" while he was still in college. Maybe "Ooze" dates from that period as well. On the other hand, we know from Katherine Hopkins Chapman's article that he spent the winter and spring of 1921 in Citronelle, Alabama, where he had gathered material for at least a couple of stories. So maybe we can say that "Ooze" is from about 1921-1922. Anyway, we can speculate that Rud functioned as a kind of literary agent for writers or as a kind of talent scout for Weird Tales. He seems to have been, at the very least, a connection to tellers of weird tales in Alabama. Whether he just lucked onto Weird Tales--and it lucked onto him--or the magazine actually sought him out, with "Ooze" as a result, Anthony M. Rud played his part in the early success of "The Unique Magazine," such as it was.

Science fiction wasn't fully formed when the first issue of Weird Tales arrived, but neither was weird fiction. Although it has its weird-fictional elements, "Ooze" is more nearly science-fictional than weird-fictional. In his story, Rud referred to Verne and Wells. Absent by name are authors such as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, whom we recognize as among the originators of weird fiction. (We should always remember the anonymous authors of Beowulf, too.) Both wrote what we might call proto-science fiction, but both might better be characterized as Gothic and Romantic authors, as authors who told tales of passion, vengeance, and the extremities of emotion, of irrationality, horror, terror, and madness. On the other hand, what is "Ooze" but just another instance of Frankensteinian science? Of an overweening pride in science and reason rather than an understanding of human frailty and the workings of human nature as the determiners of our fate?

It seems clear to me that Jules Verne and H.G. Wells--especially Wells--were Anthony Rud's models in writing "Ooze." Rud was, after all, trained in science and medicine, just as Wells had been. "Ooze" is an account by a first-person narrator of investigations carried out in a pretty even scientific or journalistic manner. The first-person narrator in The War of the Worlds is also, for example, a writer. (2) Wells' seminal works of science fiction were less than thirty years old when Rud wrote. Most were published in the same decade in which Rud was born. By the time Rud was a teenager--in other words, after his Golden Age of Twelve had passed--Wells had moved on. Rud's narrator in "Ooze" doesn't like that very much, commenting that, although Wells wrote pseudo-scientific stories for a time, he abandoned them "for stories of a different--and, in my humble opinion, less absorbing--type."

So I think that the origins of "Ooze" can be traced to the works of H.G. Wells, but I would also go back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was first published in 1818, and to other Gothic and Romantic tales of passion and madness, Moby Dick for example. (3) There's reason to believe that the origins of "Ooze" preceded even Frankenstein, though. And thereby hangs a tale of a scientific--more accurately a pseudoscientific--controversy from so long ago that no one now remembers it.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) I'm not the first to use the term metafictional in reference to "Ooze." See "American Weird" by Roger Luckhurst in The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015).
(2) In the Mercury Theatre adaptation of 1938, the narrators are a number of reporters and--in the voice of Orson Welles--a surviving scientist. Thirty years later, WKBW Radio of Buffalo, New York, broadcast a second adaptation of Wells' story in which, again, radio reporters narrate the Martian invasion of Earth. 
(3) The second English edition of Frankenstein, with Mary Shelley's byline, was published in 1823, making this year its bicentenary.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Anthony M. Rud (1893-1942)-The First Cover Story

Chicago native Anthony Melville Rud wrote the first cover story in Weird Tales, "Ooze," published in March 1923. Born on January 11, 1893, he was the son of two medical doctors. Rud studied medicine, too, but he gave that up to go into the fiction-writing business. From 1918 to his death on November 30, 1942, he authored scores of stories for pulp magazines in many of the most popular genres, including detective stories, adventure stories, Westerns, and fantasy, what we would call science fiction, science fantasy, and/or weird fiction. I'll let the author's profile below tell you more about his career. You can also read what I have written about him before in three parts:

• "Anthony Rud and the Tango Dancer Murder-Part One" from February 3, 2016

• "Anthony Rud and the Tango Dancer Murder-Part Two from February 4, 2016

• "Anthony M. Rud (1893-1942)" from February 5, 2016

I find now that what I wrote seven years ago is incomplete. I'll fix part of that below.

