Nard Jones (1904-1972)

Journalist, Novelist, Historian, Short Story Writer

Born April 12, 1904, Seattle, Washington

Died September 3, 1972, Seattle, Washington

Nard Jones was the kind of writer every state and region hopes for, a writer with a sense of place, someone rooted in his native soil, an author who writes about his home truthfully, lovingly, and respectfully. Jones wrote the first novel in which his home city of Seattle is not just a setting, but a real place, essential to the story. He is also credited with the first detective novel set in Seattle. The focus of his many novels and historical books is the Pacific Northwest--Washington and Oregon--where he was born, lived, worked, and died.

Maynard Benedict Jones was born on April 12, 1904, in Seattle. Between 1919 and 1927, he lived in Weston, Oregon, where he went to high school and where he was a columnist for the Weston Leader. At Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, Jones founded Blue Moon, a literary magazine, and served as campus correspondent for the Walla Walla Daily Bulletin. Graduating with honors, Jones set out on a career in journalism, eventually becoming chief editorial writer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He also began writing fiction.

Nard Jones was a prolific author of short stories, writing over 300 in all. They were published in all manner of popular magazines: The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Liberty, Blue Book, Argosy, College Life, Breezy Stories, Smart Love Stories, This Week, The Passing Show. His only story for Weird Tales was called "Nomadic Skull"--a title that makes you want to pick up and read--and it was published in the May issue, 1933.

Jones also wrote history and fiction for the book-reading crowd. There were eighteen titles in all, most in hardback, a few in paperback. His first novel, Oregon Detour (1930), was set in the fictional town of Creston, Oregon. The people of Weston, where Jones had lived as a youngster, saw themselves and their town in Oregon Detour. Like so many small-town novelists of his era, Jones--and his book--were subject of controversy back home. Copies of it kept disappearing from the public library. For years the people of Weston speculated on just who was supposed to be whom in the pages of Jones' novel. Jones followed Oregon Detour with The Petlands (1931), the first novel with a Seattle setting. He ended the decade with The Case of the Hanging Lady (1938), a detective novel, also set in his hometown.

Jones served in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II as a public relations officer in Seattle. That experience gave him the material he needed to write his postwar novel, The Island (1948). Other novels and local histories followed, the last, published posthumously, entitled simply Seattle (1972). During the early 1960s, Jones wrote and narrated a radio program called "Puget Sound Profiles," broadcast over a dozen Washington State stations. He died a decade later in the city of his birth, on September 3, 1972.

Nard Jones' Story in Weird Tales

"Nomadic Skull" (May 1933)

Further Reading

Nard Jones is still a popular writer in the Pacific Northwest. His books and biographical information are easy to find, including on the Internet.

Writer Maynard Benedict "Nard" Jones (1904-1972).

The cover of Nard Jones' 1954 novel, I'll Take What's Mine, with cover art by Saul Tepper. The male character looks an awful lot like Kirk Douglas, one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the 1950s.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Helen Rowe Henze (1899-1973)

Poet and Lyricist, Author and Translator, Singer

Born December 21, 1899, Springfield, Pennsylvania

Died March 16, 1973, Kansas City, Kansas

Helen Van Arsdale Rowe Henze worked as a secretary in a company that manufactured Portland cement, but on the side she wrote poetry. Or maybe I should say that she wrote poetry and worked in industry as her sideline. In any case, she was born on December 21, 1899, in Springfield, Pennsylvania, but moved to Kansas City as a child. Helen went to school at Kansas City Junior College and the Sarachon-Hooley Secretarial School in Kansas City. Her marriage to Raymond Philip Henze appears to have been a brief one. It's end may have prompted her going to work.

