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.

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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 

Susan Andrews Rice (1865-1938)

Author, Poet, Teacher of Music & Voice
Born September 1865, New York State, possibly in Croghan
Died October 5, 1938, at home, Washington, D.C.

Susan Andrews Rice was born in September 1865, possibly in Croghan, New York. Some sources give her birth year as 1866, but the U.S. census of 1870 indicates 1865 as the actual year. Her parents were Yale Rice, a farmer, and Helen Marie (Curtis) Rice. She had three sisters and a brother. The family moved from New York State to Falls Church, Virginia, in the 1870s or '80s.

Susan A. Rice studied at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she was a pupil of Lyman Wheeler (1837-1900). She taught vocal culture in Washington, D.C., and wrote articles on music. She was also the author of poems and short stories. Her credits include:

• "Music in America," article in The National Tribune (Washington, D.C.) (June 9, 1892)
• "To Write or Not to Write," article in The Writer (1892)
• "How to Entertain," article (syndicated) (1893)
• "All Saints Day," poem in the Boston Evening Transcript (Jan. 2, 1896)
• "Patty Jasper's Idea," short story (syndicated, including in The Independent [New York, New York]) (Aug. 20, 1896) 
• "A Missionary Story," short story in the New Orleans Times-Democrat (ca. Nov. 1897)
• "The One Who Knows Me Not," poem in the Boston Evening Transcript (Feb. 13, 1901)
• "His Particular Detestation," short story in the New Orleans Times-Democrat (Nov. 3, 1901)
• "Delia Duty's Defection," short story in the New Orleans Times-Democrat (Oct. 22, 1911)
• "The Girl in the Wheeling-Chair," short story in Harper’s Bazaar (June 1913)
• Letter in All-Story Weekly (July 27, 1918)
• "The Ghost Farm," short story in Weird Tales (May 1925)
• "A Day in the Life of Aurelia Durant," short story (syndicated) (Oct. 1925)

Thanks to The FictionMags Index for some of these credits.

Her story for Weird Tales, entitled "The Ghost Farm," is short but good, I think, and memorable. I like the tone and the sentiment. It's an example of why weird fiction should come also from women and from writers outside the realms of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. It was reprinted in 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories (1993), even if it isn't ghastly at all. "The Ghost Farm" has as its background the many losses of the Great War. That was an unavoidable theme and subject of many stories and poems in Weird Tales during the 1920s.

Susan Andrews Rice died at home in Washington, D.C., on October 5, 1938, at age seventy-three. She was buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Falls Church, Virginia, where her family had lived for many years.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Margaret McBride Hoss (1890-1962)

Poet, Lyricist, Author, Librarian
Born November 8, 1890, Nevada, Missouri
Died September 29, 1962, Lake Worth Beach, Florida

Margaret McBride Hoss was born on November 8, 1930, in Nevada, Missouri. That's pronounced Ne-VAY-da for non-natives of the Show Me State. She was the daughter of Judge Granville Snell Hoss (1850-1918) and Julia (McBride) Hoss (1856-1949) and a very distant relative of Daniel Boone. Her brother was also a teller of weird tales. His name was Granville S. Hoss [Junior] (1885-1950), and he wrote five stories published in "The Unique Magazine." They are:

• "The Man Who Thought He Was Dead" (May/June/July 1924)
• "Dr. Jerbot's Last Experiment" (Mar. 1926)
• "The Mist-Monster" (Feb. 1928)
• "The Frog" (June 1930)
• "Out of the Sun" (Dec. 1936)

I have access to various newspaper articles mentioning Hoss, published in Ellington, Missouri, a place I called home for a year in my life.

Margaret McBride Hoss had just one story in Weird Tales, "The Weird Green Eyes of Sari," from March 1925, one hundred years ago this month. Her story is about a fish-woman. "Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft has some similarities to "The Weird Green Eyes of Sari." In Margaret McBride Hoss' story, the man retreats to Kansas, far from any ocean.

Margaret M. Hoss also wrote slogans, song lyrics, poems, and short stories published in American newspapers and magazines from 1924 onward. Following are some of her credits:

• "Over the Hills with Sally" in Motor Life (article, Nov. 1924)
• "Noses" (poem, 1924)
• "Ode to Man" (poem, 1924)
• "That School Girl Complexion" (poem, 1924)
• "What Every Feller Oughter Have" (poem, 1931)
• "Gypsy Woman" (short story, 1936)

Margaret McBride Hoss graduated as valedictorian in a class of twenty ladies from William Woods' College (now William Woods University) in Fulton, Missouri. Her degree was an A.B. and her field was a literary course of study. In 1920, she moved from her home in Cherryvale, Kansas, to Lake Worth, Florida. Cherryvale, by the way, was the birthplace of movie actress Louise Brooks (1906-1985), who was a generation younger than the Hoss children. Margaret M. Hoss married Don Eastin on May 19, 1930, in Florida, and worked as a librarian at Lake Worth City Library until her retirement in 1959. Margaret McBride Hoss Eastin died on September 29, 1962, in Lake Worth Beach, Florida, at age seventy-one.