Eight out of nine of Rud's first published stories are about a detective called Jigger Masters. I have never read these stories but would like to. I can speculate that Rud had connections to a real-life Chicago police detective named John O'Keefe, who investigated the murder of Mildred Allison Rexroat, subject of my two-part series on the Tango Dancer Murder. Rud was connected only briefly and very peripherally to that case. I'll have more on O'Keefe, a fellow Irishman, just in time for St. Patrick's Day.

Anthony M. Rud wrote Westerns under the pen name Anson Piper, his mother's maiden name. He also wrote under the name R. Anthony and apparently under the name Ray McGillivray. In addition to writing the first cover story in Weird Tales, Rud wrote the first letter published in "The Eyrie," the regular letters column that also began in March 1923. He had just one more letter after that, a very brief one in the second issue, April 1923. Following are his complete credits in "The Unique Magazine." All are under the byline Anthony M. Rud unless otherwise noted:

Anthony M. Rud, Ray McGillivray, and R. Anthony's Stories & Letters in Weird Tales

• "Ooze" (Mar. 1923; reprinted Jan. 1952; reprinted Summer 1983)-The first issue
• Letter to "The Eyrie" (Mar. 1923)-The first letter in the first issue
• "A Square of Canvas" (Apr. 1923; reprinted Sept. 1951)-The second issue
• "The Forty Jars" as by Ray McGillivray (Apr. 1923)
• Letter to "The Eyrie" (Apr. 1923)
• "The Parasitic Hand" as by R. Anthony (Nov. 1926; reprinted Aug. 1934)
• "The Endocrine Monster" as by R. Anthony (Apr. 1927)
• "The Witch-Baiter" as by R. Anthony (Dec. 1927)
• "The Spectral Lover" as by R. Anthony (Apr. 1928)
• "The Place of Hairy Death" (Feb. 1934)
• "Bellowing Bamboo" (May 1934)

So it looks as though Rud, after helping to get Weird Tales started in 1923, made two returns, first as R. Anthony in 1926-1928, then as himself in 1934.

Weird Tales in Alabama

Anthony Rud opened his first letter in "The Eyrie" with these words:

Dear Mr. Baird: Delighted to hear that you contemplate WEIRD TALES. I hope you put it through--and without compromise.

I take it that Rud and Edwin Baird, the first editor of Weird Tales, were in touch before the magazine even began and that Baird sought him out as a potential contributor. Remember that Rud was a Chicago native and that Weird Tales was more or less based in Chicago, even if its editorial offices were in Indianapolis at the time. Remember, too, that Jacob Clark Henneberger, the co-publisher of the magazine, had cast about for Chicago authors (namely Hamlin Garland, Emerson Hough, and Ben Hecht) to help fill the pages of his planned magazine. Henneberger didn't get those men, but at least he got Rud. In his letter, Rud offered a story he had written in his college days, "A Square of Canvas," which appeared in the second issue of "The Unique Magazine," April 1923. If Ray McGillivray was indeed one of his pen names, then Rud had a third story in those first two issues.

"I am buried deep in the heart of the piney woods," Rud wrote, "35 miles from the nearest news-stand selling even a Sunday paper, and I want to make sure of seeing each issue of WEIRD TALES." Evidently, Weird Tales found its way even into remote places in the South, and Rud helped spread the word, writing:

     It's a corking title [Weird Tales], and it will get all the boosting I can give. Herewith a clipping of my last platform appearance. I told 'em of the coming magazine, and that it offered a field of reading unique. At Atlanta and Montgomery, where I speak later in the winter, I'll give the sheet a hand. I have two more dates in Mobile, and I'll mention your project.

So Rud was a public speaker in the South, working out of a base in "the piney woods" of southern Alabama. (I'll have more evidence of that in a minute.) He must have written sometime in late 1922 or early 1923, so in those few months before the first issue appeared, Rud was spreading the word in Alabama and Georgia about a new and unique magazine on its way. I don't know what kind of public speaking he did, but in his travels Rud may very well have come in contact with other writers. His story "Ooze" is set in southern Alabama, presumably near Mobile. His narrator even mentions a "reporter on the staff of The Mobile Register." I have written before about Weird Tales in Alabama (on Dec. 18, 2022, here). It looks as though most of the authors I included in that summary worked on newspapers in Birmingham, well north of Mobile. Nonetheless, Artemus Calloway, who also worked on newspapers in Birmingham, contributed to the second issue of Weird Tales, April 1923.