Helen Rowe Henze worked as a secretary at the Ash Grove Lime and Portland Cement Company for twenty-seven years, retiring in the same month that she turned sixty-two. She authored five volumes of poetry during those years: Song To Life (1948), Each Man's World (1950), Strange Is the Heart (1951), Arise, My Love (1953), and The Odes of Horace, Newly Translated from the Latin and Rendered in the Original Metres (1961). (There is mention of another book, The Bright God, in the description of a collection of her papers, but I don't know whether the book is hers or if it was ever published.) She also wrote short stories, including one story for Weird Tales, "The Escape," published in the June 1923 issue of the magazine. Her work was published in many newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Kansas City Star, Washington Post, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, and Prairie Schooner. Helen also attended conferences and lectures on poetry and creative writing, including the University of Kansas Writer's Conference in 1966. Finally, Helen was a singer and a lyricist. Her song, "The Half Loaf," was put to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1961. Helen Rowe Henze, described as "a tall, handsome woman who speaks in a low voice," died in March 16, 1973, in Kansas City, Kansas.

Helen Rowe Henze's Story in Weird Tales

"The Escape" (June 1923)

Further Reading

Helen's books and papers are still available, the latter at the State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center, Kansas City.

Helen V. Rowe from the Westport High School (Kansas City, Missouri) yearbook, The Herald, 1918.

Helen Rowe Henze in a poor reproduction of a newspaper photograph from 1953.

Helen Rowe Henze's lone story for Weird Tales appeared behind this cover, in the June 1923 issue, the magazine's fourth.

Thanks to Randal A. Everts for providing further information on Helen Rowe Henze, including the photographs.

Thanks also to John Horner at the Kansas City Public Library for providing Helen's middle name.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Vennette Herron (1885-1973)

Née Margaret Vennette Herron

Poet, Author

Born September 10, 1885, Zanesville, Ohio

Died March 15, 1973, Lakeland, Florida

You begin your research simply enough, but before long, the extravagant complexity of lives intrudes. A simple biographical sketch becomes a mere introduction to a story too big for the confines of blog entry. (And what an ugly word, blog.) An author of a single story in and a single letter to Weird Tales is revealed to be a most interesting woman, her life embedded in a fascinating story that begins in twin forces of poverty and religious fervor and includes in its chapters: agitation, scandal, exile, the building of institutions, world travel, marriages beginning and ending in exotic places, and even a fatal fall from an Egyptian pyramid. The woman was Vennette Herron, a teller of weird tales and so much more.

Poet and author Vennette Herron and her family all came out of the American Midwest. Her father, George Davis Herron (1862-1925) was a Hoosier, native of a small town with an exotic name, Montezuma, Indiana. His family was poor but devout, and Herron's childhood was "obsessed with premonitions of a religious world mission." He studied at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, from 1879 to 1882, in the process finding a wife in Mary V. Everhard, daughter of the mayor. The couple were married and Herron entered the Congregationalist ministry in 1883. For the next few years, the Herrons moved from state to state. Margaret Vennette Herron was born on September 11, 1885, in Zanesville, Ohio, her younger siblings in Wisconsin and Iowa. It was in Minnesota, however, that George Herron made a name for himself with an 1890 lecture, "The Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth." That lecture led to a position in the pastorate at Burlington, Iowa, then to a professorship created especially for him at Iowa College, now known as Grinnell College.

The woman who endowed Herron's chair in Iowa was Caroline A. Sherfey Rand (1828-1905). (1) Her daughter, Carrie Rand (1867-1914) (2), also with Iowa College, worked closely with Herron in his new post. Perhaps inevitably, the two became lovers, and Herron gave up his post, his marriage, and his family to be with her. Although he was still in Grinnell, Iowa, in 1900, his previous life was coming to an end. He and the younger Carrie Rand were married in 1901 in Rochester, New York. Defrocked and vilified, he retreated with his new wife to Florence, Italy.

Vennette Herron, like her father, attended college when most people her age were still in high school, if in school at all. In 1900, at age fourteen, she was a college student in her adopted hometown of Grinnell, Iowa, where her father taught and lectured. A decade later, with the 1910 census, she was living in Newton, Massachusetts, with her mother and siblings. Vennette had married by then, but her husband, Charles B. Wagner, was nowhere in sight, at least in the enumerator's big book. Although her occupation was listed as "None," Vennette had already started in her career as a writer. From before World War I and into the 1930s, she authored stories for a number of magazines, including Ainslee's Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Romance, The Smart Set, Telling Tales, and Women's Stories. Her book Perfume and Poison, a mix of verse and fable, was printed in 1917 by a publishing house in Boston.

