Turpitude

August 2006

Mike Horvat ~ Post Office Box 741 ~ Stayton, Oregon 97383 ~

The following is a bit of blather that I wrote to accompany an article in the Daily Iowan about my fanzine collection; they wanted to know how I got started in sf:

When I was twelve years old, my friend Robert Kirkpatrick and I would hitch a ride with the S F Chronicle truck at 6 am. The truck would take us the forty-five miles to San Francisco, and then bring us back at 6 pm. There is a lot a couple of twelve year old boys can get into in The City for half a day; nothing that we did affected my life as much as the trip one blustery day in April of 1958. We were standing around waiting for The Holmes Book Store to open when a clerk wheeled out a sidewalk rack of Specials – books they couldn’t get rid of anyway else. My eye was caught by a copy of Science Fiction Stories for November, 1957, with a cover illustrating Eric Frank Russell’s “Early Bird.”

I bought it for a nickel, took it home and read it the next day. WOW! This was no Miss Pickerill Goes to Mars! This was real science fiction; I had arrived.

I spent the next ten years gobbling up all the sf I could find. (Don’t call it “sci-fi.” That’s tacky.) My favorite authors were Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and L. Sprague de Camp.

In 1967, thanks to a little ad in the back of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction I ordered twelve fanzines for a dollar. Heck; I didn’t even know what a fanzine was, but it sounded cool. When they arrived, I discovered Fandom. Fans were people who read science fiction, thought about it, wrote about it, and published amateur magazines about it. I knew right away that I had found Family.

Those twelve were carefully preserved, as were all the others I received over the years, and formed the collection that now resides at University of Iowa.

In 1968, I enlisted in the United States Army and was sent to Viet Nam. During my tour I had lots of time to read and write, and I carried on a vast correspondence with sf fans in the USA and abroad. I spent two weeks in Australia with sf fans there. Eventually, I returned home. My fanzine accumulation was about three boxes by then. I bought a Victorian ex-church in Oregon with a file cabinet for the fanzines. I was half-way between San Francisco and Seattle, and provided an easy place for traveling fans to get a free place to “crash” and a meal. In those days, early 70s, all fans were fanzine fans; that is, they all contributed to, or at least read, fanzines. Convention attendance was still measured in the couple of hundreds. I went to Westercon, V-Con (Vancouver, BC), and even started up a little con of my own, TanKon (Tangent, Oregon). And the fanzine collection grew.

My friends, particularly Frank Denton (publisher of Ashwing), saved their old ‘zines for me and I would haul them home, file them, store the duplicates, and do other fannish things. In 1987, I bought twenty filing cabinets that had been through a fire locally. It took a lot of wire-brushing and two coats of primer but I finally got them in shape to hold fanzines. I never did get a finish coat on them; if you look at the collection at UI, you will still see those old file cabinets! I was greatly relieved to have a place to put the ‘zines, and that inspired me to finally get to sorting them. I made a big effort over the next three years to make the collection more accessible. And, too, people had started writing to me asking for copies of this fanzine or that article. I was flattered that I could help.

Those twenty filing cabinets made up about a third of the collection. Imagine the bulk of the fanzines by the 90s. Imagine my wife’s tolerance of all this stuff. (And this was just one of four major collections that I amassed.)

In 2002 we sold the house and had to move the collection to storage in an old woolen mill. I refurbished the area and it made a good home, plenty of room. Unfortunately, I had to sell the mill and the new owner didn’t want my stuff in it any longer; he was going to have the fire department do a “practice burn” to clear the buildings off the land, prior to development. That’s when I panicked. I didn’t have time to find a good, fannish home for the fanzines. I used the internet to reach fandom and wrote a lot of personal letters. No one came forth. One of my desperate ploys to spread the word was to put the fanzines on eBay for sale. This netted me one of Rob Latham’s ex-grad students who put the two of us together. The rest is, as they say, history.

I had reservations about placing the collection with a university, caused by past poor experiences with Special Collections at other institutions. I taught university for some years, by the way, math. However, I am pleased with the enthusiasm of Rob and Sid Huttner and I am now convinced that my collection could have no better home than University of Iowa. I like the idea of physically having it in the center of the country, for accessibility. I like the reality of the work that is going on to continue my filing and the prospects of making at least a part of the collection available on the internet. These are things that I could not have done.

Mike and Joyce: What a nice adventure into the Smokeys. I have 38 acres near Lake Shasta in Northern California. But it is too difficult to get to: got to rent a boat and cross the lake, then hike two miles. We get to it so seldom we are going to sell it. Seems like we can only get around $150,000 for it because of its isolation; I always thought it should be worth more because of it! The two years Sue and I lived there were great – quiet in the same way your adventure was quiet. One’s pace of life certainly changes in surroundings like that.

Frank: You shouldn’t warn slans about Dale; let them grok the fullness of him. *** Thanks for the postcard. I am trying to do more postcard sending. I think of different people a lot but if I don’t let them know I’m thinking of them, then I might as well not. It’s like the tree falling over in the forest.

Jerry: I really should watch more movies. I had six months of Netflix thanks to my daughter’s Christmas present to me. I copied a couple of hundred movies onto DVD…and have only made time to watch a few of them. Funny, once one gets out of the television habit, it is easy to stay out of it. Sue and I went to see Cars at the local cinema here in Stayton. I thought it would be a waste of time and I was right. Then I watched Treasure of Sierra Madre a couple of nights ago; much better than I remembered it. *** I feel we must stop illegal immigration cold. I consider this an imperative. And I’m not for giving amnesty to the illegals currently in this country.

Bob: I resemble your remark about all the mp3 files being recorded by not listened to. However, now that my basement has filled with books and radios and I have to stop buying those, I find that I have stopped downloading music. The common denominator seems to be accumulating. Sue bought a new stereo for the living room; it plays mp3s and I find that I am listening much more than I have in the past. I am walking on the treadmill more, too, which calls for more OTR and audiobooks as well.

Dale: I would have liked Eddie Izzard a lot less if he had been dressed more like Donna Reed than like Val McDermid. Nice TanKon report. I wasn’t there for some of it, but then I have learned to pace myself. I rather enjoy having the time move to ‘morning’ being around noon and bedtime at 3am. Between 2:30 and 3:00 am, while everyone else is asleep, I can eat as much junk food as I want to without being shamed. TanKon was only a month ago, yet it seems in the distant past. Perhaps we should try a quarterly meeting?

“I am willing and able to serve as Temporary Official Editor for next month’s SLANapa”