I have an item from The Bookman, October 1921, page 186, regarding writers in Alabama. Katherine Hopkins Chapman wrote:

     The little town of Citronelle, Alabama, is rich in literary traditions. [. . .] Two miles south of this spot is the famous estate locally known as "Mann's Folly," built by Charles Mann, brother of Colonel William D'Alton Mann, late editor of "Town Topics." A quarter section of woodland was laid out in a chain of Italian lakes and rare shrubs and trees imported to beautify the grounds. [. . .] A handsome house was started, but when it was half completed, Charles Mann, who was said to have taken a flier on 'change, went broke. [. . .] [T]he estate, neglected and forlorn, is referred to by the townspeople as "Mann's Folly."

Colonel William D'Alton Mann was at one time the owner of the Mobile Register.

Katherine Hopkins Chapman continued:

     Other interesting, if less spectacular writer folk come and go at Citronelle. Anthony M. Rud, magazine and fiction writer ("Saturday Evening Post" et al.), after spending the winter and spring there, drove through to Chicago for the summer--and so far as the thermometer counts, had better stayed south! While in this section Mr. Rud found much to interest him in the way of story material. One of the scenes of his forthcoming tales, he states, will be laid between Citronelle and Vinegar Bend, while another will be just this side of Mobile. He found the negro character rich in story suggestion and will use it to a large extent.

"Ooze" is of course set in Alabama, and now maybe we have a place: Citronelle or its environs. (Citronelle is about thirty-four miles from Mobile. Vinegar Bend is north of Citronelle. Oak Grove, which lies between Citronelle and Mobile, is mentioned in "Ooze" as a source for lumber.) "Ooze" begins with a description of a ruined house in the swampy backwoods of southern Alabama. And there is a description of a nasty, fish-smelling pond of ooze on the grounds of the house. Could Rud--except for the ooze--have been describing Mann's Folly?

Anthony  M. Rud's story:

"Ooze" is a novelette in nine chapters, told in the first person by a writer out of the Chicago area, "a scribbler of general fact articles." It is told in the form of an investigation after-the-fact of terrible and murderous events that happened at a now ruined house in backwoods Alabama, not far from Mobile. The year is 1913, six years after the events under investigation.

The main characters in "Ooze" are--or were--Lee Cranmer, a writer of what is called "pseudo-scientific" stories, his wife Peggy Breede Cranmer, and Cranmer's father, scientist John Corliss Cranmer. The narrator knew all three and was a friend and college roommate of Lee Cranmer. He is dismayed to know that the elder Cranmer had been accused of murdering his son and daughter-in-law. Declared insane and confined to a mental institution, John Corliss Cranmer escaped and went missing. By the end of the story, the narrator discovers the truth behind the mystery. (The couple of Lee Cranmer, teller of tales, and his father, a scientist, is more or less equivalent to the couple of Rud, the pulp writer, and his father, the medical doctor.)

The subject of Cranmer's scientific research was protozoa and the possibility of altering their "chromosome arrangement" to affect change in their size and growth. The mysteries are manifold: Just what was Cranmer up to in his researches? What happened to him, his son, and his daughter-in-law? (There was another victim, too, the octoroon man Joe, who, according to a witness, was engulfed by "a slimy, amorphous something.") How did Cranmer's house, called "the Lodge" or "the Dead House," come to ruination? And what was Lee Cranmer's "pet" kept in the now oozy pond surrounded by the breached, doorless, brick wall, which also enclosed the house? Rud's unnamed narrator answers all of these questions in the course of his investigations. The story ends with an all-revealing quote drawn from a notebook, another one of those conventions of weird fiction.

"Ooze" is an early science fiction story, but it lacks the positive and progressive aspects of science fiction. The theme of science run amuck (no pun intended) and a resulting horrible fate visited upon the protagonists is more nearly weird-fictional, as is the remote setting, the physical isolation, and the prevailing atmosphere of decay. Rud's narrator is a writer of fact, not fiction, and his tone is pretty even and matter-of-fact. There isn't any of the overwrought narration so common in weird fiction. Descriptions of the monster, a giant amoeba, and what it does are effective and horrifying. We don't need any Lovecraftian prose to see that.