Margaret McBride Hoss' Story in Weird Tales
"The Weird Green Eyes" of Sari" (Mar. 1925)

Further Reading
Various newspaper articles, poems, and short stories published during her lifetime.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Louise Garwood (1900-1980)

Poet, Author, Newspaper Feature Writer, Teacher
Born January 29, 1900, Houston, Texas
Died March 21, 1980, Seton Medical Center, Austin, Texas

Louise Ford Garwood had an admirable career as a poet, author, journalist, and teacher. She was born on January 29, 1900, in Houston, Texas. Her parents were Judge Hiram Morgan Garwood (1864-1930) and Hettie Page (Love) Garwood (1867-1918). Louise Garwood attended Columbia University, although I'm not sure she graduated from there. In late 1923, she won the Florence Sterling Prize from the Poetry Society of Texas for her poem "Dusty Shoes." She also won second place in the competition for the Alamo Prize for "A Joy Forever." In addition to writing poems and short stories, Louise covered the Broadway stage for newspapers in Texas. She also wrote syndicated newspaper feature articles for Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA). Later on, she wrote for the Houston Press.

Here are some of Louise Garwood's credits:

• "The Miniature," a poem in the Corsicana Daily Sun, December 16, 1922.

• "Do You Know Your Library?" in the Houston Post, May 20, 1923.

• "Mrs. Lovett Warns Against Superficial View of Paris Life" in the Houston Post, June 24, 1923.

• "The 'Makers' of Writers" in the Houston Post, October 7, 1923, which mentions Harry Kniffin, who also contributed to Weird Tales.

• "Rainbow Tears," a poem set to music by Wilson Fraser and published in 1925.

• A syndicated feature article on philanthropist Anne Morgan, 1927 (NEA).

• A syndicated feature article from November 1928 on the play Machinal, written by Sophie Treadwell, based on the Ruth Snyder-Albert Gray murder case, and featuring Zita Johann (1904-1993), who went on to star in The Mummy (1932). The execution of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair was photographed surreptitiously. That photograph became famous.

• "Bond," a poem in Cupid’s Diary, September 4 1929.

• "Reality," a poem syndicated in 1929.

Louise Garwood wrote two short stories and three poems published in Weird Tales from 1925 to 1931. Her story "Fayrian," from one hundred years ago this month, is a poetic fantasy of murder and suicide.

Louise traveled to Argentina with her brother in 1931. Louise also taught dramatic art at the LaSalle School of Music, Dramatic Art and Dancing, in South Bend, Indiana, circa 1933-1934. By 1950, she was hospitalized at San Antonio State Hospital, a Kirkbride Plan hospital for the insane. She lived for another three decades and died on March 21, 1980, at Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas. She was eighty years old.

Louise Garwood's Stories & Poems in Weird Tales
"Fayrian" (short story, Feb. 1925)
"Candle-Light" (short story, Nov. 1925)
"Ghosts" (poem, July 1926)
"The Living" (poem, Sept. 1929)
"Ghost" (poem, Dec. 1931)

Further Reading
None known.

Louise Garwood (1900-1980), a passport photograph from 1922.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

"Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide" by Carol Gyzander

Carol Gyzander is a poet, author, and editor. Her story "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide" is the last in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. I think she's an American, even if her story has a Canadian-style bilingual title. The English half of her title echoes that of "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft. That's probably not a coincidence. The Nietzschean void is right there in the title, too, also probably not a coincidence. Word must have gone out to prospective authors for this issue that they would get extra points if they used void (or abyss) in their stories and titles.

"Call" is five and a half pages long, with a full-page illustration on the main title page and a one-third page snippet of it reused in the interior. The font in this story is pretty large, needlessly so, I think, unless you're an editor running short on material but still trying to fill out 96 pages of your magazine. If you're an editor relying on your friends to write stories for you, and you find that you're running short, you might need more friends. Either that or the ones you have should write more sustained works. I wouldn't count on that very much, though. I'm not sure they're capable of it. More than one of the stories in this issue falls short of full development. They start out with a good germ but fail to reach their full potential. Anyway, the large font used in "Call" is just another indicator of the thinness of content in this issue of Weird Tales. I don't plan on reading any future issues, though, and so I will probably never find out if this thinness is a trend.

"Call" kicks off with product placement in its first paragraph. The lone character Ellen doesn't just have a camera. She has a Nikon D850. Some product. If I look at this magical Internet, I find that a Nikon D850 is a $2,000 piece of equipment. That's not just product placement. It's very conspicuous consumption on the part of the author. And already I have a bad taste in my mouth. Then there is another high-end product, Keurig, placed in the story. There are still other proper nouns in "Call." Some are place names, but even they seem like product placement. The author seems to be saying, "Look at me. These are the places where I have been and with which I am well familiar," translated (by me) into, "I have insider information. My use of these names will substitute for any and all description of the places they represent, what they might signify in my story, or what they might mean to my character. If you don't know what or where they are, well too bad for you."

I won't single out Carol Gyzander here. Several of the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue have done the same kind of thing, and I wonder why. Why put your knowing in front of us? Why not put yourself away and tell your story? Why are you drawing attention to yourself when the attention of the reader should be on your story, its characters, and its events? Anyway, I remember going to a lecture at a university not many years ago. Before the lecture began, I heard a woman in the audience (I didn't know her) talking about going to Syria, as if going to Syria were a bullet point on her resume. Are we supposed to impressed by these things? I'm not sure. Anyway, there is even a name--Alzheimer's disease--for what killed the main character's mother in Ms. Gyzander's story. I take this as a kind of product placement, too. I guess if you give a thing a name that everyone can simply look up on the Internet, you don't have to do any explaining, meaning, you don't have to do any writing. The reader can just open another window or tab on her screen as she's reading. She could even have a tab for every commercial product you have mentioned in your story and make her purchases along the way. Put another way, in using the names of products (Alzheimer's disease and Arches National Park being, essentially, the names of products) you have relieved yourself of the responsibility of writing. I guess that's what brandnames are for. They're a kind of shorthand that gets right to the knowing, impulsive, status-seeking, and commercially or materially acquisitive part of the brain, wherever that might be. No thinking is really required. I could go on complaining, but I guess we have to realize that this is just how people talk these days, and the way people talk creeps into the author's prose. And here I thought prose was supposed to rise above the level of everyday talk.

I'll finish up. The main character Ellen, a photographer, goes alone into the desert. She has a kind of vision-quest. People have done this for a long time. Jesus did it. He refused the vision or temptation placed before him, though, by Satan. Ellen on the other hand goes for it. I say "main character," but really Ellen is the only character in "Call," for once again, as in "Mozaika," we have a woman alone, an artist, absorbed in the things that, I guess, fill and overfill the thoughts of countless numbers of women in this western world. Ellen's mother is on her mind, just as Myrna's is in "Mozaika." Both characters are lone artists, caught up in their careers and activities. Are these things the main themes in women's literature? In the lives of western women? If so, "Call of the Void -- L'appel du Vide" is made for readers of a certain type. I would say that it has narrow appeal, but then much of what appears in the Cosmic Horror Issue is written from a narrow viewpoint and may have narrow appeal. If you're an atheist or materialist, if you have a dark view of life and the world, if you're wrapped up in yourself and your own thoughts, if you're a fanboy or an ardent consumer of American popular culture, you'll probably find much here to like. What is there for the rest of us, though? Anyway, too many of these stories are too much like a TV show or a movie, and one of them is actually a comic book story. The best, most complex, and most interesting or entertaining stories in this issue--"Concerto in Five Movements" by Ramsey Campbell, "The Last Bonneville" by F. Paul Wilson, and "Night Fishing" by Caitlín R. Kiernan--are not TV-like or comic book-like. They are real fiction, despite any product placement or other flaws or shortcomings they might contain.

Fiction is supposed to be more and to offer more than a script, a screenplay, or a treatment for some medium or form other than real prose printed on the pages of a book or magazine. But authors of today seem to have watched too much TV and too many movies over the course of their lives. They have probably also read too many comic books and played too many countless hours of video games. Reading and the craft of writing seem to be in decline, probably as a result of these things. (Nancy Kilpatrick may be onto something in her story "Mozaika.") Reading takes effort, as does writing. Maybe readers and writers aren't up to the task anymore, even though the results of both reading and writing can be so very richly rewarding. Only a couple of the stories in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to have been written by authors whose imaginations were formed primarily by reading. Few of them seem to be dedicated writers of fiction in prose. I can't imagine any of their stories--or possibly only a couple--ever being anthologized or reprinted except in the authors' own collections. But then many such collections are essentially vanity publications. In fact, Weird Tales itself, in its latest incarnation, seems to be a vanity publication, a resume builder, or a little sandbox in which a little clique of authors--seemingly all friends of the editor, some talented, some far less so--have gathered to play.

The world has changed since the first Weird Tales of one hundred years ago.

Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Inkblot Succubus" by Nicole Sixx

"Inkblot Succubus" by Nicole Sixx is a one-page poem with a red-and-black illustration of an inkblot in the background. The black inkblot looks like a cross-section of a brain. Ms. Sixx's lines of verse are centered on the page, and so they are as symmetrical as their subject. There is imagery in this work of rot and decay, murder, too. In the lines: "I take a drag/The drag takes me," there is a faint echo of the famous Nietzsche quote:

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

We haven't had either Nietzsche or Fort for a while in the Cosmic Horror Issue, but with the appearance of the unexplained lights in the sky in "Mozaika"--is there an extraterrestrial invasion going on?--and the echo of Nietzsche here, maybe those two men haven't gone far from the thoughts of these two women. As for cosmic horror, this poem seems to be of the "Hell is other people" variety.

Nicole Sixx is a writer who has worked in the movie business, so again there is a movie-and-TV connection with the authors in this issue of Weird Tales. In 2022, she had a book or "book" of poetry published called Slow Burn. Before that she had a book of short stories with a vulgar title. You can look for that one on your own, as I do my best to avoid words like that on my blog.

Ms. Sixx's name is misspelled in the table of contents as Nicola Sixx. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database calls her Nikki Sixx, but I'm pretty sure she's not the bassist for Mötley Crüe. It sounds like she needs someone out there making corrections for her and to better represent herself in the world.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Mozaika" by Nancy Kilpatrick

Though born in Philadelphia (on May 6, 1946), Nancy Kilpatrick is considered a Canadian author. She has written short stories, novels, and non-fiction. Among her books are tie-ins to the Friday the 13th movie series. She also writes under the name Amarantha Knight. She lives in Canada and teaches short story writing at the George Brown College of Applied Arts and Technology in Toronto. Her story "Mozaika" takes up six and a half pages in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales. There is also a full-page main title page with an illustration, one that is used again to fill the last half page of the story.

There isn't any product placement in "Mozaika." That's a relief. The story is set in the present or near future. It's about a woman named Myrna and her attempts to assemble a mosaic as the larger world falls apart outside of her tiny house on its remote half-acre lot. Myrna lives alone, in the boondocks, mostly cut off from the world. That's how she wants it to be. In her isolation, she is like the main characters in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" and "Night Fishing." Unlike those two men, though, she stays in. They go out. Her tiny house is her safe place until it isn't anymore.

Myrna is an artist. Her work on her mosaic is a creative act, an attempt to bring order into the universe and to counteract decline and decay. There is imagery in this story of the forces that oppose her. In a "contusious" sky she sees countless lights. What are they? What do they represent? (If this story were happening now we could say they are drones.) Her grout is "necrotic black." She wipes her tiles with a chamois "like a caring parent tending a child's wound." The only other living characters in her story are her overbearing mother and her sister. As living characters, they only talk on the phone from three hours away. "Mozaika" is almost completely about Myrna and her very detailed work on her mosaic.

Something is going on in the outer world. Living in isolation and working on her art, Myrna is unaware. But her mother tells her that people are dying all over . . . and that they're coming back. Neighbors die. Her sister's baby and husband die, then the sister herself and the mother, too. All of them show up at her door, and they want in. They are like zombies. Like the wider world and humanity in the grip of history, they are in a state of decay, or "decline and fall," as she remembers a departed friend saying. Her work has been to counteract all of that. In that she fails. The creative act, an attempt to emulate God and to impose order against chaos, fails. And what is the horror, the cosmic horror? Entropy, which is horrifying enough in all of its implications.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"Lost Generations" by Angela Yuriko Smith

Angela Yuriko Smith was born on November 21, 1968, in Madisonville, Kentucky. She is a journalist, author, editor, poet, teacher of creative writing at Northwest Florida State College, and publisher of Space and Time magazine. In 2023, she had a book published, its title, Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror. Her co-editor was Lee Murray, about whom I wrote on August 13, 2020. Ms. Smith, I think, has an admirable list of activities, occupations, and accomplishments. Her birthday just passed, so I would like to say Happy Belated Birthday to her.

Angela Yuriko Smith has a poem in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue. It's called "Lost Generations," and it takes up two pages in a large typeface with the image of a star field in the background.

