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hovering vigilantly by), sometimes in a rented classroom of a nearby public school. The term "nearby," of course, refers to its proximity to Clark. All the rest of us had to travel miles.
    It is hard for me to remember what we did at these meetings, and I think the probable reason for that is that we did very little. There was a certain amount of reading the minutes and passing amendments to the bylaws, and not much else. After a while we decided to publish a mimeographed fan magazine of our own. I became its editor (largely, I think, because I owned my own typewriter), and it may have been the first place in which words of mine were actually published.
    I haven't seen a copy of The Brooklyn Reporter in many years and doubt that there was much in it worth reading, but it was marvelously exciting to me then. My words were going out to readers all over the country! (Not very many readers, no. But quite geographically dispersed.) People I never saw were writing letters to comment on what I had done. It was through The Brooklyn Reporter that I first met Robert Lowndes—only as a pen pal at first, because he lived in faraway Connecticut and neither of us could see any way of bridging that near-hundred-mile distance. But we became good friends by correspondence, quickly found interests in common (we both were addicted to popular songs), and shared others: he initiated me into Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and J. K. Huysmans, and I introduced him to James Branch Cabell.
    You see, what we science-fiction fans mostly wanted to do with each other's company was to talk—about science fiction, and about the world. Robert's Rules of Order didn't seem to provide for much of that, so we formed the habit of The Meeting After the Meeting. After enduring an hour or so of parliamentary rules, we troops would bid farewell to our leader and walk in a body to the nearest station of the EL On the way we would stop off at a soda fountain. This had three very good features: it gave us an informal atmosphere for talk, it supplied us with ice-cream sodas, and it got rid of G. G. Clark, so that we kids could be ourselves. The only bad part of it was that we had to adjourn the regular meetings pretty early, since none of us were old enough to stay out very late. But, considering what was happening at the regular meetings, that was no sacrifice.
    I really don't know why the meetings had to be so dull. I wonder why it never occurred to any of us to invite some real-live science-fiction writer to come and bask in our worship. That would have been a thrill past orgasm for every one of us, maybe even for Clark. It wouldn't have mattered who the author was, and I'm sure some would have come. For one thing, if anyone had ever suggested it to Hugo Gernsback, he would surely have flogged any number of them into our arms to boost sales.
    I know why it didn't occur to me. I was simply too naive. I wasn't aware that writers lived in places where they could be met. I don't know where I thought they did live. I may have thought they were mostly dead—that seemed to be the case with Mark Twain and Voltaire and a lot of my other favorites. If they were alive, I suppose I assumed they occupied some tree-lined, gardened, pillared suburb of something like heaven. But still, why didn't the idea occur to someone more sophisticated than I?
     
    Well, in a way it did. After a while two Real Pro Writers did in fact come to our meetings.
    They weren't top pros; in fact, I had never heard of either of them until they showed up. And they weren't there to help promote Wonder Stories , either . . . oh, my, no. Their names were John B. Michel and Donald A. Wollheim.
    To fourteen-year-old me they were immensely impressive high-powered types. Not physically. Neither were most of the rest of us fans; to some extent, Damon Knight's toad theory is descriptive enough. I started out lucky enough, but somewhere just before I got into science fiction I went swimming one day at the St. George Pool,