Will Swift tells the story about this movie in part in an article in the Spring 2004 Columbia County Historical Society Heritage publication. John S.
Lopez, who directed the film, created a lot of excitement in the town by recruiting local townspeople for the roles. Later they enjoyed seeing themselves on film but didn’t think much of the plot. A young Norma Shearer was the star, and Buckley arranged for Miss Shearer to stay at his parents’ home. She promised to reciprocate back in Hollywood, but, according to the family, when they got to California, she snubbed them, saying she was too busy.
Chatham is reported to have snubbed the movie back.
Buckley again promoted his hometown in 1923 when Houdini was making the film Haldane of the Secret Service. Houdini was looking for an old-fashioned mill with a wooden water wheel, which he could be tied to for one of his trademark escapes. Buckley suggested a mill near Chatham, and the requisite wooden wheel was built there. Unfortunately, the movie failed.
Billee found Floyd Buckley’s son, Tom, to be a great tennis and swimming Seven • The New York Years: The 1940s
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partner. Tom later had a successful career as an author and journalist including a stint with The New York Times. There were two younger sisters, Joy and Faith. His mother, Julie, was a lovely, warm woman, very beautiful with her black hair brought back in a bun, accented by a striking white streak. She was on Broadway in Yours Truly, a musical starring Irene Dunne and Leon Errol, when she married Floyd Buckley in 1927. She had been in several musicals, including Rose Marie. She loved clothes and fashion, and Billee used to show off her new clothes to her. Later, when Betty married, Julie made her wedding dress. Mr. Buckley, who sported a theatrically waxed mustache, seemed too dignified to be called by his first name, which seemed an anachro-nism considering his role as Popeye. When he died of an aneurysm in 1956
at 83, he had just completed his 445th straight performance in No Time for Sergeants on Broadway playing Andy Griffith’s father, and it was noted that he was the oldest actor still working.
Also very visible in Beechhurst was a rambunctious and friendly small boy of about ten years old with brilliant dyed red hair. His name was Ben Cooper, and he lived with his parents and sister, Berna Anne, a few houses from the Buckleys. He was quick to tell you that he was on Broadway where he was playing Harlan, youngest son of the Day family, in the long running play Life with Father. Young as he was, he had an eye for Will’s curly-topped niece Little Adeline when she visited, and he was a joy to have around. The Jenkins family went to see him in the show several times, including when he moved up to the part of an older brother, Whitney.
Ben had a successful career in movies. He played a memorable part in The Rose Tattoo and won a Golden Boot award in 2005 for his work in westerns. No one could have predicted that he would later play the astronaut Nazarro in the Time Tunnel series, based on a Murray Leinster novel. The episode, “One Way to the Moon,” aired on September 16, 1966.
For Will and Mary, Beechhurst seemed ideal. However, although it was important to Will that he give to the war effort, this move to New York cost him more than he ever anticipated, marking the beginning of the collapse of his carefully structured life plan. He never thought that their daughters Betty, then 17, and Billee, 14, would go to college and that their youngest daughter Jo-an, four, would spend her childhood here, away from Virginia. He certainly never dreamed that Clay Bank would cease to be their primary home for more than a decade. It was not until shortly before 1957, when Betty married and moved to Gloucester, and Jo-an was away at college, that they returned to live in Virginia for most of the year.
Meanwhile, Beechhurst was now home, and Mary and the girls soon adapted to a radical change in life-style. For Billee, the transition from a high 90
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school in Gloucester, Virginia, with a total of 100 students, to a high school in Bayside, Queens, New York, with more than 6000 students, must have been difficult. However, her only memories of the time revolve around the lipstick issue. Although she was a senior, she was only 14 and not supposed to be wearing lipstick. It became a serious game of intrigue with Will and Mary — putting it on after she left the house — wiping if off before she came home, worrying who might see her with it on, whether they would tell her parents. When she entered college at 15, they gave up.
Chewing gum was another game of intrigue. Will would not allow it.
Mary used to sneak it to them in the movies (where Will never went) on the grounds that it would keep young Mary and Billee from biting their nails.
Billee graduated from Bayside High School in 1943, just a week after her 15th birthday. Her sister Betty had also been 15 when she finished high school in Virginia. Now they both started college at the same time. Betty, 18, commuted to Adelphi in Garden City, Long Island, while Billee traveled daily to Packer Collegiate Institute, a kindergarten through junior college private girls school in Brooklyn, for her two year associate’s degree. After graduating from Packer, Billee transferred to Sweet Briar College, in Virginia, for her junior year.
Will continued his writing while he was with the OWI, just as he had when serving in World War I, and was appearing regularly in American Magazine, Collier’s, Country Gentleman, and Liberty. During the 1940s more slick magazines were added to his list of markets. Good Housekeeping published
“The Web” in September 1944, and “The Persian Love Story” was printed in the Saturday Evening Post on January 18, 1947 . He had been concentrating on the higher paying slicks since the late 1930s but was still appearing frequently in science fiction magazines in the 1940s, although the market was shrinking.
Several magazines had closed by 1947.
Will also continued his tinkering and had an official outlet. On July 17, 1943, he wrote to the assistant to the security officer in Washington, DC: I believe that Lieutenant John Rudloff spoke to you of some OWI gadgets the other day in New York, They are being sent abroad for use, and it seems desirable to show them to the Army and Navy in case they could be useful outside the OWI. Since I worked out the gadgets, I have been asked to do the showing, and was told to write you about the necessary appointments, If possible, I’d like to make the trip to Washington the latter half of the week, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. Thursday would be my choice, if that matters.
For your information, there are three of the gadgets, two of them much alike; printing devices designed for underground use in Europe. In one version, they are sheets of paper with a prepared text, which duplicate that text up to a thousand copies without any machinery at all — nothing but the sheet itself laid Seven • The New York Years: The 1940s
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down anywhere — and with any additional pigment from writing-ink to berry-juice will go on and print an infinite number more. In another version, they have no prepared text, but are supplied with a special backing sheet. One writes on the back with a lead-pencil, and the text is prepared. This last might be handy for field orders. A pad of them would be a complete printing plant, usable anywhere there was paper and water. To print an 81⁄2 by 51⁄4 inch space, they weigh one pound per hundred.
The third gadget is an emergency process for making negatives for the zinc plates used in Davidson and other offset presses mounted in mobile units. There is no photographic material involved. One takes an original text or carbon copy of typed, drawn, or written matter, and turns it into a negative from which the zinc plate can be made. The process takes about five minutes from start to printing-frame.
There is no further information on this.
Years later he wrote Jo-an saying, “Did I tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed Winston Churchill’s Toy Shop? I was doing that sort of thing for propaganda devices instead of booby traps when I was with the OWI. A totally different scale, but I had many of the troubles the author of that book had.” Now that Will was spending more time in New York, he met regularly with John Campbell. “The Wabbler,” published in Astounding in October
1942, was the first Murray Leinster story to appear there in six years, and more soon followed. His reappearance was particularly interesting because Campbell had been successful in developing some new young writers, including Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. These young people John Campbell encouraged were a generation younger than Will and very different in background. Many had come out of fandom, were or had been members of fan clubs, and had grown up reading science fiction. Many, like Will, had started writing and selling early. Of those who went to college, some started before they graduated. They were motivated by a love of the genre. They wished to be a part of it, and their dedication resulted in what has been called the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
Will was also a fan, and he read and wrote science fiction because he loved it. But he did not limit himself to it, because writing was his profession, and he depended on it to support his family. However, his interest in and emphasis on correct science in his writing fit perfectly into Campbell’s goal for the magazine.
Science fiction writer and editor Barry Malzberg comments that Will was “a major science fiction writer from the beginning of the 1930s within the genre magazines, and one of the very few who easily made the shift to Campbell’s Astounding and modern science fiction.” Will and Campbell became good friends and lunched together often, Will fiddling with his pipe, and John carefully inserting yet another Camel 92
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into his holder. They exchanged ideas and discussed everything in the world.
John liked to discuss possible plots, some as potential stories, others just for the exercise. One of these discussions resulted in The Murder of the U.S.A., published under Will’s own name by Crown in 1946. He dedicated it to “John W. Campbell, Jr., whose belief in this story, from the beginning, is the reason for the existence of this book.” In The Murder of the U.S.A. , Will gives one of the earliest accounts of a nuclear attack on the U.S., accurately predicting the grim realities of the Cold War — the missiles in their silos, the belts of radar warning and, in detail, the anti-missile-to-missile problems.
Arthur C. Clarke says in his review of the book, “This is a ‘whodunit’
on the largest possible scale. It opens with the initial murder of seventy million Americans in a surprise attack by atomic rockets.... The author, better known in science fiction circles as Murray Leinster, has given us a dramatically written, technically brilliant and horribly plausible story.” Clarke continues, “We find Sam Burton and his colleagues of Burrow 89, one of the deeply hidden Rocket Missile Launching bases of the Atomic Counter-Attack Force of the United States, trying to seek out the guilty nation, which has naturally taken every possible measure to cloak its identity.
The manner of the final unmasking is both ingenious and exciting, and the search itself will keep you thoroughly enthralled. This book may do a lot of good if it is read in the right circles.”
Campbell loved to play the devil’s advocate, arguing and even writing controversial editorials on such topics as slavery, tobacco, and religion. Will loved these discussions, and they had lively debates. As a Catholic, Will especially enjoyed following the development of John’s interest in Dianetics from the time the science fiction community was saying, “Look what Ron Hubbard is doing with tomato soup cans,” to later, when John embraced and promoted Hubbard’s theories. He thought it was all great fun. While many people complained that Campbell monopolized a conversation and said, “You couldn’t get a word in edgewise,” Will found their differences in opinion intellectually stimulating and had no trouble keeping his end up.
Both men’s families sometimes had a problem with their penchant for seemingly endless discussions whenever the opportunity arose. Campbell’s wife Peg tells how it was in Perry A. Chapdelaine, Sr.’s collection The John W. Campbell Letters, Vol. I.
“Later on came the beaux John’s daughters brought home. Many’s the time I had to interrupt one of those marathon debates to suggest that the girls might like to go out on their dates, rather than fidgeting, all dressed up, in the back-ground.”
This was an all too familiar scenario for the Jenkins girls.
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In 1971, after Campbell’s death, the editorship of Analog (as Astounding was later renamed) was taken on by Ben Bova, later an award winning editor, writer, lecturer, president emeritus of the National Space Society and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Of his first and only meeting with Will soon after he began at Analog, Bova recalls: I had just taken the editorship of Analog magazine after John Campbell’s unexpected death, feeling very uncertain of myself in this new job. Will Jenkins let me know he’d be in New York and of course I invited him to lunch. We had a pleasant meal and chatted about John Campbell, mostly. As he was taking his leave of me, Jenkins said something like, “Here we’ve had a good lunch and we haven’t come up with one single brilliant idea for a story.” I felt like slitting my wrists. He was accustomed to swapping ideas with Campbell and I had disappointed him, I fear.
Campbell’s death on July 11, 1971, was a great blow to Will. Although he had not been going to New York very often after Mary died in 1967, he had lost a great friend, one who had shared his passion for science and science fiction and had served as a sounding board for thirty years. There was mutual admiration, and Isaac Asimov commented in his introduction to Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories, Vol. 10 that when he was starting out as a young writer, Campbell seemed convinced that Will was a new Edison, and he got tired of hearing about the new works of genius coming from Will Jenkins’
workshops in Virginia every time he went to the Astounding office.
There was one thing Will and Campbell didn’t talk about until after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. They were among the three or four writers interviewed by the FBI about a story called “Deadline” printed in Astounding Science-Fiction in March 1944. They now knew a hor-rifying secret: that the USA was working on an atomic bomb, because Cleve Cartmill and Campbell had worked out together in explicit detail a story that was about an atomic bomb.
Will recalls the incident in his introduction to Great Stories of Science Fiction (Random House, 1951). One day he had a phone call. “A voice said pleasantly that it was the FBI calling and they’d like to talk to me. The voice said they would come to the apartment and they did.” The girls vividly remember their father and the FBI men going up on the roof of the Beechhurst Towers for privacy. As he told it: One of them said, “Tell me, have you ever read the Cleve Cartmill story,
‘Deadline’”?
I said I had. The larger FBI man said interestedly, “What did you think of it?”
“A pretty good story,” I said, “and the science is authentic. Quite accurate.” Then there was a pause. A rather long pause. Then he sighed, and reluctantly inquired, “Well, what we want to know is, could it be a leak?” 94
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At this point my hair stood up on end and its separate strands tended to crack like whiplashes. Because “Deadline” by Cleve Cartmill, was a story about an atomic bomb, and this was the year before Hiroshima. The bomb in the story was made of uranium-235, it was to explode when critical mass was attained, and there were other details. The story described most minutely the temperature of an atom-bomb explosion, the deadly radiation, the lingering after effects, the shock-wave, the heat-effect, and all the rest of the phenomena that a year later were observed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But I was being asked about it before Hiroshima, and the Manhattan Project was perhaps the most completely hush-hush of all the hush-hush performances of the war. Because I am supposed to know something about science fiction — I am a professional writer, but science fiction has been my hobby for years — I was one of the two persons I know who were consulted by the FBI on the question of whether the story was a coincidence or a leak of facts.
I was able to tell them where
all the information in the story could be found in print. The idea of an atomic bomb was not new to science fiction, but Cartmill’s story was beautifully worked out. It was so infernally close to the truth that the people who were making the bomb thought the facts had leaked.
I was privy to a secret I would greatly have preferred not to know.
But came the day when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, that morning I happened to be in the office of the magazine Today’s Woman. I was free to talk about the bomb then, and I did. That afternoon Eleanor Stierhem called: “I thought I’d ask if you could write us an easily understandable article on what the atom bomb means to the average American housewife.” The article was printed under the title “The Friendly Atom.” The military censors were also interested in the Leinster story “Four Little Ships” when it was published in Astounding Science-Fiction (November 1942). This story described a way of disrupting enemy shipping using underwater sound transmission, which was, coincidently, under military development at the time. Will once remarked that, if the enemy had read science fic tion magazines, they might have won the war. He was not alone in that thought.
Robert A. Heinlein created a volunteer think tank with fellow science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp, who worked with him at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. They met formally once a week in the evening to consider problems given to them by navy officials. Several other science fiction writers were involved as well, including L. Ron Hubbard, who later went on to found his own religion, the Church of Scientology.
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