In 1921, Vennette Herron applied for a passport so that she could visit her father, then living in exile in Switzerland, as well as Italy and other European countries. In one way or another, she became sidetracked and ended up in Java, where she married soon enough a Dutch engineer named Johannes Jacobus van der Leeuw. The American vice consul presided at the couple's wedding in Batavia on the day after the bride's birthday, on September 11, 1922. The marriage was brief. In 1925, in The Hague, Vennette divorced her husband for "desertion." She lived in Florence for several years during the 1920s and '30s. In 1932, Vennette returned to the United States (as Vannetta van der Leeuw Herron), renewing her citizenship and settling in Darien, Connecticut. Two books came out of her experiences overseas: Peacocks and Other Stories of Java (1927) and Italian Love and Other Stories (1930). The New York Times liked Peacocks. In its review (Jan. 29, 1928), the paper wrote:

It is Miss Herron's curious achievement in "Peacocks" to paint for us a colorful and glamourous background of the East and yet, against that background, to show us people who become bored and estranged[,] and love which rather dies than endures.

Twice-divorced and the product of a broken home, Vennette Herron knew something of love and the end of love.

Vennette's father, George Davis Herron, married to Carrie Rand, and after her death in 1914, to Frieda Bertha Schöberle, fathered four additional children. Elbridge Rand Herron, a child of George D. Herron's second marriage, died from a fall from the pyramid at Giza in 1932. The elder Herron--Congregationalist minister, teacher, lecturer, author, socialist, and activist--died in Bavaria, Germany, on October 9, 1925. (3) His very full life amounted to just sixty-three years.

His daughter, Vennette Herron, wrote one letter to Weird Tales (Dec. 1934) and followed that up with a single story whose title almost looks like random typing, "Toean Matjan." (4) The story, involving a tiger, appeared in the January 1938 issue of "The Unique Magazine" and was illustrated by Virgil Finlay. That is the last credit I have found for Vennette Herron. She died on March 15, 1973, in Lakeland, Florida, at the age of eighty-seven.

Notes
(1) The Wikipedia entry on George D. Herron is incorrect in calling her Mrs. Elizabeth D. Rand. I believe the error comes from conflating her name with her husband's name. In any case, Carolyn Amanda Sherfey Rand was born on February 4, 1828, in Hagerstown, Maryland. Her husband, Elbridge Dexter Rand, was a very wealthy lumber merchant. (The total value of his estate in 1870 was $250,000.)
(2) Carrie Rand was born on March 17, 1867, in Burlington, Iowa. She applied for a passport on November 8, 1899, for purposes of traveling abroad in about November 1900. Her mother, the aforementioned Carrie A. Rand (aka Mrs. E.D. Rand), applied for a passport the same day for the same purpose. She gave her occupation as "capitalist." She and her daughter were similarly occupied at the time of the 1900 census.
(3) It's worth noting that George Davis Herron, a socialist, relied so heavily upon the auspices of a capitalist and upon the capitalist or free enterprise system. But this is always the case with socialists.

(4) A commenter below has translated the title to mean "Mister Tiger."

Vennette Herron's Letter and Story in Weird Tales

Letter to "The Eyrie" (Dec. 1934)

"Toean Matjan" (Jan. 1938)

Further Reading

There is a great deal of information available on George Davis Herron on the Internet, on Wikipedia and other sources. Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916 [Vol. 1], includes a lengthy entry on him. (The quote above is from that source.) His life and work would make a worthy project for a biographer. Vennette Herron's Perfume and Poison (1917) is available on the Internet. Her other books are common enough as to still be available, even on Ebay.

Vennette Herron's passport photograph, 1921, when she was in her mid-thirties and about to embark on a long and adventurous trip overseas.

One of the outcomes of her time in other countries was her collection Peacocks and Other Stories of Java (1927).

