What a good question! Who *am* I? Well, I was born in Abingdon, Virginia on February 6, 1959. Spent several largely uneventful years growing up - much of which time was spent running around in the woods like Daniel Boone (who, I was once told by my grandfather, also ran around in those very same woods nearly 200 years earlier). Learned to read and very quickly thereafter learned to read science fiction. Read quite a lot of that. I recall a day in my 10 year old summer (You can tell that I once read a lot of Ray Bradbury, can't you?) that found me sitting on a hilltop near my home, watching the clouds and thinking about a TV news program I'd seen the night before about atomic bombs and other unpleasant things. "Gosh", I thought. "The Russians could drop an H-bomb on Abingdon right now and I'd be vaporized before I could even run back to the house!" You'll understand that this was in 1969; long before I would realize that the Russians had far better things to do than to drop H-bombs on unimportant towns in Southwest Virginia, but at the time I was starting to realize that the world was a lot bigger than I'd previously thought. There was no going back to Ray Bradbury's world after that, I'm afraid...
A year or so later my school librarian - a perceptive lady named Mrs. Dameron - Handed me a pair of books to try. They were "The X-Factor" by Andre Norton, and "The Rolling Stones" by Robert A. Heinlein. The Norton book failed to catch my attention at the time, though later I'd find her far better "Starman's Son, 2250 A.D." and would learn to love her books. The Heinlein book caught me up by my sense of wonder and flung me to new heights and I'm still up there, dangling precariously from the higher branches. Most fans start off as SF fans and eventually discover that fandom has a lot more to it than just science fiction. I eventually discovered all that too, but I still collect and read SF to this day, and I suspect that the obcession will turn out to be incurable. I certainly hope so, anyway. The collection began with that same Mrs. Dameron, who bought a subscription to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for the school library. Since I was almost the only student who ever read any of them, at the end of the school year she gave the stack of back issues to me to keep. Now *that* was neat! 12 whole magazines all lined up neatly on my shelf over my desk at home. I noticed that the little paragraph at the bottom of the contents page implied that there's been a few hundred other issues before these were published. I considered the idea of somehow finding and obtaining all of them. "Impossible", I thought. "Who could possibly collect over 200 magazines?" Well, I found out that a great many people could and did, and gradually I learned that old books and magazines turn up just about everywhere if you'll only keep your eyes open for them, and within 12 or 15 years I'd collected all those back issues, along with the subsequent issues, and a good many other SF magazines and books besides. And most of them just arrived 1 or 2 at a time. 30,000 books? That's not too many...
I did the mundanely normal stuff too of course. My family lived on a farm and so I worked on it as we all did. There was always hunting and fishing to do, as well as exploring new mountains and valleys around my mountain home. There were a few years in my teens when my father started a motorcycle and dealership and for a while there I almost lived on a motorcycle. But on all those adventures, I always had a book in my backpack. I got into the 4-H club, which is a national club for young people age 9 to 19 based mostly on farm life and career exploration. I earned my share of little ribbons and awards and even became a national officer in the club in my last year. Unfortunately the mundane world I lived in was more impressed by membership on the local high school football team than by membership in the 4-H club, but I think I had more fun than the footballers did anyway. Somewhere in highschool I found a reference to a "fanzine" in an old SF magazine. Nothing would do me but that I had to publish a fanzine of my own. It appeared in 1974 and was called "Excursions". There were 12 copies made. If there's any mercy in the world, the only copy that still survives is the one that I have carefully stored away in a box in my closet downstairs. It's one fanzine that you'll never see listed in the Memoryhole Permacollection. And rightly so. Several years later, after I'd seen some real fanzines in a friend's collection, I published a one-shot zine called "...Another Fan's Poison" and I'd have published more but shortly after that I discovered Amateur Press Associations and joined one called "Myriad". *That's* the point at which fandom really started to become a Way of Life...
CHAPTER TWO - Curt Discovers Fandom...
The story of how I discovered fanzines and SF conventions and other such fascinating persuits goes back to a moment of abject terror that I still relive in my nightmares: I was 16 years old, sitting beside a pretty girl (whom I'd met only moments before) on an amusement park roller coaster and trying not to vomit. I'm sure you've all been in that exact same situiation many times before. However in my case, the pretty girl only had one thing on her mind; she'd discovered that I liked science fiction and she had decided to talk me onto that roller coaster and keep me there until I'd agreed to attend the new SF convention that her father was starting in Roanoke, Virginia. It was called "Rovacon".
"It'll be a lot of fun", she shreiked, waving here hands in the air as we plummeted several hundred feet down towards the ground. "Leigh Brackett's gonna be our guest of honor, and Kelly Freas will have an art show, and there'll be several Star Trek episodes shown. You're into Star Trek, aren't you"?
I had just noticed that the seat belt in our car was loose where the bolt went into the frame. Was that normal?
"And there'll be fans in costume - I'm making a costume like Jenny Agutter wore in Logan's Run - and the tv station will probably have us on the evening news..."
*That* was funny. I had just been thinking that if our roller coaster car came off around that next sharp curve - there where the rail looked wobbly - that we'd certainly make the evening news. I hoped my mother would see it. She could call all her friends and tell them about it...
"And there'll be a huckster room with books, of course. Say, why are your hands all white and pasty on the rail like that?"
I wondered how often these roller coasters had to be inspected. Was there an inspection sticker on the...
Books? Did she say books?
Well, yes she *did* say books, and at the Rovacon that October I saw my first convention dealer's room with what seemed like about 100,000 books; nearly all of them science fiction. I'd *known* that I wasn't the only sf reader in the world, but to discover a whole building full of books, and movies and fans like me - and all of them interested in science fiction... well, you've all been there. You understand. I didn't actually see much more of the pretty girl after she'd gotten my $3.00 for the convention membership, but moments after I arrived at the con I discovered a dealer's table piled high and creaking under the weight of old SF pulp magazines and I was well content with the weekend. I found and bought my first pulp magazine there; the December 1942 AMAZING STORIES! It was over a full inch thick and sporting a glorious St. John cover of what I'd thought was a Tarzan story. "Aw, shoot!" I said a little later that day as I sat in the convention lobby reading that first pulp. "This isn't Edgar Rice Burroughs! This is by some guy named Howard Brown!" Well, it was still a nice cover, and maybe the Brown story will be ok...
"Do you like Edgar Rice Burroughs?" a voice next to me asked. I looked up at a pleasant looking older woman who'd sat down nearby. I said that I did, and she asked if I'd read any of his Martian series. Well, *this* was interesting. This lady who looked a little like my grandmother knew about Burroughs, and as we talked it turned out that she knew a lot more about Burroughs than I did. And Ray Bradbury too. And also Heinlein and all the other writers that I liked. I don't know how long we talked, but I was sitting there explaining a famous Bradbury story - while she listened politely and nodded in the right places - when someone walked over to her and handed her a book. She took a pen from her purse and wrote something in it and handed it back. And then someone else came over with a whole shopping bag full of books. Intrigued by this, I edged over to see what she was writing and learned that my new friend, this grandmotherly lady who'd so politely listened to me explain Ray Bradbury, was Leigh Brackett.
Later that afternoon I got her to sign a book for me too. It's still one of my prized posessions.
At that same convention I met a fellow named Ron Rogers and he gave me the first fanzine I'd ever seen other than the one I'd invented a couple of years earlier. It was called The Jinia Clan Journal and was the club fanzine of the Nelson Bond Society. And then later that day I met Nelson Bond himself, the famous fantasy writer of the 40's and 50's, still living right there in Roanoke Virginia. I went home after that convention already plotting how I might eventually move to Roanoke - which was evidently the SF capital of the world, or so it seemed that afternoon. I never did move there, but I eventually joined the NBS, attended several more Rovacons and joined the convention committee. A few years later I met a wonderful girl named Lizbeth who had been born in a small town called Wantage in East Anglia, and though she wasn't all that interested in SF, she was very tolerant of my interest in it. Still is, fortunately for me. We even spent our honeymoon at that year's Rovacon.
