Renaissance Pleasure Faire - 1966 Program
Back in the 1960's the Renaissance Faire. was held in Agoura. In the early days of the Faire, admission was free if you came in medieval garb.
Hotel of Usher
All convention hotels have problems, but the hotel where Baycon (World Science Fiction Convention in 1968) had held problems. The problems were so bad that a group of people got together one evening and created a "One-Shot Hatezine" called "The Hotel of Usher". After the convention, Lee Klingstein published the fanzine and mailed copies.
My sister (Frances Tobol) and I worked on the fanzine. I signed the contributor's page (page 3) as "Nathan, the Black Sorcerer" because of a story that Steve Goldin wrote where I appeared as that character. My sister added "and Sister" below my signature.
American Hypocritical Society
I attended Alexander Hamilton High school in the 1960's. I was part of a group of students that typically ate their lunch with a very interesting teacher (Gordon Swartz) who was had monitor duty at the campus south gate at lunch time. In my senior year, school policy changed and all students were required to have their lunch on the lunch court or in the cafeteria.
That was unacceptable. To get around this restriction, we created the "American Hypocritical Society" as a "school service organization".
School service organizations were required to have a charter and a faculty sponsor. We wrote this charter and Gordon Swartz, who thought the school policy was ridiculous, was our sponsor. We presented a copy of this charter to the school administration, in a fancy envelope labeled "AHS Charter". I am sure that the administration filed the envelope unopened and unread because, if they had read it, all of us, including our sponsor, would have been in trouble.
We claimed that one of the services we would perform for the school was helping keep students from straying from the lunch court during lunch hour. The school issued us passes that allowed up to be anywhere on campus during lunch hour. Passes in hand, we were able to go back to having our lunch at the south gate.
A Child's Garden of Model Airplane Glue
I wrote "A Child's Garden of Model Airplane Glue" while sitting in a very boring English class in early high school. Several of my friends liked the story, but I never showed the story to my parents or any of my teachers.
Walk
I wrote "Walk" sometime during my senior year in high school. I considered submitting the story to a science fiction magazine, but decided, based on the reactions of friends that read the story, that it was not good enough.
At the time I wrote this story, my best friend, Steve Goldin, was trying to get published as a science fiction author. He was following the advice of L. Sprague deCamp's "Science-Fiction Handbook" and was writing, and submitting for publication, a short story every week. (deCamp claimed that no one can write 52 bad stories in a single year.)
Steve wallpapered two of the walls of his bedroom with rejection letters and had start on the third wall before he sold his first story. His dedication to writing paid off for him, and he now makes his living selling his science fiction storied.