"Ooze" is a somewhat jumbled story, but this is in the nature of investigations done after-the-fact. The investigator discovers pieces of information on events not in the order of their occurrence but in the order that he finds them. He then has to piece it all together. Readers of Weird Tales in March 1923 would have read a story like this one before, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a story of scientific hubris and overreach. They would read another even more like it afterwards, in "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, written in 1926 and published in Weird Tales in February 1928, for in Lovecraft's story there is a similar investigation and a piecing together of separated events. I don't have any direct evidence that Lovecraft was influenced by reading "Ooze." But the similarities are there, including a scene in "The Call of Cthulhu" set in a southern swamp. We also shouldn't rule out that Joseph Payne Brennan was influenced by "Ooze" in his writing of "Slime," published in Weird Tales thirty years later, in March 1953.

From the New York Daily News, August 6, 1933, page 107. I have colorized this image.

Revised slightly on September 29, 2024.
Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales in Alabama

As you look into the lives of the men and women who contributed to Weird Tales, you start to see connections and patterns. I'm almost certain there was a connection between Weird Tales and writers in California, but then Farnsworth Wright was a native Californian who had worked as a critic and journalist there and in Chicago before becoming editor of "The Unique Magazine" in 1924.

I also sense a connection to writers in Alabama, but I can't say what that connection might have been, who created it, or who maintained it. In any case, I have listed below all of the tellers of weird tales that I have covered so far who were born in or worked in the Yellowhammer State. More than a couple of them were newspapermen. That seems like the connection. Still, it's not clear. And now that the Weird Tales files and correspondence are gone--their destruction happened about half a century ago--we may never know.

Ethel Morgan-Dunham (1880-1960)--Born in Ohio and a teacher in Iowa, Ethel Morgan-Dunham moved to Alabama in the early 1930s with her husband. They lived in Loxley. She was buried at Fairhope.

Marion Heidt Mimms (1882-1972)--Marion Heidt Mimms was born in Selma, Alabama, and attended the University of Alabama, where her uncle was a professor. Later she lived in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband.

Artemus Calloway (1883-1948)--Artemus Calloway was born in Pineapple, Alabama, and worked for the Birmingham Ledger and the Birmingham News as a reporter, feature writer, columnist, and editor. He was well connected and possibly a conduit for communications to and from the editorial offices of Weird Tales.

Howard Ellis Davis (1883-1951)--Howard Ellis Davis was born in Florida but lived and worked in Oak Grove, Alabama, as a writer. His main job was as an engineer, although he sold plenty of stories to fiction magazines and pulp magazines. He died and was buried in Alabama.

Pettersen Marzoni (1886-1939)--Born in Florida, Pettersen Marzoni lived and worked in Alabama for most of his life. He was with the Birmingham News and Birmingham Age-Herald for several years and presumably knew and worked with Artemus Calloway.

Tarleton Collier (1888 or 1889-1970)--Edward Tarleton Collier was born in Mobile, Alabama, and though he was editor of the Selma Journal, he spent most of his life and career on newspapers in Georgia and Kentucky.

Stewart Van der Veer (1893-1966)--John Stewart Van der Veer worked for the Birmingham Post for many years, but he knew Artemus Calloway of the Birmingham News as early as 1926. I suspect the journalistic fraternity in Birmingham was a fairly small one. But here Calloway's name has come up again, with the implication that he was, again, a conduit, perhaps almost like an agent, for writers seeking to get their work into the pages of Weird Tales.

Jack Kytle (1906-1971)--Elvyn Jackson "Jack" Kytle was a native Alabaman and worked for the Birmingham Age-Herald, the Birmingham Post, and the Birmingham Post-Herald. Maybe he knew and worked with all of the other newspapermen listed above.

Suzanne Pickett (1908-1999)--Suzanne Pickett was a writer and reporter for a small-town newspaper in Alabama, but she also had her first story, at age ten, in the Birmingham News. So we keep coming back to Birmingham newspapers. I can only assume that it was through one or more of those papers and one or more writers or editors for those papers that Weird Tales was in touch with tellers of weird tales in Alabama.

I haven't written yet about Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1911-1995), but she was an Alabaman, too, a native of Birmingham and a reporter with the Birmingham News.

There were almost certainly more tellers of weird tales from Alabama. I'll add to this list as I discover them.