Over the next few years I attended and eventually started working for many more SF conventions; often with Liz, a few times with our baby daughters in tow, and sometimes with a variety of fannish friends that I met along the way. The odd thing about many of the local fan friends I've known is that most of them seemed to read and like SF for a couple of years or a few years and then just lose interest. I - on the other hand - have never felt any less interested in stories of possible tomorrows. I finished college, took a job in a local factory that built missiles for the US Air Force, and kept reading SF and attending conventions. I tried other hobbies and interests now and then. While I was still in college (the first time) I applied for a job as a movie projectionist on a whim and got it - and then had to teach myself how to run a 35mm movie projector on my first night at work. Happily it turned out to be not all that different from the smaller 16mm projectors that I used to run at school assemblies. That was a great job and actually got me a free ticket to the Atlanta Worldcon in 1986 when they needed a professional projectionist at the last moment. I also talked myself into a job at a radio station and while doing that I managed to get a license that would allow me to operate a radio transmitter from "a tethered balloon", just because I'd discovered that such a license was possible. I've spent the rest of my life looking for such a job, but haven't run across it yet. But I'm still looking.
Before the missile plant job, I cooked pizzas in a Pizza Hut (and lost a lot of interest in fast-food pizzas as a result) and worked part time in a few local book shops. Now *that's* a job I was born for. The arrangement I like to make with bookshops is to work for free and get "paid" in books. I've always come out way ahead on that sort of deal, and it's helped me build a pretty good collection of SF books and magazines, plus it's gotten me involved in the world of book-scouting in a small way. Since I spend a great deal of my free time traveling around haunting thrift shops, flea markets, and yard sales looking for books for myself anyway, I long ago started picking up good books as I found them when the price was cheap. There are many bookshops willing to take good stock in on trade on books that I do want, or even to pay me something more that I have invested in them. That's book-scouting and it is, as Nelson Bond - himself an antiquarian book dealer of considerable standing - once told me, "a very pleasant way of making very little money". I went back to college at night and got a degree in electronics and that allowed me to move into some more advanced work at the missile factory. Eventually got transferred into a variety of Quality Assurance jobs including one as a Technical Writer, which - considering that my spellling and punctuation are terrible - still makes me laugh to think about. One of my proudest moments of working for that company came when I interviewed for that Technical Writer job. When I was asked about previous writing experience I mentioned fanzines and spent most of the interview explaining zines and the world of amateur journalism. It must have gone over well since I got the job. Later I moved into testing and fixing electronic systems of various military missile projects, but somehow I never really got over the idea that instead of building missiles to blow up tanks and airplanes, what I really wanted to do was to build missiles to send people into space. My bosses wern't impressed by that idea and rarely asked me for suggestions so we just kept on with what we'd been doing.
Just to finish off the story of how I earn my spending money, I'll mention that one day back in 1998, the missile company that I'd worked for for 19 years decided to close the plant where I worked and this required me to make some decisions. I could move to Kansas and go to work in their airplane factory (the safe thing to do). I could move to Arizona and keep making missiles (the boring thing to do). Or I could start over. *That's* the one I chose. I went back to school yet again and looked for the career field least like building missiles and most likely to never close down and move out of town. I chose Nursing. You see, I'd joined the local volunteer fire department as a hobby a few years earlier and had become an Emergency Medical Technician. That work took me into hospital emergency rooms quite a lot, and seemed to have planted a seed in my mind about the sort of work that I could be doing instead of building machines designed to blow things up. I leapt at the chance to go to Nursing school. It wasn't easy, but I made it through - though at the cost of near total fafiation for two years - and today I work as a surgical nurse in a large regional hospital in East Tennessee. With luck, this should be my last career.
That covers most of the mundane apects of my life - except that I didn't mention World War II or American Civil War re-enacting, did I? And there are a LOT of firefighting and rescue squad stories I could tell you... Oh well, maybe I'll write a fanzine article about all that. Till then have a look at the photos elsewhere on this website. Now for the *real* substance of this bio. The story of the most contentious and dangerous part of my life. The story of how I joined not one, not two, but three apas - and lived to tell the tale...
CHAPTER THREE - Is Anyone Really Still Reading This?
Have you ever gone to a convention and wandered around feeling out of place, as though you didn't really belong and no one there really wanted to talk to you? Of course you haven't! That's because you're "in" Fandom and you've already discovered that Fandom has a million open doors and if you want to you can enter through any of them. Thing is, it took me a while to figure that out. I was one of those fans who started as just a "science fiction" fan. All I cared about at first were the books and magazines. I built up my *collection* and took insufferable pride in knowing the names of every Hugo winner and ... eventually I realized that most of the folks who seemed to be having the most fun at conventions wern't terribly concerned with all that. The SF was interesting to them, yes, but there were other priorities. Talking with other people, for instance. And meeting new ones. It wasn't all that long before I began to realize that *I* was starting to look forward to the next convention not so much for the chance to find some more books in the dealer's room, but also for the chance to again see some of the people I'd met at previous conventions. These folks were just more interesting than those I'd known back home. They *read* more; not just SF but mysteries and science and history and so on. And they knew how to *talk* about what they'd read. And eventually, someone suggested that I ought to join an apa. And so I did. The first one was MYRIAD and it was as though I'd walked into a room with 25 interesting discussions; all of them involving me. Joining MYRIAD was to key to real fandom for me. I had learned to write in school, but it took that apa to teach me how to actually say something. And I met fascinating people there; most of whom became true friends. From there I joined SFPA and a short time later Lynn Hickman started a new apa dealing with pulp magazines called PEAPS and I was a charter member. I OE'd first MYRIAD and then PEAPS for a while, worked on more conventions and ran a couple of small ones back home. Attended the 1983 Worldcon with Liz and some friends and figured that a convention that large would *have* to be a once in a lifetime event. Then as I mentioned, a friend who was working on the 1986 Worldcon in Atlanta suddenly found that he quickly needed someone who could run a 35mm movie projector and remembered that fellow in his apa who had worked in a theater. That's how I got to attend Confederation that year. I joined a few clubs and attended meetings, worked on my share of *projects*, got involved in a couple of fueds, kept on collecting SF books and magazines, and started writing articles for other people's fanzines. Best of all, those fan editors kept asking for more of my writing. In the years to come I plan to spend much of my fannish effort on writing more articles, at least until I run out of things to say. You just can't beat that kind of Egoboo...
Other interests: Old Time Radio. I collected old radio shows (Lights Out!, Dimension X, and so on) on tape for several years. Then about a year ago I discovered that the Internet has allowed OTR collectors from all across the planet to convert their collections to MP3 files and share them for free on the net. I now have several thousand shows - more than I'll ever listen to - and they all cost me less than what my first dozen OTR shows on tape cost. It's a nifty hobby for a collector. And when I have time I enjoy watching old movies on the various cable channels. Sometimes after a night shift at the hospital I'll come home after everyone else in the house is asleep, but I'll be too wound up to go right to bed and so either an old pulp magazine or an old movie will help me unwind. In my off hours I still pull duty as a volunteer firefighter and EMT, so when I'm not working at the hospital I'm usually bringing that same hospital more customers. I should get a commission. Firefighting is fascinating work. It's a whole world of its own and when you join a fire department you become part of a fraternity closer than just about any family I've ever known. Kind of like Fandom, except that you get to drive fire engines and ambulances. And every now and then I'll have a long weekend when I can attend a Civil War reenactment. I've been doing that hobby since 1990 and still get a thrill at the time-binding aspect of it. As a reenactor I get to explore history to a degree that no book or movie can ever provide. I've also done WWII and American Revolutionary War reenacting, but Civil War is my first interest. I attended a SF con in Knoxville, Tennessee a few years ago and it just happened that my local CW group was doing a memorial service at an old cemetary there in the same town (The regiment we portray once fought there during the war) and so I took my uniform along and slipped out to participate in that ceremony. On my way back into the convention hotel the lady running the costume contest saw me, made a fuss, and insisted that I sign up for the contest right then. I don't think she had a lot of entries. So I showed up in that hot, smelly wool uniform and after the Star Trek and Star Wars people did their thing, I came out and realised - only then - that the audience was expecting me to "perform". Several ideas flashed through my mind in that moment. Running away was the one that kept coming back to me, but without knowing what I was going to say I just pointed to the far wall of the hotel, opened my mouth, and said: "If we could go back 135 years in time and stand here on this very spot, we would look towards the South there and see that mountain over across the river roaring with cannon fire and burning with musket fire as 4000 Union soldiers attacked up the North slope and tried to take it from the 2000 Confederates dug in on the top. They fought all night long, over 800 men were killed and it all happened exactly 135 years ago *tonight* (pulled out my pocket watch to check the time...) right to this very minute!" From then on it was easy and I proceeded to tell them about the battle, about the field hospital that was set up literaly on the very ground where our hotel now stood, and basically I painted them a word picture of what that battle looked, sounded, and felt like. It was a success beyond anything I'd hoped for. And all I had to do was tell them the truth! That was how I won the first and last convention costume contest that I'll ever enter. I'll post an article that I wrote for CHALLENGER about American Civil War reenacting over in the "articles" section of this website.
Someone asked me in a private e-mail what it was that I wanted to actually "do" in Europe if I win TAFF. (NOTE: This article was originaly written as a part of my unsuccessful TAFF campaign in 2005, And I'm too lazy to re-write it. Besides, I might try again someday!) That question rather floored me. What I would like to "do" is go and be a fan. I'd consider myself pretty much at the disposal of fandom for the trip and would participate in the convention and any side activities that come along pretty much in any way that Fandom asks me to. Isn't that how it's supposed to work? Sure, I could go for a trip to the usual tourist sites and all that (and there *is* a certain abandoned WWII air base that I wouldn't mind visiting), but the first priority is to meet the fans in Europe. I could make a big long list of all the folks on that side of the Atlantic whom I'd like to meet, but it's a lot easier to say, "I want to meet all of you." I do hope to spend some time either before or after the convention - if not both - traveling around a bit to meet some of the fans and fan group gatherings (I'm a fan *and* a nurse, so I really would have liked to have gone to the Florence Nightengale before they tore it down...) but fandom has a wonderful way of working things out to keep a visiting TAFF delegate occupied. I'm not worried about having to sit around with nothing to do. If fans over there really want me to suggest some things I'll be glad to do so but I'll wait to be asked - assumning I win, that is!. My wife was born in East Anglia and has spent years telling me about the people and places she knew there. (She was born in Wantage and Pam Boal - who lives there today - told me once that the building where my wife was born has since been converted into a museum. Liz was rather pleased with that idea. I'm toying with the idea of suggesting to her that if I get to go I should take the pair of baby booties that her mother still has and go and donate them to the Wantage Museum, but experience has taught me that every time I suggest things like that to Liz I wind up rather wishing I hadn't, so...
So now you know a lot more about Curt Phillips than you ever expected to. Except that I'd very much like to travel to other countries and meet other fans in my travels. I'll keep looking for ways to do that. And I still have that urge to write more fanzine articles so faneds, beware!
--Curt Phillips