"Lost Generations" is in eleven stanzas of three lines each. These are haiku-like tercets, and they are centered on the page such that they have the general appearance of the double helix of the DNA molecule. The acronym DNA appears in the poem, in fact, in the third stanza. So there are three lines per stanza, five and seven syllables per line (mostly, and possibly ideally), and eleven stanzas all together. These are prime numbers, four out of the first five in fact. Where is the missing two? In the pairs of "Adams and Eves" on board the intergenerational spaceship of which she writes, I guess. Or are they the paired, twisted, and intertwined ladders of the DNA helix? And does the use of these prime numbers signify anything?

In the first tercet in "Lost Generations" there is the word Hyades. That makes me think of Robert W. Chambers, who wrote of "the songs that the Hyades shall sing" and "the mystery of the Hyades" in his collection The King in Yellow. In the fifth, the eyes of the awakening voyagers are described as "shining in the abyss." And in the last, there is darkness, for the voyagers are swallowed by a black hole before they can fulfill their mission. So there is abyss and there is darkness and blackness. The people who go into the black hole are the lost generations of the title, a phrase that recalls the men and women who were born during the decade in which The King in Yellow was published, a generation that included, oddly enough, H.P. Lovecraft. This is a different kind of cosmic horror, and I think we can be grateful for that in this issue. 

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill

"The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill is the first poem in Weird Tales #367, the Cosmic Horror Issue. This work is included under the heading of fiction in the table of contents, but it's clearly a poem. So what happened here? A mistake? Or is this another example of a lack of precision in word and meaning so common in our century?

Samantha Underhill was, by her own account, born in Appalachia. She is a poet, author, educator, researcher, voice actress, and audio reader and narrator. Her poetry collection Sadness of the Siren appeared in 2022. The forward is by Jonathan Maberry, editor of Weird Tales. So it looks like Ms. Underhill is another insider. I don't detect any TV or comic book work in her resumé, but it could be there nonetheless. She has done audio work related to the Lord of the Rings. That's fitting, I would say, for someone named Underhill.

"The Forest Gate" is a somewhat long poem of twelve stanzas of four lines each, plus a closing couplet. The lines are long, and the rhyme scheme AABB. It is printed using a large typeface and has a dark, apocalyptic, illustrative background, similar to an American-Romantic painting of the early nineteenth century. The whole thing takes up four pages in this issue, more, really, than what is needed. But as I have indicated, the content in Weird Tales #367 is thin and there's a lot of padding in its pages. Abysses and voids appear on many of them and there seems to have been a lot of effort put into stretching this thing to 96 in all.

I like this poem and its lush, vivid imagery. I like that it's a change of pace in the Cosmic Horror Issue, not only for its form but also because it stands alone and is separate from all other works. It exists in a world all its own, a dark, fantastic, dream-like world. This is high fantasy, I guess, or a Poesque work. Maybe after all it's related to the image of Poe's city in the sea. And now I notice the expression "[s]tar-spawned nightmares" and start to think that H.P. Lovecraft is lurking on its edges as well. The mood is different in "The Forest Gate" than what has come before. This is a poem of course, but it's also the work of the distaff side of humanity. I guess I wouldn't expect anything less than difference.

Ms. Underhill touches on the two main themes or images I have detected in the Cosmic Horror Issue. There are of course the dark parts and the cosmic parts. The poem is dark and the word cosmos appears more than once here. But those aren't the two I mean. Actually, the first of the two themes or images I have mentioned and about which I'll write more is of the abyss or the void. Samantha Underhill writes of a "shimmering void" and "the unlimitable void of space," also the aforementioned "[s]tar-spawned nightmares of the abysses of night." Towards the end, the narrator is "[s]wallowed by the abyss." If there is imagery here similar to that found in "The City in the Sea" by Edgar Allan Poe, then I would like to point out that the word void also is in that poem.

Abyss and void, void and abyss. If this were Pee Wee Herman's Playhouse and these were the secret words of the day, we would all be screaming really loudly--a lot in this issue.

The abyss or the void seems to be tied up with cosmic horror. I'm not sure why that is. Cosmos is from a Greek word meaning "order." The origins and meaning of the word are why Carl Sagan chose it as the title of his 1980s television series. In contrast, abyss refers to "depths of the earth or sea; primordial chaos," according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. I have added the emphasis to the word chaos here because its meaning is essentially the opposite of cosmos. Chaos--disorder, emptiness, or confusion--came first. Then there was Cosmos, which is where we live. Maybe the correct term for this ill-defined sub-genre or sub-sub-genre should be chaotic horror. Remember here that Lovecraft's god Azathoth--perhaps his supreme god--rules from a "black throne at the centre of Chaos." Look for the sea and for depths in Poe's aforementioned poem.

As for void--I would say that the void and the abyss are far more closely related to each other as words or concepts, and so they can stay together I think.

The second theme or image I have detected is what Samantha Underhill alludes to as "some monstrous alien race." She doesn't develop that idea in her poem. That's not what this is about. But there will be more on this theme and image in the next few works in the Cosmic Horror Issue. And connected to these two themes and images--the void and alien races--will be two real-life historical-literary figures, one for each. You have seen their names before in this blog. There are even labels for them appearing on the right on your screen. But that will be only after a while.

There isn't any meta-content or self-references or insider information in "The Forest Gate" as far as I can tell. If you're looking for that kind of thing, go to "Piercing the Veil of Reality: Cosmic Horror Stories in Weird Tales #367," a series of interviews carried out by Nicholas Diak, a contributor to Weird Tales #367, and posted on his website. The date was April 26, 2023. In addition to interviewing Samantha Underhill, Mr. Diak interviewed Angela Yuriko Smith and Carol Gyzander, who also contributed to this issue. There's another image in mythology and fantasy that comes to mind as I discover these things, that of the worm ouroboros, which swallows its own tail.

Before leaving Mr. Diak's website, I thought I would quote a blurb from therein:

A century later, even after a few turbulent decades, Weird Tales is still regarded with prestige and as a premiere publisher of pulp stories, including the cosmic horror genre it pioneered. 

He posted that on April 26, 2023, in other words during the centennial of Weird Tales. So at some point, someone connected with the magazine realized that this was an anniversary year. I'm glad to know that. And I would agree that Weird Tales still carries with it a cachet, although that was earned in the first third (or maybe only quarter) of its hundred years. (What used to be a magazine has turned into a brand and a commodity.) I'm still not sure about cosmic horror, though--whether it's actually a thing or not.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

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

Photographs & Misconceptions

There have been misconceptions and inaccurate pieces of information about Gertrude Barrows Bennett for a very long time now. Our use of the Internet was supposed to have taken care of these things. Instead, bad information spreads like wildfire, while the facts lag far behind. Maybe facts--and ultimately truth--are analog rather than digital.

Birth Year
I'll start with her birth year. It was 1883, not 1884. The Minnesota state census of 1885 made that clear. Wikipedia is wrong.

Middle Name
Next is her middle name. Some people think it was Mabel, and some Myrtle. I used Mabel for a while, but that was based only on what others had written before me. I haven't found any record showing her actual middle name. For all we know, it could have been Minnesota, the place of her birth.

There is this, though: in looking for Mabel Barrows in Minnesota, I came up empty, except for several articles about an actress and stage director named Mabel Hay Barrows (1873-1931). But in looking for Myrtle Barrows, I found two articles mentioning a girl at just the right age and in just the right place for her to have been our subject:

In the 1890s and into the early 1900s, the Minneapolis Journal had a feature called "Journal Juniors." The idea, I think, was for young readers to submit their drawings and essays to the newspaper in hopes of winning prizes. On May 16, 1896, the Journal announced the winners of a drawing contest. Young Myrtle Barrows won honorable mention. Her drawing was not shown. We should note here that Gertrude Barrows had wanted to become an artist but was forced to go to work as a stenographer in order to support her mother following the death of her father and her two brothers. On June 5, 1896, "Journal Juniors" listed the winners of an essay contest on "The History of a Patched Garment." Myrtle Barrows of 1005 University avenue SE, a pupil at Marcy school, won third place in that contest. Gertrude Barrows was of course a writer. If she was a writer in adulthood, why not also in childhood? Anyway, later that year, at Christmastime, Gertrude Barrows' brother, Reginald Barrows, shot himself, and so any happy times in the Barrows family may have come to an end, at least for a while.

So was the Myrtle Barrows of that spring season in 1896 simply Gertrude Barrows, then aged twelve, going by her middle name? It all seems to fit, but I can't say for sure. By the way, the band Marcy Playground is named after Marcy school.

Parents' Death Dates
Gertrude Barrows' father, Charles A. Barrows, died in 1892, not at around the time of World War I. It was her mother, Caroline "Carrie" Pierson (Hatch) Barrows, who died at that time, on August 10, 1918, to be exact.

First Husband's Name
Gertrude's first husband was named Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett, sometimes C.M. Stuart Bennett or just Stuart Bennett. His name was not Stewart Bennett. Once again, Wikipedia is wrong.

Lovecraft & Merritt
Augustus T. Swift was not H.P. Lovecraft writing under a pseudonym. He was actually his own person. People have claimed that Gertrude Barrows, writing under her nom de plume Francis Stevens, was an influence upon both Lovecraft and A. Merritt or that they were admirers of her work. I haven't seen any evidence of that. I wouldn't say that there isn't any evidence. It's just that I haven't seen it. I kind of doubt that anybody has. In his introduction to The Heads of Cerberus, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach wrote: "Gertrude Bennett, by the way, was an admirer of A. Merritt." (Dover, 2014, p. 15.) So maybe the admiration went the other way around, at least at first.

Religion
Gertrude Barrows Bennett was almost certainly a Christian. There is strong evidence in her work for such a conclusion, especially in "Serapion" and "The Citadel of Fear." That she was a Roman Catholic, as I have speculated, is far less certain. Two of her heroes, Terence "Terry" Trenmore in "The Heads of Cerberus" and Colin O'Hara in "The Citadel of Fear," are Irish Catholics. That's about all of the evidence that I have for my speculation. In any case, it's clear that she was not a nihilist. In fact, she made a nihilist, Archer Kennedy, her human villain in "The Citadel of Fear," one of her most powerful and insightful works. Kennedy shouts, "I worship nothing! Do you understand me? Nothing!" If Gertrude Barrows Bennett was a nihilist, why ever would she have made one of her worst villains a person of that idiotic creed? 

Gertrude's maternal grandparents, Charles Hatch (1808-1850) and Clymene (or Clymena) Rebecca (Pierson) Hatch (1813-1899), came out of the "burned-over district" of central and western New York State during the Second Great Awakening in America. Charles Hatch was an abolitionist. Abolitionism in America was, to be sure, a Christian movement. I don't know anything about the religion of Gertrude Barrows' parents, but the body of her mother, Caroline, was cremated and interred at what is now Chelten Hills Cemetery in Philadelphia. I take that as evidence that she was not Catholic, but then I never thought that she was. More likely, she and her husband were Protestants, possibly in a mainstream denomination, but then again, maybe not.

Finally, Gertrude Barrows Bennett's only child, Josephine Christy Bennett, later Constance B. "Connie" Wilson Osborne (1910-2001), was a member of Self-Realization Fellowship in California, World Unity-England, and Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) of Virginia Beach, Virginia. I can't say that these are religious institutions, but they are or may be, in one way or another, associated with religious or spiritual belief systems. So maybe there was searching in the Hatch and Barrows and Bennett families, a kind of treasure-hunting that led them from one end of the country to the other. Constance Bennett remained in her native state, Pennsylvania. Gertrude Barrows Bennett, on the other hand, finally made it to California, the Golden State, that land of milk and honey, finally completing the journey that her grandfather had begun fourscore years before her, a journey that came to grief near the banks of a lonely Wyoming river.

* * *

There are things that are factual and things that are not factual. Nonfactual things can be lies, but they may also be merely inaccurate or incorrect. The Internet is full of nonfactual things. We all saw that for ourselves the other day when American and European media unquestioningly repeated a horrific lie--a kind of blood libel--regarding the murder in Gaza of hundreds of people by a bunch of terrorists, their coreligionists. Even the next day, even when the whole world knew better, National Public Radio (NPR), which is basically a fount of lies, by commission and omission, was calling it a "bombing." There was no bombing. Those poor people were killed by an errant rocket meant to murder Jews. NPR and everyone else who repeated and peddled that lie ought to be ashamed of themselves. But we live in world without shame, embarrassment, remorse, or regret, and so the whole lot of them go blithely on . . . on to the next lie. Gaza, by the way, is from a Hebrew word. Tell us all again who was there first.

So there is the factual versus the nonfactual. Then there are opinions and interpretations. A person can say (as Wikipedia does) that Gertrude Barrows Bennett "has been credited as having 'the best claim at creating the new genre of dark fantasy'." It's not factual to say that she created so-called "dark fantasy." It's also not nonfactual. It's really just an opinion or an interpretation. I think it's actually a misreading and misinterpretation of her work, but that's my opinion. But I can also say that that specific claim, originally made by Gary Hoppenstand, is internally contradictory, to wit: in his introduction to The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Francis Stevens (University of Nebraska Press, 2004), Dr. Hoppenstand wrote:

Dark fantasy is nihilistic fiction in its prediction (directly or indirectly) of a terrible end to our world that we inhabit in blissful ignorance. (p. xxiv)

