Tag: Charlie Brown

July 8th, 2025

Charlie had phoned to ask if we could bring Frank Robinson to the party. We left at aboiut 6:00 to pick him up, fighting our way to the Castro, which was gearing up for Sunday’s Gay Day parade. The usual summertime evening fog was already creeping over the hills and making everything slightly hazy.

For a party at Locus it was a small crowd, only about fifteen people, including staff past and present, Bob Silverberg, Dan Chow and his wife and children, Bill Contento, Paul Preuss… Charlie was in a good mood. He loves being the host, and he was especially bucked by Quina playing hostess. The fog had made it too cold for the deck, so we ate inside. Delicious barbecue, tough corn, interesting conversation. Bob Silverberg seemed more outgoing than usual at Locus parties, perhaps because it was a smaller, less fannish crowd.

Dan’s boys got bored and went into the back to play with one of Charlie’s toys, a mechanical chicken that cheeped and laid eggs.

After opening his presents (most of them toys). Charlie presented Silverberg with his Locus award, a water-powered rocket Bob was afraid to set off indoors. Before we all left we each accepted a jar of the plum jam Quina had made, “Locus Jam” with labels designed and printed by Shelly’s artist husband. My own jar read “Chthulu Saves. Locus preserves.”

The jam was delicious.

Locus parties always had at least one celebrity, usually Robert Silverberg, whom I remember as a tall hipster with dark gray hair and a neatly trimmed beard, always dressed in a turtleneck and holding a drink as he gazed shyly over everyone’s heads. Paul Preuss was affable, tanned, and clean-shaven with frat-boy good looks.

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July 7th, 2025

I went out to buy Charlie a birthday present for the party. Weather was good and it’s the height of the tourist season, so Powell Street cable car turn-around was packed. The AIDS preacher is now being counter-picketed by a pair of protestors, a white woman and a black man, holding up signs about compassion and reason in dealing with the disease — a word of sense badly needed among the Powell Street evangelists.

Walked down to Waldenbooks and bought a copy of Our Mutual Friend, then to headlines where I bought a stuffed dinosaur for Charlie, which a patient clerk wrapped for me.

It’s hard to convey to younger people today how very present, how very visible, the AIDS epidemic was back then. An HIV diagnosis was still a death sentence. On any San Francisco street, but especially in the Castro, you could encounter young men in their twenties or thirties reduced to skeletons, walking slowly and painfully with canes.

I still have and occasionally read that copy of OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. The dinosaur was to add to a collection of plush stuffed dinosaurs Charlie collected. No idea why.

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July 6th, 2025

We bagged the issue today, loaded it into the new van. It’s nice to be able to put it all in one car. Shelly and I did most of the hauling, drove to the bulk mailing center ourselves. It was strenuous and my clothes were a mess afterwards, covered with grime, but I likely needed the exercise.

Back at Locus, we still had to get a lot of the First Class out, and all of the Air Mail. Charlie didn’t like the way I’d packed the envelopes. He grabbed a stapler and tried to fold the flap tighter, succeeded only in tearing it. Then he decided to get upset about the fact that there wasn’t a red stamp reading “AIR MAIL” on the Air Mail packages. (The things have gone through just fine with just the word “AIRMAIL” on the labels, and Charlie had no problem in the past.) Enraged, Shelly ended up stamping them until the boxes looked like they had the measles before we drove them down to the post office.

There was a disturbing story today in the paper. Many scientists believe that this year’s drought can be blamed on the Greenhouse Effect. If that is the case, we can expect many more years as dry as this one.

The bulk mailing center was part of the massive post office center in West Oakland. It’s still a major landmark and stop on the BART ride into San Francisco, a blocky brick comples seen from overhead when you’re riding a train. We would drive there from Montclair (in the past we’d had to use two cars), pull up in the loading area, and toss into a vast metal container mailbags filled with squares of magazines bound together by zip code. The mailbags were rough canvas and always dirty, hence the state of my clothes afterwards. I mainly remember it as the sun on stacks of canvas bags piled in an enormous bin, distant lines of shabby West Oakland houses , a couple of times the sound of distant gunfire — yes, in broad daylight. That part of West Oakland could be dangerous.

Once, I chipped a front tooth because the metal buckle on a bag struck me in the mouth as I swung it into the bin.

The “Greenhouse Effect” was what we called Global Warming back then. It was still a new concept to most of us. And yes — we had many more dry years ahead of us.

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July 4th, 2025

The issue came in at about 4:00 pm and we immediately got to work on First Class, (except for Quina who was making plum jam in the kitchen.) Part of First Class got done and carried off to the Western Addition post office. The rest will be finished tomorrow.

As usual, Russ was the first to arrive, followed by Shelly’s Paul, Dave Nee, Lisa Goldstein and her husband, and others. (Tim stayed home because we already have other parties this week.) Everyone sat around on sofas and the floor, stuffing envelopes, mostly for overseas and Canadian. The night was so warm it was like a southern summer evening, and we ate hamburgers outside on the deck.

I left at about 10:00 pm, giving Russ a ride home.

When I walked into the apartment, it was to the opening credits of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Tim finally found a copy of it. It was the first movie we saw together as a couple.

SPOILER

I loved RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK when it came out, not so much because of Harrison Ford, but because of Paul Freeman, who played the villainous-but-sexy Rene Belloq — whom I was bitterly disapointed to see killed off at the end.

Why, Stephen? WHY?

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July 3rd, 2025

We now have a new Locus car, a bright red mini-van. Shelly fell in love with it yesterday during her test drive. She joined forces with Quina to convince Charlie it would be a perfect van to take to Yosemite. After Charlie and Quina used it to run errands, he returned to Locus a little downcast. I overheard him telling Shelly, “I just don’t feel the same sense of ownership anymore.”

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July 2nd, 2025

Neither Charlie nor Quina were around today. They’d taken off to Carmel to visit Ginny Heinlein, so we rattled around Charlie’s house doing the usual between-issue chores. Shelly left at one point to go across the bay to The City look at a new van she wants as a replacement for the Locus car. She returned happy and excited about the test drive.

Milton Wolf, who is writing a bio of Charlie, called and asked about the party on Sunday. He said he wants to talk to me and other Locus employees. Should be interesting

The plums on Charlie’s tree are truly beautiful this year, a sort of luminous greenish-gold. Shelly tried some and said they are very sweet.

I believe Milton Wolf is a Science Fiction scholar, currently the VP of the Science Fiction Research Association. The bio in question was likely not so much a book as an entry in a larger reference work.

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June 28th, 2025

Today, Bill Contento installed Pagemaker 3 and showed me how to use it. The colors are different, and the logo. For much of the day I stayed in the back office with Bill and Faren, getting the hang of Pagemaker’s new autoflow feature, so it occaionally got a bit crowded. Charlie, who was in a good mood now that another issue is under his belt, kept coming back to see how things were going, then darting away because he couldn’t stand watching it any more.

Late in the afternoon I drove Charlie down to Berkeley to leave some galleys and a book cover at The Other Change of Hobbit. Lisa Goldstein was there. Then we went to Andronico’s where we both did a little shopping. By the time we got back to Locus it was time to go home.

Charlie was blind in one eye, which screwed up his depth perception, so our duties included chauffering. Sometimes that meant visiting the local bookstores — The Other Change of Hobbit and Dark Carnival in Berkeley, Fantasy Etc. in San Francisco… The Other Change of Hobbit has, alas, gone the way of many bookstores and no longer has a corporeal form. At that time it was in a little shopping complex on Shattuck, always brightly lit, never cluttered or shadowy, but well-stocked with the latest and best in fantasy and science fiction. It was, as all important bookstores should be, a social center where part of the visit was pausing to gossip with the owners, Debbie Notkin and Tom Whitmore, or the writers who freqented it. Lisa Goldstein, the author of THE RED MAGICIAN, was at that time a small, blackhaired, pretty woman of about my own age, and everything I aspired to be in a writer. She still is. Wish I could remember what we talked about.

Andronico’s back then was the ne plus ultra of high end supermarkets — soft lighting, with soothing music, wide aisles, and an amazing selection of produce, etc. It has since been swallowed up by Safeway.

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June 27th, 2025

“Why is the day lasting forever?” Shelly asked. Because, of course, suddenly we are left with nothing to do but those chores that getting the magazine out gives us an excuse to ignore.

I spent a lot of time today answering mail and working on the phone list. The latter is always kind of interesting because the phone list is a measure of how people have risen and fallen in Charlie’s estimation. One person who’s been on it for years is now removed for being rude to Shelly at the last ABA. Others have been demoted from authors (indicated with an “A”) to fen (indicatd with an F.) Yet others have been promoted from Effs to Ays. I managed to get the final list run out at 6:00. When I left everyone had departed, including Charlie, who’d gone for a walk.

This was, of course, the era before email. Answering mail involved postage, etc. and was a pain in the ass.

Charlie may have gone off for a walk to cool down after the emotional upheaval of editing his phone list, which involved him revisiting old offenses.

Another measure of Charlie’s estimation was how flattering or unflattering were the photos of authors and fen included in the magazine.

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June 26th, 2025

Today, Bill Contento installed Pagemaker 3 and showed me how to use it. The colors are different, and the logo. For much of the day I stayed in the back office with Bill and Faren, getting the hang of Pagemaker’s new autoflow feature, so it occaionally got a bit crowded. Charlie, who was in a good mood now that another issue is under his belt, kept coming back to see how things were going, then darting away because he couldn’t stand watching it any more.

Late in the afternoon I drove Charlie down to Berkeley to leave some galleys and a book cover at The Other Change of Hobbit. Lisa Goldstein was there. Then we went to Andronico’s where we both did a little shopping. By the time we got back to Locus it was time to go home.

Charlie was blind in one eye, which screwed up his depth perception, so our duties included chauffering. Sometimes that meant visiting the local bookstores — The Other Change of Hobbit and Dark Carnival in Berkeley, Fantasy Etc. in San Francisco… The Other Change of Hobbit has, alas, gone the way of many bookstores and no longer has a corporeal form. At that time it was in a little shopping complex on Shattuck, always brightly lit, never cluttered or shadowy, but well-stocked with the latest and best in fantasy and science fiction. It was, as all important bookstores should be, a social center where part of the visit was pausing to gossip with the owners, Debbie Notkin and Tom Whitmore, or the writers who freqented it. Lisa Goldstein, the author of THE RED MAGICIAN, was at that time a small, blackhaired, pretty woman of about my own age, and everything I aspired to be in a writer. She still is. Wish I could remember what we talked about.

Andronico’s back then was the ne plus ultra of high end supermarkets — soft lighting, with soothing music, wide aisles, and an amazing selection of produce, etc. It has since been swallowed up by Safeway.

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June 25th, 2025

Charlie was not quite at his worst today, but close, wavering between chumminess and martyrdom. Any sign of an employee thinking for herself infuriated him. He tried to prevent me from checking a board to see if the correction I was running out would flow properly onto it.

I’ve been given a fairly meaningless nudge “up.” Charlie told me to change the colophon to reflect, not only Trevin’s departure, but Shelly’s promotion. She is now “Associate Manager.” This means one who goes with Charlie to conventions, helps him deal with people, etc. Perhaps out of fear that I would object to remaining lowest on the masthead, he has changed my title to “Production Associate,” a term that sounds marginally better than “Production Assistant.”

Shelly took off with the issue at about 3:00. I spent the rest of the day getting out the invitations to Charlie’s two parties next week and later, driving him down to Montclair to run some errands.

“The board” meant the paste-up board. Charlie literally tried to prevent me from walking into the front room and looking over the paste-up board. Among the many nutty behaviors I’ve encountered in insanely controlling male employers, that’s the nuttiest.

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Pam Troy

A Writer’s Website

Tag: Charlie Brown