Oasis 15 Program Book

Memories of My Dad

by Mike Resnick

 

My dad should have been born in New York. There is no question in my mind that if he had been, he'd have found and joined the Futurians, collaborated with Cyril Kornbluth, feuded with Don Wollheim, worked for Fred Pohl, and had affairs with Judy Merril and Virginia Kidd. They were his kind of people, but he didn't know it for more than 70 years.

As it was, he was born in Chicago on March 27, 1912, and grew up there. He was a young Communist, and took great pride in the fact that he didn't always vote a straight Democratic ticket, that indeed he had voted for Socialist Norman Thomas over FDR back in 1932. Even Bill and Hillary Clinton's abuses couldn't make him vote Republican, though they came closer than anyone else.

I remember that most of my baby sitters were young men who wore thick eyeglasses, spoke with Slavic accents, and thought the only way to entertain a 5-year-old was to read Das Kapital aloud or engage him in endless games of chess.

My dad lived and died with the White Sox, and since we lived on the South Side of Chicago -- they had this strange team on the North Side that played in this place with lots of vines and no lights, but we never really acknowledged their existence -- he must have taken me to over one hundred Sunday double-headers by the time we moved to a northern suburb in 1954. (Think of it. I got to watch Luke Appling and the Sox lose about 185 games. By the time they'd put together the Girl's Team -- Nellie and Minnie and that whole crowd -- we'd moved too far away to go to games, so we never saw their good teams.)

He tried very hard to talk me out of becoming a writer, not that he had anything against writers, but rather that, being a Depression kid, he had a lot against poverty. Once it was apparent that I was actually going to make a living at it, he became my biggest fan.

He attended only one convention while my mother was alive. (She was a bit of a literary snob, who had no use for science fiction and even less for fandom.) I was the Toastmaster at the 1976 Windycon -- the one where the cops raided the skinny-dippers at the 13th-floor indoor pool -- and that was it until my mother died. Then he decided to give conventions another shot, and drove to the 1984 Worldcon in Los Angeles (he was living in San Diego at the time), and suddenly found that he was having the time of his life. He made a ton of friends, hit more parties than I did, went to panel after panel, sat in rapt attention during the Hugo Awards, and decided that science fiction wasn't so bad after all.

He asked me for a list of books to read. I gave him about 30 authors and 150 titles. Within a year he'd read every one of them, and wanted more. He started coming to Midwestcon almost every year, and then he decided to strike out on his own, hitting a bunch of California cons by himself.

When I toastmastered the 1988 Worldcon, the committee gave me the Presidential Suite at the New Orleans Sheraton, which had a few extra bedrooms, so I invited both my dad and my daughter Laura (whose award-laden career as a romance and science fiction writer hadn't yet begun) to come on down and grab a bedroom apiece. Laura grew up in fandom, knew her away around a con every bit as well as Carol and I, and volunteered to act as my dad's guide. After three days she decided she couldn't keep up with him, and just pointed him toward the next two nights' parties.

By the early 1990s he'd discovered the pulps. In a year's time he read all 188 Doc Savage adventures, plus every Spider, Shadow, G-8, and Operator 5 that he could get his hands on. He is the only person I know who actually read all thirteen 60,000-word episodes of Operator 5's "Purple Invasion" epic, the War and Peace of the pulp magazines.

Along the way, he also finally got to see a bit of the world. One night he was telling me where to find all his papers and such if he died, and I mentioned that if he died the next day I would certainly take his money and spend it on a safari, and since that's where it was earmarked, why didn't he do the same thing with it while he was still capable of such an arduous trip?

So, at age 77, he met Carol and me in England during the 1987 Worldcon, and went on a 3-week safari in Kenya with us. He enjoyed it so much that, at 79, he joined Carol and me, Pat and Roger Sims, and my agent Eleanor Wood, on a lengthy safari that encompassed Egypt (including a Nile cruise), Kenya again, and Tanzania. At 80, he couldn't talk us into taking a trip to the Greek Isles -- I had too many deadlines -- so he borrowed my video camera, went alone, and loved every minute of it.

He moved from California to Orlando early in 1996, driving the whole distance at the ripe young age of 84. He already knew Dick Spelman, and Dick introduced him to Orlando fandom -- the club, the reading groups, everything. And he became an active participant, constantly telling me how much he enjoyed the Orlando fan community. He flew to Los Angeles that summer for what was to be his last Worldcon.

His health started to fail in 1997, and by mid-year he had moved to an assisted-living facility, but he still read voraciously and attended meetings and cons whenever someone could drive him.

Then he moved into a full-care nursing home in 1999, and without any access to fandom, to the cons and parties and discussions he so loved, he lost most of the enthusiasm for life

that had become his trademark. He didn't enjoy his last two years at all. His death was perfectly timed; he ran out of money and went onto MedicAid on July 1, 2001, and died on July 15. (Well, let me amend that: the body died then. The fan who was interested in everything had departed perhaps 20 months earlier.)

He wasn't a great man. He didn't leave his mark on any books or paintings or anything of lasting value. 20 years from now no one will know he ever existed.

But he was a good man, and a good father, and once he discovered fandom, a good fan as well. He left hundreds of friends behind, and no enemies. That's not a bad total for 89 years.

 

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