If dark fantasy is nihilistic fiction, and Francis Stevens did not write nihilistic fiction, then Francis Stevens did not invent dark fantasy. QED. Beyond that, as I've already pointed out and as everybody ought to know by now, dark fantasy was not named until late in the twentieth century, it has not been adequately defined by anybody, and there isn't any wide acceptance of any particular definition of that term, or even whether there is such a thing. For example, the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction doesn't even have an entry on this supposed genre or sub-genre or sub-sub-genre of fantasy fiction. Although, in his definition, Dr. Hoppenstand echoed H.P. Lovecraft in "The Call of Cthulhu"--"our world that we inhabit in blissful ignorance"--I would say that it's more likely that he, Gary Hoppenstand, invented dark fantasy, and not anybody else, least of all Francis Stevens. He, after all, has defined it and described it. It's his genre. Or sub-genre. Or sub-sub-genre. We should note that Dr. Hoppenstand dedicated his book to Karl Edward Wagner, one of the namers and I guess practitioners of what is called "dark fantasy." Wagner was a nihilist. The other namer of dark fantasy, Robert M. Price, is an atheist. I don't know where Dr. Hoppenstand stands.

Anyway, all of this looks to me like an exercise in resume-building, with the resume-builder trying to get all of the rest of us to go along with his own interpretations. On top of that, I would call it a pretty bad misreading and misinterpretation of Francis Stevens' fiction, misreading or misinterpretation being perhaps the first sin of the literary critic. And I would say that Dr. Hoppenstand's introduction as published should never have gotten by his editor, so the University of Nebraska Press is also at fault. I suspect that his introduction was never peer-reviewed, as papers are in the sciences. (Even the sciences are a wreck these days.) But I guess that if you're a professor in the liberal arts, your expectation is that you can put out anything you want and people will go for it because, being an academic, you're "an expert" in your field.* Or at least the people at Wikipedia will go for it. But at least Dr. Hoppenstand did the good work of assembling Francis Steven's stories and at least the University of Nebraska Press issued them in an affordable edition. We should be thankful to both of them for that.

-----

*As people say, full disclosure: I'm a graduate in the liberal arts, too.

* * *

The nonfactual claims about Francis Stevens keep rolling in. There are more regarding her photographic image, if there actually is one in existence:

This is NOT Gertrude Barrows Bennett. This is actually a photograph of Joy Bright Hancock (1898-1986), taken in February 1918, coincidentally in the same year that Gertrude's story "Friend Island" was published in The Argosy. Joy Bright Hancock attended school in Philadelphia. During World War I, she enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a Yeoman (F), (F) for female. This picture has appeared on the Internet in association with "Friend Island," I guess because it shows a woman in the navy.

This is NOT Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Instead it's a picture of the American movie actress Gertrude Bennett (1899-1985). A different picture of her appears on the front cover of a "book" published in 2020. The subtitle of that book repeats the misconception that Francis Stevens invented "dark fantasy." I have altered this image from the original that I found on the Internet.

Here's another image of the actress Gertrude Bennett, this one on a cigarette card.

On October 7, 2023, Kevin L. Cook left a long and very informative comment on this blog under the second part of this series on Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Mr. Cook wrote: "First, the two common published photographs of Mrs. Bennett were supplied by her daughter, Constance Osbourne, to Robert Weinberg in 1988." Unfortunately, I don't know exactly what two photographs he was referring to. I can only assume that they are the ones shown above and below. You can find both on the Internet. As far as I can tell, none of the sources of these images gives an original source or provenance for them. So are they of Gertrude Barrows Bennett? I don't know. You'd think we would know for sure. And you'd think that we would have better, larger, and higher-quality images than those shown here. But we don't. So I will remain skeptical until someone can come up with some good supporting evidence. Whoever has Robert Weinberg's papers is a place to start. A member of Gertrude's or Constance's family would be another.

In any case, the image above is obviously older than the one below. I base this on the dress. They may or may not be of the same woman. It's hard to tell. If the image above is of Gertrude Barrows, I would guess that it's a graduation picture, possibly from around 1900 or 1901. Unfortunately, we don't know where she went to high school, nor whether she went to some kind of business school. Either way, it would almost certainly have been in Minneapolis.

Here is the image that appears on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. The source is a Russian website. So why do Russians have the better or more likely image of Francis Stevens? Don't ask me. This world is full of mysteries. Anyway, judging from the dress, especially the hat, I would guess that this picture was taken as early as the World War I years, possibly in the 1920s, and possibly as late as about 1930. If this is Francis Stevens, is she looking to the west? Towards California and the place in the Lower Forty-Eight where you can watch the sun set over the encircling sea?

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Speculations . . .

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

More speculations.

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

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

Second Husband

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued . . .

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

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

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

First Husband

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: The Second Husband.

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

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley