There is a whole lot of stuff that I’ve not been writing about, such as who did I hang out with during the day when there weren’t specific events to go to, and where did we go to eat. I didn’t take specific notes, but mostly I hung around the fanzine room since that was where the fanzine fans that I knew, or had corresponded with, or wanted to meet, were most likely to be.
I do remember two dinners. One was (mostly) with the New York people at a Chicago pizza place. Chicago pizzas are not like Domino’s, not wide and thin. For eight or so of us, two pizzas were ordered and brought out, each one maybe eight inches across. That didn’t look like much to me. Okay, they were a bit thicker than I was used to, but still. They were cut into six and we each had a slice, leaving a few slices for seconds. I discovered that the slices were in fact pretty filling, so filling that when it came to seconds, I was the only one who said yes. I admit to feeling not pretty full but wholly stuffed by the time I’d finished. The extra slices were bagged up and taken away – someone’s breakfast, no doubt.
The second place I recall was a Japanese restaurant, with a different group of people. This was my first time eating Japanese, so I followed the lead of others. One guy in particular seemed to know what he was doing, and ordered some good food for us all. I then noticed that he was calling for extra dishes as the meal went on, but I didn’t join in with that. In the end, most of us paid around $20 and he paid $40. Japanese food was not so cheap.
Anyhow, this has just been filling in time until 3pm Saturday, and the panel discussion: “Fandom’s Fullbrights: TAFF’s Kevin Smith and DUFF’s Peter Toluzzi, with Joyce Scrivener (sic) and Stu Shiffman”. Joyce and Stu were the previous winners of DUFF and TAFF, respectively. And I know that they misspelled Joyce’s surname in the Pocket Program since I still have my handwritten file card with her name and address on it and the erroneous first ‘e’ crossed out, having made the same mistake. She was correct in the main program book list of members, though.
We were part of Track 3, taking place in Grand Ballroom C. This is not another Grand Ballroom, but rather a part of the one and only Grand Ballroom, sectioned off by moveable partitions. We were preceded by The History of Fantasy Art Part 2 and followed by the Space Colonies Debate arguing the resolution that the only practical form of space colonies will be orbiting satellites. I’m not sure whether NASA ever picked up on this learned discussion, but the ISS launched in 1998. Can this be coincidence..?
Our panel was there to explain about TAFF and DUFF, how we’d come to be there, our personal backgrounds in fandom and the contrasts we’d noticed between our countries and their fandoms. We had a pre-meeting to talk about this, where my notebook entry is in very neat handwriting indicating time and thought going into it, as opposed to the usual hasty scrawl.
Comparing and contrasting fandoms was a bit difficult, since I’d had precisely one week in the US, restricted to New York and Chicon. I could point out, however, that the last two American TAFF delegates (Terry Hughes and Stu Shiffman) were teetotallers, whilst the last two Brits (Dave Langford and myself) were not. Decidedly so. Despite his teetotalism, Stu was persuaded to drink three half-pints of passable bitter at a meeting of the Surrey Limpwrists at the Railway Tavern in Surbiton, an effort to fit in with his hosts which was greatly appreciated. There’s another difference between the USA and UK. New York had an early group of fans called the FANOCLASTS, a name that I (not they) have put in capitals because I reckon the name itself almost demands capitals, whereas southwest London had the Limpwrists. A difference of seriousness of intent, I think; our main purpose was having a pint with mates. Stu had carried a huge suitcase and wore an enormous trench coat, like a latter-day Paddington Bear without the red hat.
My own suitcase was sizeable, but not huge, though it still weighed a lot. This was a time before wheelie cases became the norm, but I had bought a set of tiny wheels that you could strap onto an ordinary suitcase to make it more manageable. The operative word there is “could”. In practice, the wheels were forever slipping sideways off the case, so I ended up carrying it more often than not.
I recall Peter talking about disorientation. Whilst I had flown the Atlantic to the East coast, he had crossed the Pacific to the West coast (Los Angeles, probably). He had arranged to meet some people and been told to leave his hotel and turn north. So out he came, checked carefully with the sun, and headed south. It took him a few minutes to realise it was the wrong direction and he had to put aside his southern hemisphere instincts about the sun’s direction.
I imagine it was a livelier panel than I noted or can remember now. After all, you can’t spend your time writing down other people’s jokes.
Saturday also saw the traditional auctions to raise money for future TAFF and DUFF trips. Fans gather and bid for old books, fanzines, comics and other paraphernalia, with real money. As a TAFF person, I had to be involved in this and as an accountant, I was assigned to writing down the sales and taking the money. So that was six pages of my notebook used up right there. A peculiarity of American money is that all the notes are the same size and colour. Sensible countries have bigger notes for bigger amounts, in different colours, so that you can easily tell them apart. Not the US. I had to peer really closely to tell whether I should give change for a ten or a fifty. But accountancy training is good for many things, and I managed.
I was personally interested in one of the auction items. Older readers may recall the black & white BBC TV series The Forsyte Saga from the 1960s. It was a phenomenon. Churches changed the times of their Sunday evening services to avoid clashing with it, such were the numbers staying home to watch. No iPlayer or even video recording back then. The cartoonist Bill Tidy saw an opportunity. The Forsytes were a wealthy, upper-middle class, late Victorian family involved in banking, insurance, the stock exchange and so forth in London. Tidy created the Fosdykes, a rags-to-riches saga about a Manchester tripe magnate and his family, which was published as a comic strip in the Daily Mirror and then collected into book form. Which I collected. Who can resist a killer punchline every four panels?
Well, a copy of one of the books I didn’t have appeared in the auction. How it got to Chicago will be forever unknown, but there it was. I bid for it, confident that in Chicago at least I would have little competition. I was wrong. A guy called Brian Barrett also wanted it, and when the bidding reached $11, I dropped out. It only cost 60p new.
Other highlights of the auction included a copy of Mood 70, a fanwriting anthology I had edited for the Brighton Worldcon in 1979. It didn’t make a huge amount, but I was pleased to see it sell at all, honestly. A New Zealand comic strip collection called Footrot Flats went for $27.50 (so maybe $11 for the Fosdykes was cheap, at that) and someone paid $55 for two items each of which I recorded simply as ‘badge’. TAFF made $190 and DUFF $390. Well, Australians have further to travel, they needed it more.
Saturday night might be all right for fighting (E. John), but at Chicon IV it was for the Masquerade. This is the bit that gets the mundane media all excited as they see folks walking around in chain mail bikinis and prosthetic ears, waving broad swords and light sabres. I, however, have nothing to say on the matter. I was not there, and if I was I did not realise it, and anyway it is not what the TAFF voters want to hear about*.
* I’ll date-stamp that sentence at 1st February 2022, which British readers will recognise as the beginnings of the Downing Street parties furore.