Text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Stewart Van der Veer (1893-1966)

John Stewart Van der Veer
Singer, Author, Newspaper Reporter & Feature Writer, Soldier & Ambulance Driver, Advertising Man
Born June 27, 1893, Frankfort, Kentucky
Died December 27, 1966, at home, Odenville, Alabama

John Stewart Van der Veer was born into a distinguished and long-established family in America, on June 27, 1893, in Frankfort, Kentucky. His father, John McLelland Van der Veer, was a businessman in Frankfort, later in Enid, Oklahoma; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Birmingham, Alabama. His mother, Rosalie (Stewart) Van der Veer, was a diarist and a "belle of the Bluegrass" before her wedding in 1892. (1) Stewart Van der Veer attended public schools, Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia, and the University of Kentucky. He studied to be a singer and appeared in "The Pirates of Penzance" at Tulane University in 1914, but his singing career appears to have been brief or at most only an avocation.

In 1916, Van der Veer went to the Mexican border in service with the 141st Field Artillery Regiment, a unit of the Louisiana National Guard better known as the Washington Artillery. In 1917-1918, he was an ambulance driver and sous-chef with the Red Cross in Italy. For his service, he was awarded the Croce al Merito di Guerra. In July 1918, Van de Veer delivered one of the men in his unit to a hospital in Milano. That man had been badly wounded by the explosion of a trench mortar shell. He survived, but his experience shaped his life and art. That man's name was Ernest Hemingway.

Stewart Van der Veer worked as a feature writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and a musical and theatrical reporter for the Kansas City Journal. Other newspapers with which he was associated were the Enid Daily News (he and his brothers were part owners of that Oklahoma newspaper) and the Kansas City Post. He established an advertising business in Kansas City but removed to Birmingham in the fall of 1924. Again, he worked for a newspaper, the Birmingham Post, and started his own company, Van der Veer Printing and Direct Mailing Advertising Company. His brother, John McClellan "Teddy" Van Der Veer (1895-1961), was also a newspaperman, as well as a radio commentator. The two sometimes worked together.

Van der Veer had a long career and retired in 1953 to Odenville, Alabama, where he established his own 200-acre Lazy V Ranch and built a popular fishing resort called Lazy V Lakes. He died at home in Odenville on December 27, 1966, at age seventy-five. By then most of his family were gone. He died without issue.

* * *

Stewart Van der Veer was the author of the novels Death for the Lady, a murder mystery set in New Orleans (1939); Remembered April, a romance of Kentucky (1941); and Interlude at Pelican Bend (1947), an adventure story, again set in New Orleans. Near the end of his life, he sat down to write an autobiography. Entitled Walk in My Moccasins (ca. 1966), it has apparently never been published. Remembered April was syndicated in newspapers nationwide. Interlude at Pelican Bend was reviewed by a fellow Alabama newspaperman, Artemus Calloway. (2) As it so happens, Calloway was also a contributor to Weird Tales. The two had known each other since at least 1926.

In addition to his novels and newspaper work, Van der Veer wrote poems and stories published in outdoor and adventure magazines, including pulp magazines. Here are all of his credits listed in The FictionMags Index:

• "The Yellow Specter" in Weird Tales (Apr. 1926)-Reprinted in More Not at Night (1926)
• "The Beckonin' Trail" in Triple-X Western #95 (poem, June 1932)
• "Rimrock’s Ghost Killer" in Triple-X Western #98 (Sept. 1932)
• "Bandit Trap" in Triple-X Western #101 (1934)
• "Long-Range Posse" in Dime Western Magazine (Sept. 1, 1934)
• "The Smokin' Fool" Pete Rice Magazine (Jan. 1935)
• "Killer of Blind Valley" in Doc Savage (Apr. 1935)
• "Powderhorn Law" in Street & Smith's Western Story Magazine (Apr. 27, 1935)
• "Goin' Up" in Hardboiled (Dec. 1936)
•  "Romance Comes to Jericho" in Western Romances #68 (Jan. 1937)

He also had poems in the Enid Daily News. Titles include "Trail to the Setting Sun" (Mar. 27, 1921, sec. B. p.1); "The Ledger of Life" (May 1, 1921, sec. B, p. 1); and "The Drifter" (May 15, 1921, sec. B, p.1)

As you can see, his first known pulp fiction story, "The Yellow Specter," was in Weird Tales. A long time ago, I noticed what I think might have been a pattern or a connection between Weird Tales and writers in Alabama. I'll write about that next in "Weird Tales in Alabama."