Revised slightly June 6, 2015; February 19, 2023.
Thanks to Randal A. Everts for providing the death date and place of Vennette Herron. Thanks to A Family Member for corrections and clarifications.
Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

R. Jere Black, Jr. (1892-1953)

Writer, Poet

Born June 27, 1892, McKeesport, Pennsylvania

Died September 7, 1953, Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico

Robert Jere Black, Jr., was born on June 27, 1892, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Son of a physician, he turned to the arts for his living, writing stories and other pieces for slicks and pulps, including The Smart Set, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Breezy Stories, Battle Stories, Sweetheart Stories, and College Life. His work for Weird Tales consisted of three poems published in 1928 and 1930. Black also wrote a non-fiction piece, "The Pseudo-Scientific Field," for Author and Journalist, published in May 1930. Science fiction fans are interested in Black's essay for its early look at their field, so early in fact that the term "science fiction" wasn't even in common usage yet. His work also came out in hardback in the 1934 novel, The Killing of the Golden Goose: A Christopher King Mystery Story.

During World War I, Black served with the American Expeditionary Force in France from May 1918 to May 1919. A machine gunner, he was gassed by the Germans and suffered from ill health throughout his life. He returned to Europe in 1923 hoping to recuperate. In and out of the hospital, he continued to write, although I haven't found anything else by him from after 1934.

In addition to McKeesport, Black lived in Chautauqua, New York; Washington, D.C.; Long Beach and Santa Monica, California; and Byron Center, Michigan. His life ended far from home though, in the home of Pablo Heuer, in Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico. Ajijic, located on the shores of Lake Chapala, had been a magnet for writers, artists, and entertainers since the 1920s. D.H. Lawrence, David Herbert, Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams (another teller of weird tales), and the writing duo known as Dane Chandos all lived there at one time or another. Elizabeth Taylor, Charles Bronson, and other Hollywood stars were drawn to the area in later years. In any case, Robert Jere Black, Jr., described by his brother as "a brilliant, fascinating person," died in that writer's haven on September 7, 1953, after thirty-five years a casualty of World War I. His body was interred at the Ajijic Municipal Cemetery the next day.

Black's wife, known as E. Best Black, was also a writer of genre fiction. Born Josephine Elizabeth Best in 1894 in Meadville, Pennsylvania, she was the daughter of Dean Wesley B. Best of Allegheny College. Josephine and Jere Black married in 1920 in her home town and traveled widely after that. She wrote two hardback novels, The Ravenelle Riddle (1933) and The Crime of the Chromium Bowl (1937). Her detective was named Peter Strangley. She also wrote a story with the punning title of "Flaming Ruth" for Young's Realistic Stories Magazine for February 1928. She later remarried, her new husband being named Theron Lowden Kelley (1899-1967). Josephine Elizabeth Best Black Kelley died in 1976.

R. Jere Black, Jr.'s Poems in Weird Tales

"Lyonesse" (Dec. 1928)

"Masquerade" (Mar. 1930)

"The Pirate" (Aug. 1930)

Further Reading

Black's essay, "The Pseudo-Scientific Field," was reprinted in the magazine Blood and Thunder #11 in the summer issue 2005.

Writer Robert Jere Black, Jr. (1892-1953), his passport photo from 1922.

Thanks to Randal A. Everts for information on Black's life and death and on his wife's life and career.
Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Arthur B. Waltermire (1888-1938)

Musician, Teacher, Author

Born September 10, 1888, Findlay, Ohio

Died July 30, 1938, Franklin County, Ohio

Arthur Beecher Waltermire was born on September 10, 1888, and died on July 30, 1938. In between those two dates, Waltermire served, studied, wrote, traveled, played music, and taught hundreds if not thousands of students. He came into the world in Findlay, Ohio, the son of a lawyer. (1) He served three years in the Ohio National Guard and studied at Ohio State University, where his wife, Adelaide, was treasurer of the Dames' Club. When he filled out his draft card in 1917, Waltermire was teaching at Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio. By 1920, he and his wife had moved to Columbus, presumably so he could continue in his teaching career. Waltermire was a musician and teacher of history at North High School in Columbus. He was also an author, writing a single story for Weird Tales, "The Doors of Death" (October 1936; C.L. Moore's story, "The Tree of Life" appeared in the same issue). Waltermire passed through those doors less than two years after his story was published, on July 30, 1938, probably in Columbus. He was a few weeks short of his fiftieth birthday. His yearbook remembered him as "[b]eloved friend and counselor to all."

