Morgan carefully removed the offending pages before it went on display.
The afternoon the Hibbses visited, Happy Morgan’s elder son, Jimmy, then aged 12, was lounging in the store. Jimmy was editor of his school newspaper, The Scribe, and as his brother, Delegate Harvey Morgan, tells it, the two editors chatted, and Ben Hibbs asked Jimmy his circulation number.
“Answer, 100. What’s your circulation?”
“16 million [or some such number]. What do you charge for advertising, Jimmy?”
“$1.00 for a full page, 50 cents for half and 25 cents for a quarter page. What do you charge?”
“$200,000 (or so) for a full page.”
And so the conversation went — both very earnest and respectful of each other.
The boys never forgot it.
Will’s successful author-editor relationship with Ben Hibbs continued after Hibbs went to The Saturday Evening Post, also a Curtis publication, in 1942.
Keeping on top of the market and inevitable changes in magazines required a certain amount of personal contact, and Will had learned this early on. Pulp editors depended on the availability of a writer to take a project on.
If you could produce, you had a good chance for a steady market. Pulp writers were also used to talking over an idea or two with an editor and getting approval before writing a story.
Will made a trip to New York with his family almost every year. The girls understood it was to see the editors. He liked to take quarts of shucked oysters, carefully iced, and bunches of daffodils as gifts when it was possible.
On one such journey in the mid-thirties, memorable to Billee, one of the editors took them all to the Coney Island Amusement Park. It was her first and only visit to amusement park rides, except for those at the small carnivals that came to Gloucester Court House. She still wishes she could remember who it was and could thank him.
Curtis Publishing’s home, the Curtis Building in Philadelphia, became a familiar stop for Will’s daughters, who often accompanied their father on his visits there. Billee particularly looked forward to another sight of Dream Garden, the 15 by 49 foot glass mosaic in the lobby. Edward Bok ordered Dream Garden when he was senior editor at Curtis Publishing Company. It Six • The 1930s
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was designed by Maxfield Parrish and executed by Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1916. When, as an adult, Billee moved near Philadelphia, she was amazed that few people seem to know of this treasure, and she made a point of taking visitors to see it. (Philadelphians woke up when they almost lost it. Steve Wynn, a casino developer, bought it in 1998 with the intention of moving it to Las Vegas. Suddenly aware, the community rallied to save it, and it can still be seen in the lobby of the Curtis Building.)
An apparently routine move that also took place in 1937 was to have a strong impact on the science fiction world and usher in what came to be known as the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Will was very much a part of it.
Orlin Tremaine hired John Campbell in October 1937 to follow him as editor of Astounding Stories, and by the March 1938 issue Campbell had taken over and begun to make changes. He renamed the magazine Astounding Science-Fiction and put out the word that he wanted more emphasis on science.
Campbell had attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) but flunked the German they required for a degree in chemistry. He then moved on to Duke University where he took a degree in physics.
He not only knew the field of science, but also was a writer himself, having published his first story in 1930 when he was 19. He often used the name Don A. Stuart, an anagram of his first wife’s name. However, he used his own name, John W. Campbell, Jr., for the 18-installment series of articles called
“A Study of the Solar System” that began in the June 1936 issue of Astounding.
These articles were very popular and the practice of including an article in each issue continued after he took over as editor. Two Stuart novelettes appeared in Astounding in 1937, “Forgetfulness” and “Out of Night.” Campbell soon began to put the full effort of his forceful personality into redirecting the focus of the magazine. This new emphasis on science was
“right up his alley,” as Will would say, and, from the first, Campbell wanted Will to continue submitting stories. He related this in his speech at Disclave I, 1963:
When I first began my editorship of Astounding ... I wrote Will Jenkins, hopefully asking for stories. He was busy with commitments just then, and couldn’t send stories, but very warmly offered to help me by sending me technique suggestions for getting stories written. That ... was very cogent and unforgettable.
Will had a basic tenet for science fiction that fitted the new Astounding well. He expressed it in his introduction to the Great Stories of Science Fiction,
“Let’s Call It a Hobby.” He said that he, like most fans, would accept only one false assumption at a time. For example, that “there are five or six or seven dimensions instead of the three we know and Mr. Einstein’s four. But we will 82
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not stand for it if somebody falsifies the Rylberg Numbers or the Einsteinian mass-energy equation or the formula for the Fitzgerald Contraction, or any little thing like that.”
Busy with his commitments to the higher paying slick magazines, Will did not find time to submit anything to Astounding until 1942. Then, spending his full time in New York, he began the series of lunches with Campbell that resulted in a close friendship and some darn good stories.
The late 1930s brought changes in Will’s family life as well. The girls were growing older and more involved with his tinkering and experimenting. For a while he spent a lot of time with a cardboard box with a pinhole. Will showed the girls that, when you blew a smoke ring, it moved from the inside out and became larger and larger. If you could make it move from the outside in, it would get smaller and smaller. They spent hours on that. Another experiment, its goal unremembered, seemed to cause everything in the house to turn purple.
Delegate Harvey Morgan shared another memory of how Will used to come into his family’s drug store in Gloucester Court House looking for unusual items for his experiments. One example was using extremely slow-reacting lead monoxide mixed with another compound to open cargo hatches, etc.
Harvey remembers a visit he made to the house at Clay Bank. After about fifteen minutes, he heard an explosion outside.
“His daughters came running in the house exclaiming, ‘It worked Daddy, it worked!’ We all went outside and there in an open ditch we found the remains of a previously sealed metal pipe. He had mixed the heretofore believed unreactive chemicals and set his watch to determine how long it would take to develop the required pressure to burst the pipe.” Harvey also remembered: “Will Jenkins and my father were good friends.
He would visit us in our family drug store and once asked my father why his Ant No More ant poison worked so well. My Dad explained that ants are carnivorous and, when one ate the poison and died others would eat them and die, until the whole colony was wiped out. This concept fascinated Mr. Jenkins so much that he wrote a story about giant ants invading the earth. When the usual weapons — guns, tanks and bombs — were ineffective, someone remembered that fact about ants, and civilization was saved by eliminating them with poison.”
That story, “Doomsday Deferred,” was published in The Saturday Evening Post, September 24, 1949.
Harvey asked Will once how he could write so visually about places he had never visited. Will explained about the use of language to convey a word picture.
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“By learning about climate, customs, buildings, street locations, etc.
through study, it is possible to describe a setting in such a manner that even one familiar with the location will accept the scene as accurately portrayed.” Will also told Harvey how to debate scholars and win. “Talk fast and ask questions!”
Will was fascinated with pure science. He loved to discover things and the
n, hopefully, figure out what to do with them. He saw in Little Mary particularly a spark of his scientific interest, and, like many parents, a second chance to live his dream. She was bright and pliant, and he began involving her in more and more of his science projects and some of his tinkering and gadgetry. Will set up a laboratory in the power house, the small outbuilding that had previously been used to house the Delco plant. There they worked on the project later mentioned in reports on the FBI investigation into Cleve Cartmill’s story “Deadline.”
Robert Silverberg in Reflections: The Cartmill Affair Two, printed in Asimov’s Science Fiction (Oct.–Nov. 2003), quotes Will as saying, “They had
‘conducted experiments designed to acquire quantities of atomic copper.’” When Mary started high school in 1935, it seemed almost an opportunity for Will to capture the experience he had never had. He monitored her lessons and encouraged her to start a school newspaper with a group of her friends.
It was published on the sun porch at the house in Clay Bank. First he made a hectograph, the old gelatin in a tray method of reproduction, and then staked them to a mimeograph machine. He suggested articles, including a gossip column, and helped type stories. He drove them around to sell advertising. He loved being part of the group.
Will missed Mary terribly when she left for Mount Holyoke College in the autumn of 1939, where he encouraged her to major in physics. She had the same problem with their requirement of German as John Campbell had at MIT so she switched to zoology, even though her heart was in art, a passion she followed in her later life.
Betty was just 15 in 1940 when she graduated from high school in Glou -
cester, Virginia. Mary and Will thought she was too young to go away to college, so she was instead sent to study in Richmond for a post-graduate year.
She came home on weekends but was so pitifully homesick that she was never sent away again. Betty had always liked to make up stories and entertained her younger sisters with her tales, so it was not surprising when she and Will collaborated on a story, “Fly for Your Life,” which was printed in the August 1940 issue of American Magazine. Betty’s writing skills were later focused on the local newspaper, Glo-Quips, that she and her husband started in Gloucester after their marriage.
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A welcome distraction in
1938 was a new baby. The last
bit of dirt road between Glou -
cester Court House and Clay
Bank was freshly paved when
Will brought Mary and baby
Joan Patricia (always pro-
nounced “Jo-Ann”) home from
Stuart Circle Hospital in Rich-
mond after her birth on Sep-
tember 22. She was the first of
the four children not to have
been born at home. He was
tickled with the new arrival
and the newly paved road. “If
Top: Telegram of congratula-
tions on Jo-an’s birth from Will’s
agent Edith Haggard and Allan
Collins at Curtis Brown. Left: A welcoming “Happy Birthday” to
Jo-an from Eleanor Stierhem,
editor of Today’s Woman.
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you build a better mousetrap,” he would quote proudly, “The world will build a path to your door.”
Edith Haggard, Will’s long-time agent at Curtis Brown, sent congratulations from herself and Curtis Brown’s president, Allan Collins. Eleanor Stierhem sent a “Happy Birthday” note from Today’s Woman. Will was 42 years old and, even though he had hoped for a son instead of a fourth daughter, he was a happy man living a life he loved. Soon, this new daughter, too, began to be enchanted by his stories, and he was enchanted by this new developing life.
In 1939, the whole family went to New York to see The World of Tomorrow at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. Will had a heyday telling the girls what he thought was good science, what was speculation, and what would catch on. When the silhouettes of the rides in the amusement section called out to eleven-year-old Billee, they were dismissed with a careless, “You can go on rides any time.” They moved on through a tomorrow exhibition that, as it turned out, wasn’t half as exciting or prescient as any of Murray Leinster’s stories.
• SEVEN •
The New York Years:
The 1940s
Like most Americans from 1939 onward, Will became focused on the escalating war in Europe and spent much of his time glued to the radio, listening to news reports and anticipating our entrance into the conflict. When the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Will, Mary and their children were visiting Mary’s sister Adeline Allen and her family in Front Royal, Virginia. When they heard the news report, the Jenkins girls and their cousin Little Adeline came back from the nearby soda shop where they had been spending time with friends, including young men in high school at nearby Randolph Macon Military Academy. Looking at the boys who accompanied them to the Allen home, Will and Lewis Allen said, “I guess the academy will be going ROTC [Reserve Officers Training Corps] now.” It immediately struck daughter Billee that these young friends might actually have to go to war, face unthinkable danger, and possibly not come home again. As she said later, “My childhood ended right then.”
Will was eager to make a contribution to the war effort and began searching for a niche. He got in touch with every contact he could think of. In the spring of 1942, he found that niche with the about-to-be-opened Office of War Information (OWI), where he was soon to be a senior publications editor.
In his employment application, he named Allan Collins, c/o Curtis Brown, Ltd., agent; Ben Hibbs, c/o Saturday Evening Post, editor; Robert Reed, c/o Country Gentleman, editor; Henry LaCossitt, c/o The American Magazine, editor; and Max Wilkinson, c/o Collier’s Magazine, editor, as references.
The family then left Gloucester and went north. For several weeks they stayed with Mary’s sister Julia and her family in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and then rented a house for the summer in Flushing, Queens, New York.
The OWI was a U.S. government agency operating from June 1942 to 86
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September 1945. It was created to consolidate government information services, promote patriotism, warn about foreign spies, and attempt to recruit women into war work. As it gradually developed, it began to concentrate on brief films and posters produced by advertising professionals, much to Will’s disappointment. Among the many people who worked for the OWI for a time were Owen Lattimore, Milton S. Eisenhower, Jane Jacobs, Archibald MacLeish, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. OWI information lists Will as Murray Leinster.
Will’s story “Morale,” subtitled “A Story of the War of 1941–43,” which had been printed in Astounding in 1931, moved from fiction to an actual current event.
A home was needed for the family during Will’s time with the OWI. It was found in the fall of 1942 in Beechhurst, a community in the borough of Queens about an hour’s journey from Manhattan via subway and bus. What was most attractive to Will and Mary was that the Beechhurst Towers at 160-15 Powell’s Cove Boulevard, where they rented an apartment, overlooked the Long Island Sound. There was a tennis court and a playground with swings and a slide immediately behind the building, and behind that a tree-filled park on the edge of a cliff leading to a private beach and pier. It was as close as Will could come in New York to his beloved home at Clay Bank.
What they did not know was that many theater and film people had discovered Beechhurst before they did and were also attracted by the waterfront location. Mary Pickford had a home there, which she may have bought when she was making movies for Adolph Zukor at his Famous Players studios in Astoria. She made 21 films in Astoria between 1911 and 1916, and by then she was probably the most famous woman in America.
It was during this period that Charlie Chaplin came to America from
London. Beechhurst legend says Charlie Chaplin also lived in Beechhurst for a time, actually in the Towers, and Mary Pickford may have brought him there. She had not been close to Chaplin originally, but he was Douglas Fairbanks’s best friend. She had developed a relationship with Fairbanks while still married to Owen Moore and, after divorcing Moore in 1920, married him. Fairbanks, Pickford and Chaplin had already, in 1919, joined together and formed United Artists film company. The Towers was designed and built during the 1920s boom, and, for a man on the move like Chaplin, a luxury rental in a new apartment building near his friends and favored by showgirls would have been attractive.
Many wealthy people had homes nearby, now largely abandoned. Among them was the Tudor-style mansion built in 1924 for Arthur Hammerstein, the Broadway producer and uncle of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. The two-88
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story, 15-room house, called Wildflower for Arthur Hammerstein’s 1923 hit play, lay in the five-acre grounds of the estate at 168-11 Powell’s Cove Boulevard. The original building burned down in 1994. It was restored, named a national landmark, and is now part of a gated community of condominiums.
Other well-known former residents of the area included entertainer Harry Richman, movie producer Joseph Schenck, and actress Paulette Goddard.
Escape artist Harry Houdini had a home there and, around 1915, magician Howard Thurston built his three-story house across the street from his idol, the German magician Alexander Herrmann. Rudolph Valentino lived nearby when he was filming The Sheik.
Industrialist Harvey Firestone also built a home on Cryders Lane near Wildflower that was called Michel by the Sea. Luxury co-ops now stand on the site.
In 1942 when the Jenkinses arrived, these famous people were gone, and many of those mansions had been long abandoned. Beechhurst was a quiet neighborhood predominately made up of small, private homes surrounded by gardens. However, there were still links to the theatrical past. Floyd Buckley, well known for providing the gravelly voice of Popeye on the radio during the 1930s, lived with his family in a home on 161st Street backing up to the grounds where the deserted mansions were partially hidden by trees. Buckley had a long career in theater and motion pictures beginning before the turn of the century. He appeared in The Perils of Pauline sequel The Exploits of Elaine in 1915 and played the automaton Q in the 1919 Harry Houdini serial The Master Mystery. In 1920, he came back to his hometown of Chatham, New York, to appear in a movie, By Man’s Law.
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