Stewart Van der Veer's Story in Weird Tales

"The Yellow Specter" (Apr. 1926)

Further Reading

• "About Birmingham: Stewart Van der Veer Is Our Town's Latest Addition to Who's Who, Supplement Reveals" by Lily May Caldwell in the Birmingham News, May 21, 1942, page 10.
• "Burros Here, Hinnies to Come" by Lane Carter in the Birmingham News Magazine, September 13, 1952, page 5.
• John Stewart Van der Veer Papers, 1909-1966, Birmingham Public Library, Archives Department, description accessible by clicking here.

Notes
(1) From "'So Much in Love . . .': The Courtship of a Bluegrass Belle--Rosalie Stewart's Diary, December 1890-July 1891" by Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton in The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Winter 1990), pp. 24-44 (21 pages).
(2) "Stewart Van der Veer, Birmingham Writer, Has New Book Out" by Artemus Calloway in the Birmingham News, June 1, 1947, page 52.

"The Yellow Specter" was also reprinted as «El espectro amarillo» in Narraciones terroríficas #13, published by Molino Argentina in 1939.

A poem by Stewart Van der Veer, "Romance of War," from 1920.

John Stewart Van der Veer (1893-1966)

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Ethel Morgan-Dunham (1880-1960)

Née Edna Ethel Morgan
Author, Artist, Teacher, School Principal
Born December 12, 1880, Shreve, Ohio
Died September 14, 1960, Fairhope, Alabama

Edna Ethel Morgan was born on December 12, 1880, the seventh daughter of Hugh Morgan, a farmer, and Sarah (Weiker) Morgan, his wife. Her place of birth was Shreve, Ohio. Edna graduated high school and continued her education with two years at a college unknown to me. In 1900, calling herself by then Ethel, she lived far from home, in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, at a place called Raceland.

Still in existence, Raceland is an old stagecoach tavern converted to a home for an old Virginia family. Originally called Rice's Tavern and built circa 1750 (more information at this link), Raceland was once owned by William "Racer Billy" Wynn (1784-1853), an owner and breeder of racehorses. There was a racetrack at Raceland (and slave quarters, too). Racer Billy passed the house on to his son, Marshall Ambler Moncure (1841-1900), once of the Ninth Virginia Cavalry, C.S.A. In 1900, when Ethel Morgan was living there, the head of the household was Elizabeth Imogene "Bettie" (Wynn) Moncure, widow of Marshall A. Moncure. Also in the house was Bettie's son, Ambler B. Moncure (1868-1933), and Ambler's wife, Rhoda (Morgan) Moncure (1875-1946), older sister of Ethel Morgan.

Ethel Morgan taught in the public schools of Iowa for many years. In 1910, she was at Stanton, Iowa, and in 1915, at Dunkerton. In 1921, in Cedar Falls, Iowa, she married Leroy A. Dunham (1886-1977), a U.S. Army veteran of World War I. By 1930, the couple were in Elgin, Iowa, where Dunham was a school superintendent and his wife was a school principal. The two shared a birthday, December 12. Upon his death in 1977, Dunham was buried at Biloxi National Cemetery in Mississippi.

The Dunhams moved to Alabama in the early 1930s. In 1935 and 1940, they were at Loxley in Baldwin County, Alabama. Ethel Morgan-Dunham had one poem in Weird Tales, "Magic Carpets," from July 1934. She preceded her husband in death, passing away at age seventy-nine on September 14, 1960. Ethel Dunham was buried at Colony Cemetery in Fairhope, Alabama, a place founded more than half a century before by Iowans.

Ethel Morgan Dunham's Poem in Weird Tales
"Magic Carpets" (July 1934)

Further Reading

There is much to read on Raceland and the Wynn-Moncure families. If you have access to Ancestry.com, you can read a little more on Ethel Morgan-Dunham and see a few images of her or related to her life, including the self-portrait shown below.

Ethel Morgan-Dunham (1880-1960), a self-portrait. Uploaded by a user of Ancestry.com.

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley