Many years later, Walter told his friends a story about having developed his photographic memory through a head injury received in a plane crash during World War II. The problem is that the war ended in 1945, more than a year before his hospitalization, so this story is obviously not true. Even if he had been in a plane crash of some sort, he never mentioned being in combat to me, and considering that only two months passed between his enlistment and his subsequent beating, he clearly never saw combat. He was barely out of boot camp!Also, Walter’s superior memory had already manifested itself in his unusual scholastic history.
That being said, there was one detail related to the plane crash story that cannot be disputed. Regardless of its origins, his photographic memory was indisputable: He could recite entire passages from phone books his friends would hand him.
On an even less plausible note, both he and my mother were convinced that they had been abducted by aliens, though I have never seen a single little green man at any of our family homes, and I am not much of a believer in that sort of thing. Pardon me for being boring, but I find tales of alien abduction to be as dismal as stories about being stuck in line at the DMV. I cannot find anything useful to say about purported alien abductions, other than to hope the aliens they encountered were more interesting than the probing accounts of the Whitley Strieber set.
Seriously, must all space aliens be creepy gray New Agers? Why do they all look alike? Why do they invariably sexually abuse the abductees? If they want to create human/alien hybrids, why can’t they do it via in vitro and birth the result in an alien female or a machine incubator? Why do they always speak in telepathy? And those outfits—sheesh! Shouldn’t a visiting space alien at least be expected to be aware of the most basic sartorial advances we have made on Earth? If we can invent so many different cool outfits for science-fiction aliens, why would actual alien dress be so universally dreary?
If my parents were alien abductees, why did they not have better alien stories to tell? My mother never mentioned her purported abduction as being an inspiration for Darkover. If we are to believe abductees, all aliens ever do is to come to earth, abuse cows, and scare the proverbial pants off of people. How does one go from being abducted and abused by aliens to writing science fiction about aliens who never come to Earth or probe anyone?
For Walter, life in the hospital was more solitary, and more tragic than his imagined alien abductions or anachronistic plane crashes. My father was in a hospital bed, he was only sixteen years old, and his injuries and subsequent diagnoses had already ended his military service. His mother’s visit provided no comfort and no emotional support, only terror and threats of hellfire. And worst of all, he had lost his connection with the only father he had ever known.
Walter’s amnesia had resulted in a temporary loss of his ability to read and write, and he had to learn how to do so again. Afterward, he continued his autodidactic education, first from the hospital library and later in public libraries.
Back in those days, homosexual men were routinely discharged through Section 8, but it should be clear that my father’s head trauma and schizophrenia went far beyond that. His autobiography said he was discharged as “Inadaptable” for military service in February of 1947. The usual definition of Section 8 is mental unfitness for military service.
He was sent home to his mother, who kept him locked up in his room, viewing him as potentially dangerous. He says that her mind was going at that time: a reasonable, even kind interpretation for much of their interactions up to that point. I have never heard my father say anything good about the military, despite his VA benefits providing him with a hospital bed for a very long time.
In September of 1947, my father began attending St. Edward’s College in Austin, Texas. He became the organist and assistant choirmaster for the college choir and the local boy choir associated with the grade school at St. Edwards.
He had learned to play the organ. He had been given a few weeks of lessons by a colleague, presumably as a gift—there was certainly no money to pay for ongoing piano or organ lessons, certainly not to explain the years and years of daily practice which his level of ability would ordinarily have required. His ability to play was on the level of a savant. He could sight read any music placed before him from Puccini to Liszt.
I hope I can make clear that my father’s ability to play the piano in such a short time could be compared to becoming a champion powerlifter after a few weeks of weightlifting, or winning a karate tournament after watching a few Bruce Lee movies. His accomplishment was staggering, but he took his ability as lightly as the rest of the things he did very well without study or training.
Walter’s autobiography states that although he loved music and college, his health began breaking down at that time. He occasionally had epileptic seizures when he performed on the piano, which precluded a serious solo career as a pianist. On the day before Thanksgiving, two months into his time at St. Edwards, he was admitted into the VA hospital yet again, feeling run down and unable to sleep. The next day, his mother showed up at the hospital and disowned him so ferociously and loudly that the hospital staff and the police barred her from ever visiting him again. He was treated with sedatives and vitamins.
He was attending college and doing what he loved. From my knowledge of him, working as an organist and a choirmaster would have been the nearest thing to his fondest dream. Although he loved coins, classical music was dearer to his heart than anything else. I remember him telling me about sitting on an airplane reading the score of Madama Butterfly with the tears running down his cheeks.
It was sad to read in his autobiography about how his health broke down while he was doing something that he loved so much. It was a very difficult year and he had no family on whom to rely or friends to whom he could talk. His mother had kept him under house arrest in her home. Any woman who would disown her sick son in the hospital was not likely to be a good caretaker for anyone, let alone for a teenager coping with a massive head injury and severe mental illness.
Given his head injury and schizophrenia, it was a wonder he lasted as long as he did outside the hospital. Reading his autobiography, I ended up with the impression that the hospital became a form of surrogate family for him.
While in the hospital, Walter began to learn about coins, an interest which would become his prevailing passion for the rest of his life. Not only did he read everything he could find about coins, but he began to correspond with other numismatists, including Wayte Raymond, a numismatic publisher, and the coin dealer John J. Ford, Jr. who later claimed to have discovered him. He corresponded with William Guild about “patterns:” coin prototypes which are important to collectors.
Walter remained in the VA hospital from September of 1947 until May of 1948. He was released because the hospital needed his bed for a more acute case. The VA sent him to the Hayden Memorial Goodwill Inn in Boston, not knowing that it was a facility for juvenile delinquents. Walter did not object. He was interested in transferring to Hayden because Dr. Sheldon, whom he admired greatly, had done his research there.
He did not remain in the facility in Boston, but, in his own words, “bummed around” instead, mostly studying coins and going to concerts. But before long his health broke down again, and on October 8, 1948, he was admitted to the Cushing VA Hospital, where he remained until August 1950. While he was there, he corresponded with John J. Ford Jr. and arranged to meet Wayte Raymond in person after his discharge. On December 2, 1950, Wayte Raymond hired him to go to the National Archives in Washington to study American coins and to fill in the gaps of numismatic knowledge. He met Dr. Sheldon at that time, as well as other people he admired, and worked at the National Archives until March of 1951.
In 1951, my father had several jobs in numismatics. He spent time at the Smithsonian with his friend Stuart Mosher, the Curator of Numismatics and Editor of The Numismatist, which was the monthly journal for the ANA, or the American Numismatic Society.
While Stuart Mosher was un
able to work for a time, my father served as Acting Editor for The Numismatist during the spring of 1951, doing everything from editing to layout. His first numismatic publication appeared in The Numismatist in 1951. Mosher was grooming my father to replace him, but Lew Reagan, the General Secretary of North American Numismatics, opposed this. My father did not state a reason for Lew Reagan’s opposition, but I am certain a few might be guessed at. He also worked at the American Numismatic Society for a brief time. My father went through the Stepney Hoard of Connecticut Coppers at Stack’s, but left, complaining of hearing too many shouting matches between his coworkers.
In between these very odd jobs, my father went back to college. On February 14, 1951, he read about the “New Plan” at Johns Hopkins University. The “New Plan” was a way to get through college more quickly by challenging courses and taking final exams instead of doing the entire course. My father took the SAT and claimed to have scored “a pair of 800s on them,” although is almost certainly not true considering his Army-measured IQ of 144. Regardless, he did well enough on the SAT to be accepted to Johns Hopkins in June 1951 and began classes with a concentration on the German language. He already knew a lot of German due to mail-order classes he had taken while at Cushing Hospital, but the mail-order courses offered no credits. He had no credits from his one partial semester spent at St. Andrews, and his VA benefits would cover exactly one year of college. His participation in the New Plan was a way to complete his college degree within the time he could afford to be there.
The New Plan let him take exams to fulfill course requirements instead of attending classes. He described his year spent this way as “a dreadful grind,” and he was at the point of dropping out twice. Still, he made it through with an 87 average and just enough credits to qualify for a degree in mathematics, which he received the following June, in 1952.
He was elected to the Maryland Alpha Chapter (JHU) of Phi Beta Kappa and showed his respect for that society by wearing his golden key on the zipper of his trousers. His other extracurricular activities included the Astronomy Club, the History of Ideas Club, and Phalanx, an early version of Mensa. He wrote for the Numismatic Scrapbook which, unlike The Numismatist, paid him for his articles.
While completing his rigorous school schedule, he worked for the coin dealer Tom Warfield from the Mason-Dixon Coin exchange, and he also assisted in writing coin catalogues for the American Numismatic Association, in 1952.
A few skeptics have questioned his singular feat of completing a four-year degree between June 1951 and June 1952, but the college confirmed it, as did photos in the Johns Hopkins yearbook. At that time, my father was tall and slim, broad-shouldered and clean-shaven. His hair was black, and it fell in soft finger-waves like a film star from the Forties. I never saw him looking even remotely like he did in his college yearbook picture.
Another event that my father felt worthy of noting in his autobiography took place in August of 1952. Apparently, the FBI tried to arrest him as a draft dodger despite his military service and discharge. He described the situation as a “hilarious mixup” and it was resolved without creating any more problems for him.
Within a few months my father began working full time for the New Netherlands coin company as an auction cataloguer and he remained there until 1960. He complained that he would have made better money as a ribbon clerk at Woolworth’s and had to supplement his income by writing for any coin publication which would pay him. He also made money through what he called “cherry picking.” His coin expertise, unrivaled by anyone in the business, enabled him to look at a pile of coins and figure out very quickly which ones would be worth anything at resale. Wayte Raymond’s 1953, 1954, and 1957 editions of his Standard Catalogue included a lot of my father’s writing as well as Raymond’s Guidebook. Much of what he did was what he called “coin cataloguing,” where he would describe the physical characteristics of individual coins so that collectors could decide what they wanted to buy.
During his life, my father received many literary awards. My father’s first book, Proof Coins Struck by the United States Mint, 1817–1901, was published in 1953. Twice he received the ANA’s Heath Literary Award, in 1953 and 1991. He reported regularly winning awards from the Numismatic Literary Guild, or NLG, including the Clemy Award in 1985 and the Book of the Year Award. He received the Fifth Award in Poet Laureateship of California in 1962, and he received the Silver Medallion of Honor from Roosevelt University in 1965. He received the Professional Numismatists Guild’s Fobert Friedberg Award in 1988.
My father’s interest in science was not limited to mathematics, geology, or medicine. He became a member of the Rittenhouse Astronomical Society and was made Honorary Vice President in 1958. Later, the Rittenhouse Society awarded him the title of “Numismatic Scholar of the Twentieth Century” in 1992, citing his “generous contribution to knowledge through [his] enormous number of books, catalogues and magazine and newspaper articles and columns…[and] amazing breadth and depth of extensive research on all phases of American numismatics” (“Rittenhouse,” 1992, p.81).
I never heard him mention any award that he had received. Walter took no pride in his awards nor in anything that was status-related. The only things that impressed my father were intelligence, musical ability, and good writing.
I wish I could continue with a litany of my father’s impressive accomplishments. Sadly, the next thing my father was involved with was directly connected to his eventual downfall.
Dr. William Herbert Sheldon was a controversial psychologist and numismatist, and long-time mentor of my father. I often heard his name mentioned in our home. Dr. Sheldon’s theories included somatotype and constitutional psychology, which sought to correlate body type with temperament—an idea popular with eugenicists. Although his theories in their original form are no longer taken seriously in his field, elements of somatotype taxonomy, such as the words ectomorph, mesomorph, and endomorph, are still in use today.
Between 1953 and 1956, my father was working with Dr. Sheldon in the Constitutional Laboratory at Columbia Medical School. He had become the coordinator of parapsychological research studies of New York’s gifted children, also called the “Superkids.” Among the Superkids were my father’s long-time friends and colleagues, Jack Sarfatti and Robert Bashlow. An unfortunate part of my father’s “research” on the Superkids was to bring them into the New York science-fiction fandom. Given my father’s future tendency to use science-fiction conventions as a place to locate gifted boys to groom and later molest, I cannot overlook the possibility that my father was sexually exploiting at least some of the Superkids.
My father loved children, especially boys, in much the same way many of us love a rare steak. Every child he met, Superkid or not, would be encouraged to go to science-fiction conventions, which meant they would often be separated from their parents for hours at a time and available to talk with him.
When my father attended science-fiction conventions, he would usually sit in a high-traffic area playing with a spinning mirrored disc or other science-related toy, until a curious male child would approach him. This was his usual method of seduction during the Seventies and Eighties that I personally witnessed, and I conclude that he first developed it in the Fifties.
While these public interactions might at first seem harmless, when one adds to it the heady mix of adult attention lavished on the vulnerable boy, reassurance of the boy’s remarkable intellect whether it was true or not, and intense, highly-focused conversations, the result frequently produced a victim who was willing to provide more or less anything that Walter wanted from him.
This slow, attention-driven means of obtaining influence over a child by an adult is called “grooming.” During the grooming process, the child would become convinced that my father saw something in them that nobody else saw, and came to believe that under his tutelage they would be able to accomplish great things due to the amazing abilities he attributed to them. Naturally, the more completely my father could persuad
e them, the more vulnerable they became and the more they felt they needed him. The vampiric process transformed him from an interesting stranger into an emotionally-bonded surrogate parent with dark intentions none of them were capable of imagining.
Once he managed to separate the boy from other adults who might interfere with him, Walter would provide the groomed child with pot and often other hallucinogens. He would also keep the boy up much later than usual. Then, Walter would show him very tasteful pornography disguised as educational materials. Sooner or later, he would make some sort of sexual invitation to the stoned, very tired boy. Walter was patient, and often the overt sexual invitations would only occur later, during week-long parent-free visits to his home by the boys, whose parents foolishly believed their children were being given a wonderful opportunity to spend time with an influential, intelligent mentor.
In 1954, my father was arrested for exposing himself to a young man under a boardwalk in Atlantic City. Since he was tried as a first offender, he received only probation. What we may think of as a pervert—a flasher or a child molester—is more clearly described as a sexual addict. Where many sexual addicts do not reach the level of criminal behavior, some do, and among these some are very dangerous indeed. It makes the most sense to view my father and his conduct through the frame of sexual addiction.
Sexual addiction is described at length by Pat Carnes in his book Contrary to Love. The book describes the mental and emotional state of the sexual addict from the fantasies, to the planning and the eventual acting out. Where public exhibition might seem a very mild act compared to the ones my father was eventually convicted of, these acts occur on a spectrum. There is an escalation over time, since as with any drug, the acting out never produces a feeling quite as good as the fantasies promise. Each escalation represents an effort by the sexual addict to finally feel the way they think they should feel at the point of sexual release. Naturally, this works about as well as gambling in a casino does: The odds are always against you, and the only thing you can ever choose is how much you are willing to lose.
The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon Page 4