Arthur B. Waltermire's Story in Weird Tales

"The Doors of Death" (Oct. 1936)

Further Reading

Waltermire's story is available as a download on the Internet.

Note
(1) Waltermire's father was Beecher Wesley Waltermire (1858-1932), a lawyer, lecturer, and writer born in Sedalia, Missouri, and orphaned during the Civil War. The elder Waltermire practiced law in and served as mayor of Findlay, Ohio. He later lived in Columbus. His books include The Adventures of a Skeleton, A Tale of Natural Gas (1890), Around the Wigwams of the Wyandots (1892), and Buckeye Ballads (1906). In addition, he wrote stories and verse for magazines and newspapers. See The Magazine of Poetry and Literary Review, Vol. 7 (1895) for more information, including a photograph.

Arthur B. Waltermire, remembered in his high school yearbook, 1939.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales Covers

August 1938

Cover art by Margaret Brundage, a birthday remembrance for someone who is missed.

Anthony Di Giannurio (1925-2008)

Aka Anthony Digiannurio, Anthony Vincent

Illustrator, Painter, Architect, Poet, Novelist

Born August 30, 1925, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Died January 12, 2008, Florida

In doing the research for this blog, I have found that real life is often weirder and sometimes more horrifying than fiction. The death of Anthony Digiannurio is a case in point. A retired architect and a veteran of World War II, he was taken from a nursing home to a Florida hospital shortly before he died. Apart from bedsores on his elbow and a catheter inserted incorrectly into his bladder, apart from an infected breathing tube, Digiannurio had maggots in his eye. Put into the care of a nursing home, he had living maggots in his eye. If we were reading about such a thing in an issue of Weird Tales, we would shudder, close the magazine, turn off the light, and sleep soundly. Not so easy in the real world.

Anthony Vincent Digiannurio was born on August 30, 1925, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During World War II, Digiannurio saw combat with the U.S. Army in Europe. Discharged in April 1946 when he was not quite twenty-one, he waited until 1988 to receive a Purple Heart for a wound received on September 8, 1945, after hostilities had ended. While in Europe, he sent an engagement ring to his future wife. The couple were married and spent the next five decades together. On their fortieth anniversary, Digiannurio surprised his wife with the gift of a fully furnished home in Deltona, Florida.

I have made the assumption that the Anthony Digiannurio born in Pittsburgh in 1925, a painter, writer, and architect, was the same Anthony Di Giannurio who created illustrations for Weird Tales, including one cover, during the magazine's last two years in print. If I'm wrong in that assumption, I invite a correction. In any case, the artist Di Giannurio began in a big way with the cover and an interior illustration in the November 1952 issue of Weird Tales. He illustrated at least five more stories before the magazine met its end in September 1954.

If Di Giannurio became Digiannurio, then the young illustrator for Weird Tales went on to become an architect, poet, novelist, and painter. His poems were published in Whiskey Island Magazine, his novel, Defiance (as by Anthony Vincent), in paperback in 2001. (He wrote nine books in all.) Late in life, Digiannurio was placed in a nursing home. In November 2007, he was removed to a DeLand, Florida, hospital where his story made it out into the world. Although he bounced back a little, Digiannurio died two months later, on January 12, 2008.

Anthony Di Giannurio's Illustrations in Weird Tales

Cover

Nov. 1952

Interior Illustrations

Nov. 1952 ("Fermentation" by Curtis Casewit)

May 1953 ("I'll Be Back" by David Eynon and "Wife of the Dragon-Fly" by Paul Ernst)

July 1953 ("The Missing Room" by Lyn Venable and "Dread Summons" by Paul Ernst)

Jan. 1954 ("Black Heath" by Farfal Delano)

Further Reading

There are many accounts on the Internet of Anthony Digiannurio's last days. I would rather provide something about his long and productive life.

The cover to Anthony Digiannurio's novel, Defiance, from 2011. The cover artist is unknown, but could the author have created this painting?

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley