Killdozer!

Speaking of Theodore Sturgeon, it was twenty years ago today that a man in Granby, Colorado, went on a rampage with a heavily modified bulldozer that has since been dubbed "Killdozer." Maybe that was after Sturgeon's story "Killdozer!", which was published in Astounding Science-Fiction in November 1944. "Killdozer!" was adapted to comic book form in Worlds Unknown in April 1974 by writer Gerry Conway and artist Dick Ayers. Two months before that cover date, in February 1974, NBC had broadcast a made-for-TV movie version of Killdozer! with Clint Walker, Neville Brand, and Robert Urich. We watched that movie when we were kids. I haven't seen it since. Anyway, this makes a quadruple-Killdozer! anniversary year: eighty years since the first publication of the story, fifty since the movie and comic book adaptations, and twenty since the real-life Killdozer rampage. Maybe every thirty years there's a Killdozer outbreak, so watch out, America, in 2034.

Astounding Science-Fiction, November 1944. Cover story: "Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon. Cover art by William Timmins (1915-1985).

Worlds Unknown, April 1974. Cover story: "Killdozer!", originally by Sturgeon, adapted by Gerry Conway. Cover art by . . . I'm not sure. That looks like Gil Kane art under somebody else's inks? Comic books are supposed to be a low art, science fiction barely higher, but I would say that the comic book version of the Killdozer cover is better, and not by a little.

And speaking of influences or possible influences . . . a year after "Killdozer!" was first published, Weird Tales had its own story of a murderous machine. The title is "The Murderous Steam Shovel." The author was Allison V. Harding. This is the first Harding story I have looked at with a woman as the narrator. Her name is Vilma. That might lend some credence to the idea that Jean Milligan (1920-2005) was Allison V. Harding. Whether she was or not, it seems that at least some of the Harding stories were influenced or inspired by stories written by others. This one looks like an example.

"The Murderous Steam Shovel" by Allison V. Harding in a two-page spread in Weird Tales, November 1945. The art is by the rare and elusive Boris Dolgov. It doesn't seem likely to me that the artist for Marvel Comics in 1974 saw this image from nearly three decades before. Nevertheless, he arrived at a similar kind of personified machine. Artist Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965) also personified machines--to perfection.

Addition:

In 1939, Riverside Press published Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton. Here's an image of the dust jacket of the first edition, swiped from the Internet. Dolgov's murderous steam shovel looks a little like Virginia Lee Burton's version, named in her book Mary Anne. They're seen from the same angle, and both were drawn with a crayon or charcoal on textured paper. (I think.) I wonder if Dolgov was aware of Virginia's book.

Text and captions copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Bert David Ross (1888-1947)

Pseudonym of Gilbert C. Ross
Aka G.C. Ross
Office Worker, Insurance Salesman, Gardener, Author, Teacher
Born March 8, 1888, Red Oak, Iowa
Died March 30, 1947, Santa Clara city or county, California

Bert David Ross was the pseudonym of Gilbert C. Ross, who also went by his initials as G.C. Ross. Ross was born on March 8, 1888, in Red Oak, Iowa. I haven't found anything on his early life, but on March 15, 1925, Ross married Della Rose Brown in Seattle, Washington. The couple had two daughters, Rose Alyce Ross and Star Aileen Ross.

As of 1928, Ross was working as office manager at Acme Engraving, Seattle, Washington. In 1930, he was an insurance salesman. Ten years later, he was a gardener for a private family in the Seattle area. In 1942, when he filled out his draft card, Ross was living at Deer Harbor on San Juan Island, Washington, and working for Davis Investment Co. Finally, in 1944, he was an office worker at Bremerton Navy Yard. It was at around this time that Ross' professional writing career began. He had a story called "Scandia Reef" in Short Stories, June 25, 1944. "Overflow," in Short Stories for October 25, 1944, is set on San Juan Island, Ross' former home.

On the strength of those successes and a couple of more from early 1945, Ross, with his associates, formed the Writer's Club of Bremerton in late April 1945. Ross served as the first president, while Edward Stevenson was vice-president, Mrs. Lucille E. Doty was secretary, and Alice Smock was treasurer. According to an article from September 25, 1945, other members of the Bremerton Writers Club and their guests included: Mildred Dunn, Eddie Hammond, Muriel Innes, Jane Kent, Mr. & Mrs. Harvey Leach, Bernice McFarland, Ivy Pelky, Louise Pelky, Seaman 1st Class Larry Richardson, and Dr. & Mrs. Savage. More articles give the names of more members during the 1940s through the 1960s: Clyde Clark, Henry Clarke, Valentine Dmetriev, Mr. & Mrs. Lynn Jensen, Muriel McConnell, Margaret Metcalfe, Marian Reid, Margaret Rice, and Myrtle Tennis.

As of 1946, Ross was a teacher of creative writing in night school classes conducted at Bremerton High School. His older daughter was in high school, the younger in grade school. Later in the year, Ross and his family moved either to San Luis Obispo or San Simeon, California. G.C. Ross died in Santa Clara city or county, California, on March 30, 1947, and so his writing career that had begun three years before came to a sudden end. He had just turned fifty-nine years old. 

If the information in The FictionMags Index is accurate (I always assume that it is), then Ross' career in writing for story magazines lasted just over three years, from June 1944 to November 1947. He had two stories in Weird Tales and eight in Short Stories. Both titles were owned at the time by Short Stories, Inc., of New York City, and both had Dorothy McIlwraith as their editor.

Bert David Ross' Stories in Weird Tales & Short Stories

• "Scandia Reef" in Short Stories (June 25, 1944)
• "Overflow" in Short Stories (Oct. 25, 1944)
• "Luck Plus X" in Short Stories (Feb. 25, 1945)
• "Old Black Magic" in Short Stories (May 10, 1945)
• "Plane Paradise" in Short Stories (Mar. 10, 1946)
• "'Discovery 2nd'" in Short Stories (Apr. 25, 1946)
• "Not Human" in Weird Tales (Sept. 1946)
• "Peek and the Blackfish" in Short Stories (Jan. 25, 1947)
• "Trip to Monterey" in Short Stories (Mar. 25, 1947)
• "The Last Adam and Eve" in Weird Tales (Nov. 1947)

Further Reading

• "Invite Membership in Writers Club" in Kitsap Sun (Washington), May 1, 1945, page 4.
• "Personal Portraits" by Vera Pumphrey in Kitsap Sun (Washington), March 2, 1946, page 3.

An illustration for "The Last Adam and Eve" by Bert David Ross, drawn by Boris Dolgov and published in Weird Tales, November 1947.

Text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Five

In the 1950s, what is now called the East Village began to attract writers, artists, beatniks, and bohemians, especially from Greenwich Village to the west. It may have been a natural place for an artist like The Mysterious Dolgov to land, if he wasn't already living there. The East Village was also once considered a part of the Lower East Side, a place in which Russian-Jewish immigrants settled during the late 1800s and early 1900s. I'm pretty sure that Dolgov's family were both Russian and Jewish. In addition, the East Village was home to the Yiddish Theatre District or Yiddish Rialto of the early twentieth century. That last fact leads us to another Dolgoff.

Lewis Benjamin "Lou" Dolgoff was a comedian and master of ceremonies who performed on radio and stage in the Yiddish Theatre District and other places around town during the early to mid twentieth century. He was born on June 29, 1892, in Manhattan to Benjamin Dolgoff (1848-1920) and Lena (Golub) Dolgoff (ca. 1856-1953). He was a regular at the Village Grove Nut Club in Greenwich Village (1920s), also at Kernel Lew Mercur's Nut Club in Miami, Florida (1940s). Dolgoff had engagements at the Swing Club, Arabian Nights, Boery (sic) Cafe, B and B Nut Club, and Sir Jimmy Dwyer's Sawdust Trail in New York. If I read things right, Dolgoff was also on the radio on WMCA, WPAP, and WPCH, all in the same city.

When he registered for the draft in 1942, Dolgoff was employed by the New Fulton Royal Restaurant in Brooklyn. He may have alternated between New York City and Florida, specifically Miami, at the time. It looks like Dolgoff divorced his wife Sally in early 1953, married Bertha Zeitlin in Dade County, Florida, sometime that year, then was widowed when she died the following year. He had emceed at the Red Barn in Miami prior to that and--who knows?--maybe after that, too. In any event, Dolgoff followed his wife to the grave on October 11, 1956, and was buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, New York, with his parents. His stone is marked "Dear Uncle."

So, that's an awfully long way to go following somebody who might not have had anything to do with The Mysterious Dolgov, but we're still chasing leads. I have just one more: I found an Oscar Arthur Dolgoff, later known as Oscar Dole, who, in the 1930 Federal census, while living in the Bronx, gave his occupation as advertising artist. He was born on November 29, 1911, to Philip and Bertha Dolgoff. In 1940 he was unemployed. I don't know anything more about him except that he died on February 17, 1980, and is at buried Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Glendale, Queens County, New York. The surname and age are about right, as are the place and occupation, but why would Oscar Dolgoff have gone by the name Boris Dolgov when he was already going by the name Oscar Dole? It just doesn't add up. What we should consider, though, is that "Boris" or "Dolgov" or "Dolgoff" was not the Weird Tales artist's real name or birth name, and that's why he has been so hard to find. Maybe, too, he was an only child or never married or never had any children, and so there aren't any remaining Dolgovs to set us straight. There is one thing available to us, though, that might clear all of this up:

New York City Death Certificate Number 23513
Name: Boris Dolgoff
Age: 48
Date of death: November 4, 1958
Place of death: Manhattan

Are you listening, RAE?

The Village Grove Nut Club was a landmark in Manhattan for drinkers, nightclubbers, partygoers, and other bon vivants. Here is a photograph from the exact date of February 18, 1933.

Located at 99 7th Avenue South, "In the Heart of Greenwich Village," the Village Grove Nut Club might have been a little too far west to be a part of the Yiddish Theatre District (I'm a Midwesterner with absolutely no knowledge of New York City, or its neighborhoods, culture, or history). Nonetheless, it must have been an attraction for Jewish performers and clientele from all over. (Above: A wine list from 1943.)

One of those performers was Lou "Judge" Dolgoff (1892-1956), whose parents, Benjamin and Lena Dolgoff (or Dolgov), were Russian-Jewish immigrants who spoke Yiddish and/or Hebrew as their native language. His father was a clothing presser. Lou escaped that by becoming a comedy performer and master of ceremonies. Here his name appears in a newspaper advertisement for Kernel Lew Mercur's Nut Club, from the Miami Herald, December 17, 1941.

One of my points in showing these images is that bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and other entertainments and businesses in New York City, as everywhere, would have needed art, cartoons, and illustrations, thus providing opportunities for young artists. It might help, too, if a young artist had a friend or relative who already worked in those industries. A foot in the door, an introduction, a kind word: "My brother's kid draws. How about if I bring him around this weekend and he can show you what he's got?"

I can't say that Boris Dolgov and Lou Dolgoff were related, but it might be instructive to look at the paths taken by the children of European-Jewish immigrants in early twentieth-century America: the first generation were laborers--Kirk Douglas' father was a ragman, the Marx Brothers' a tailor--who escaped the Old World into the New. The second made their own escape from common labor into entertainment and the arts. Could that have been Boris Dolgov's path, too? Unfortunately, we don't know and we're left with a lot of speculation in the absence of evidence. For now The Mysterious Dolgov remains so.

Text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Four

Here is what we know about Boris Dolgov:

First, he was an artist who drew pictures for fantasy and science fiction magazines from 1941 to 1954. Most of these were for Weird Tales.

Second, he collaborated with another artist, Hannes Bok (1914-1964), on drawings published in 1941 under the pseudonym "Dolbokov."

Third, he and Bok visited with artist Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966), probably at Parrish's home in New Hampshire. The date is unknown, but I presume it to be in about 1939-1940 or 1939-1941.

Fourth, while with Parrish, Dolgov had his picture taken by Bok, and so we know what Dolgov looked like.

Fifth, according to "old timers" referred to by the anonymous author of the website Notasdecine, Dolgov "fell to his death by falling from the fire escape to his own apartment." By "old timers," I think the author means people who remember events in science fiction of the 1940s-1950s.

I have found a Boris Dolgoff in a grand total of two public records:

1. From the Manhattan City Directory, 1957 (p. 435): Boris Dolgoff at 630 East 14th Street, telephone number ORegn 3-8552.

2. From the New York, New York, Death Index, 1949-1965: Boris Dolgoff, age 48, died on November 4, 1958, death certificate number 23513.

From all of this we might infer:

One, that Boris Dolgov was from New York City or that he lived in New York City from about 1940 onward.

Two, that he was about the same age as Hannes Bok.

Three, that he got into prozines by way of science fiction fandom, either by being an active fan himself or by being recruited by a fan, such as Hannes Bok.

Four, that he may have been an only son or unfit for service during World War II, or that something else may have kept him out of the military, as he continued to draw pictures for Weird Tales throughout 1942-1945. In fact, he seems to have been something of a workhorse during those years.

Five, that in the 1950s, something happened in his life that made him drop (no pun intended) out of science fiction and fantasy, suddenly and with no further credits in those genres.

Six, if Dolgov was not an assumed name, that he was probably of Russian-Jewish extraction and that his family came to the United States in the late 1800s or early 1900s.

The address 630 East 14th Street is in the East Village in New York City. Cooper Union, where many well-known artists have gone to school, is a few blocks to the west. In 1939-1940, on behalf of her boyfriend Frederik Pohl (and perhaps, too, of his friends in fandom), Doë Baumgardt, aka Leslie Perri, recruited a number of art students from Cooper Union to draw pictures for the new science fiction magazines Pohl was editing. The titles were Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. Dolgov did not have any credited work in these two magazines, but he did contribute illustrations to Science Fiction Quarterly, edited by Robert W. Lowndes, and Cosmic Stories, edited by Donald A. Wollheim. Dolgov's drawings were published in 1941. Both of these new editors had come out of fandom, and both were friends of Frederik Pohl.

To be concluded . . .

Text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Three and a Half

A month ago I wrote part three of this series on The Mysterious Dolgov. Then the world came to an end. Since then, my copy of Frederik Pohl's memoir The Way the Future Was has been sitting on the floor, waiting like a child to be picked up again. Like I said before, I have only a paperback edition of this book and there isn't any index in it. Today, after finishing a job, I picked it up again and looked through it a little more closely than before.

And I still didn't find Boris Dolgov's name.

However, there are some clues scattered like breadcrumbs through the text. They may not lead to The Mysterious Dolgov, but they lead to a supposition. Here are the breadcrumbs, from the Ballantine Books edition of May 1979:

First, Pohl listed the names of the original Futurians, a science fiction fan club formed in 1937 in New York City. "As near as I can remember," he wrote, "[they] were:

• Isaac Asimov
• Daniel Burford
• Chester Cohen
• Jack Gillespie
• Cyril Kornbluth
• Walter Kubilius
• David A. Kyle
• Herman Leventman
• Robert W. Lowndes
• John B. Michel
• Frederik Pohl
• Jack Rubinson
• Richard Wilson
• Donald A. Wollheim
• Dirk Wylie

"Later additions," Pohl continued, "included Hannes Bok, Damon Knight, and Judith Merril [. . .]." (p. 67) (For the writers and artists who later contributed to Weird Tales, hover over their names and then click on the links.)

Second, on May 11, 1937, Frederik Pohl met a woman he described as "strikingly beautiful, and strikingly intelligent, too, in a sulky, humorous, deprecatory way [. . . ]." (p. 74) Her real name was Doris Marie Claire Baumgardt, but her friends--and her future husband, Frederik Pohl--called her Doë. Doë was a writer and artist. In 1940 and 1941, again in the 1950s, all under the name Leslie Perri, she wrote fiction and non-fiction and drew pictures for science fiction publications. Here are her professional credits, in their entirety, from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb):

• Cover and interior illustrations for The Final Men by H.G. Wells, a seven-page chapbook published by Robert W. Lowndes in March 1940
• "Fantasy Reviews: Fantasy Films," review published in Astonishing Stories (June 1940), with Forrest J. Ackerman, and under editor Frederik Pohl (1)
• "Fantasy Reviews: Fantasy Music," review published in Super Science Stories (July 1940), under editor Frederik Pohl
• "Space Episode," short story published in Future (Dec. 1941), under an uncredited editor and behind a cover illustration by Hannes Bok
• "In the Forest," short story published in If (Sept. 1953), under editor James L. Quinn
• "Under the Skin," short story published in Infinity Science Fiction (June 1956), under editor Larry T. Shaw (also appeared as "The Untouchables") (2)

So here we see some of the same names again: Pohl, Lowndes, Bok.

Third, Pohl became editor of two new magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, in the fall of 1939. (Both made their debut in 1940.) He had a budget of about a penny per word for fiction. "Art was something else," he remembered, continuing:

When I brought my budget to Aleck Portegal, the art director, he looked at me with compassion and disgust. Where the hell was I going to get artists to work for that kind of money? Writers, sure. Everybody knew what writers were like. But artists did a job of work for a dollar, and they wouldn't take less. That didn't worry me because I had a secret weapon. In fact, two of them. There were the fan artists, as eager as the fan writers for publication in a science-fiction magazine. And besides, my girlfriend, Doë, was an art student at Cooper Union. She had at her fingertips a whole school of striving newcomers to whom five dollars would look like a hell of a price for something they would gladly have bribed us to print. (p. 102)

Unfortunately, the art students proved "a disappointment," Pohl wrote, "and most of the fans were worse. But there were a couple who were competent, and one--Hannes Bok, whom Ray Bradbury had been touting at the World Convention not long before--who was superb." (p. 102) A few pages later, still recounting his travails as an editor strapped by a tight budget, Pohl wrote: "Hannes Bok, Doë, Dave Kyle, and others did illustrations for me, and I farmed out departments and columns to those who wanted to do them [. . .]." (pp. 110-111)

And that's it. No matter how hard I try, I can't get Frederik Pohl to say Boris Dolgov's name.

So, did Dolgov contribute to magazines edited by Pohl? Not according to ISFDb. But then I don't think we should rule out that Dolgov worked anonymously or under a different name. In any case, we know that Dolgov contributed to magazines edited by two other Futurians, Robert W. Lowndes and Donald A. Wollheim, and that these five drawings came in 1941. Three were collaborations with Hannes Bok. (3)

So again, I'm working on the idea that Boris Dolgov was born in about 1910, probably in New York City, and that he was peripherally attached to science fiction fandom in that city during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Like I said, Bok came out of fandom, too, and I wonder if that's where they met and where they decided to collaborate. But what if instead Dolgov was an art student at Cooper Union in about 1939-1940, and what if he was recruited into the science fiction field by Doë Baumgardt? Maybe a look at the student rolls from Cooper Union, if they still exist, would tell us something . . .

By the way, Doë Marie Claire Baumgardt Pohl Owens Wilson, aka Leslie Perri, was born one hundred years ago this week, on April 27, 1920. Happy Birthday, Doë!

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Pohl and Doë were married on August 31, 1940 (in a Presbyterian church of all places). See The Way the Future Was, pages 112 and following, for more on their short-lived marriage.

(2) Doë also contributed to fanzines during the 1930s and '40s.

(3) Dolgov's first illustration for Weird Tales was in the issue of September 1941. His last appeared in July 1954. In other words, after working very briefly for a couple of science fiction magazines in 1941, Dolgov found regular work with Weird Tales and stayed with it until the very end.

The Way the Future Was: A Memoir by Frederik Pohl (1978), with cover art by Joseph Lombardero (1922-2004). Ignore the -dero part: as far as anyone knows, Lombardero was not an evil, cavern-dwelling creature sprung from the imagination of Richard Sharpe Shaver.

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Three

One of the things about this ever-expanding Internet is that sources that were unavailable even a week ago are now suddenly here before us. I first wrote about Boris Dolgov on August 27, 2016. At the time, the only person I could find in public records by that name or anything close was Boris Dolgoff (1897-1989), a Russian-born Jewish poultry dealer in Seattle, Washington. I knew then that he wasn't our artist, but I wondered about a possible connection to Hannes Bok, who lived in Seattle for a couple of stints during the 1930s. Now, through a new search, I have a candidate for the Mysterious Dolgov, a supposition based on two and a half bits of evidence.

First, I found a death record. And after I found a death record, I found mention of Boris Dolgov's cause of death. I'll take the cause of death first.

On the website Notasdecine, the author, who seems to be anonymous, wrote in June 2009 a parenthetical statement about Dolgov's cause of death. Here it is in its entirety:

(Over the years I've heard stories from several old timers that he fell to his death by falling from the fire escape to his own apartment)

You might say the author at Notasdecine skimped on his information and sources. His sentence doesn't even end in a period. But if we accept that Dolgov fell from a fire escape; and we know that his genre credits ended in the 1950s, suggesting that something greater ended then, too; and we can guess that Dolgov was about the same age as Hannes Bok, then we can say that his death was untimely and tragic, just as Bok's own death would be in 1964.

That's half a piece of evidence. Now comes a whole piece from the Internet and posted there since I first wrote about Dolgov in 2016: a death record, from the New York, New York, Death Index, 1949-1965, states that a Boris Dolgoff, born circa 1910 (meaning, I think, that his age at his death was thought to be about forty-eight), died on November 4, 1958, in Manhattan. All of that lines up pretty well: the age is about right (Bok was born in 1914, making the presumed Dolgov four years his senior), the disappearance from genre work is about right (according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, Dolgov's last genre illustration was in the penultimate issue of Weird Tales, July 1954), and the untimely death is right (leaving only "old timers" to remember it).

Boris Dolgov isn't in the indexes for The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom by Sam Moskowitz (1954), All Our Yesterdays: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the Forties by Harry Warner, Jr. (1969), or The Futurians: The Story of the Science Fiction "Family" of the 30's That Produced Today's Top SF Writers and Editors by Damon Knight (1977). I have only a paperback edition of The Way the Future Was: A Memoir by Frederik Pohl (1979). There isn't any index, and I came up empty in only a cursory search of the text. The Mysterious Dolgov seems to have remained mysterious even among science fiction fans, writers, artists, and editors of the 1930s and '40s. It would seem also that he was a pretty peripheral figure. If a fan-based artist of that time was remembered at all, he was the middle third of the pen name Dolbokov, i.e., Hannes Bok. All of that is a shame because Boris Dolgov was a good and interesting artist.

Now for the second whole bit of evidence: In the Manhattan City Directory of 1957, there is a listing for a Boris Dolgoff with an address of 630 East 14th Street and a telephone number of O Regn 3-8552. (I take that to mean that his number was OR3-8552, or 673-8552.) I don't know much about Manhattan (the Bronx and Staten Island, too), but it looks like that address would fall within the East Village. In reading about the East Village on that ultimate source of all knowledge, Wikipedia, I find that it was home to the Yiddish Theatre District in the early to mid twentieth century, also that it became home to poets, artists, musicians, writers, and general Beatniks during the 1950s. That second fact is pertinent when we're talking about an artist, but the first fact may be pertinent, too. The reason is that there was a Jewish performer of the 1920s through the early 1950s who shared Boris Dolgoff's last name, and so maybe we have a place of origin and a possible family member for the Mysterious Dolgov.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Mysterious Dolgov-Part Two

Readers have suggested two possible identities for the Mysterious Dolgov. Hannes Bok is one. The other is Boris Artzybasheff.

Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965)

Once or twice a century, an artist comes along whose vision is so extraordinary that he can hardly be categorized or placed with other artists. Boris Artzybasheff was one of these artists. He was born on May 25, 1899, in Kharkov, in what is now Ukraine. I believe that birthdate was under the old calendar, as Artzybasheff gave his birthdate as June 5, 1899, in his petition for naturalization. He arrived in the United States, at the port of New York, on June 17, 1919, after having left Russia from the Black Sea port of Novorsisk more than a month before. I don't know much about the tangled and tragic history of the Russian Revolution, but I believe Novorsisk may have been a last refuge of White Russian forces in 1918-1920. There were pogroms in Ukraine at about the same time, carried out by the Green Army, but I believe Artzybasheff's family to have been Eastern Orthodox and not Jewish. Still, socialism has its depredations, and the young artist escaped from them at about the same time that so many of his countrymen and countrywomen did, including at least three tellers of weird tales, Maria Moravsky (1889-1947), Nadia Lavrova (1897-1989), and Edith M. Almedingen (1898-1973). Artzybasheff's father, Mikhail Artsybashev (1878-1927), also an artist, escaped not long after his son, going to Poland in 1923. Artsybashev was a fierce opponent of Bolshevism and edited a newspaper in Poland called For Liberty! According to endlessly repeated sources on the Internet, his surname became the root of a Soviet pejorative, artsybashevchina.

One of my readers has suggested that Boris Artzybasheff, who by the 1940s was a well-established and successful commercial artist and illustrator, contributed to Weird Tales under the pseudonym Boris Dolgov, effectively slumming among the pulps. I don't like to call improbabilities impossibilities, but I also don't think that to be very likely. Although it's true that the Mysterious Dolgov worked in a uniquely 1940s style, his art bears little resemblance to that of the other Boris, Artzybasheff. Beyond that, Artzybasheff was famed for his advertising work, moreover for his covers for Time magazine, of which he created more than 200 from 1941 to 1966. It doesn't seem likely that he could have been induced to contribute to Weird Tales for the kind of pittances the magazine offered artists during the 1940s and '50s. I like writing about Boris Artzybasheff and showing his art. I would like to think that he could have contributed to "The Unique Magazine." But it just doesn't seem to me that he was Boris Dolgov, especially considering that there really was a person by that name and identity. We know that from the photograph shown in the previous posting (here). I'll show more evidence in the next. I would like to thank my reader, though, and invite him and others to continue to comment and offer their research, suggestions, recommendations, and so on. It's always good to explore possibilities.

Boris Artzybasheff in his studio, ca. mid 1940s. In contrast to the Mysterious Dolgov, Artzybasheff was well known and frequently photographed. He was also very successful and widely published as an artist. And we know a lot about his life, including his birthdate, May 25, 1899 (O.S.), and his death date, July 16, 1965. A dedicated artist to the end, Artzybasheff died in his studio in that artist's haven of Connecticut, in his case, in Lyme. Artzybasheff moved from New York City to Lyme in mid 1955 at his wife's behest. Tragically, she died just half a year later, on December 11, 1955. She was the former Elisabeth Southard Snyder (1904-1955), whom he had married on February 22, 1930, in Manhattan. They spent just a quarter of a century together. The image is from Forty Illustrators and How They Work by Ernest W. Watson (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1946), page 9.

As I said, Artzybasheff was an artist of extraordinary vision. He could only have understood that about himself, as demonstrated in the cover image and title of his own book, As I See, from 1954.

Artzybasheff was the son of Mikhail Artsybashev, or Artzybasheff as in this cover. The elder Artsybashev (1878-1927) was a Polish-Russian writer, editor, artist, and journalist. Among his novels was The Savage, published in paperback in 1951 when just about any piece of literature, high or low, could be put into print as long as it had a suitably trashy and suggestive cover. The artist here was Tobey. I'm pretty sure that he wasn't the painter Mark Tobey (1890-1976), who knew Hannes Bok, but like I said, I don't like to call improbabilities impossibilities.

Boris Artzybasheff was not only a painter but also a graphic artist. Here is what looks to be a scratchboard drawing from his own book, Poor Shaydullah, from 1931, reproduced in Forty Illustrators and How They Work. The Wizard of Oz-like character in the middle of that blossoming whatsit looks like George Bernard Shaw.

Artzybasheff was renowned for his personified machines. "I like machines," he said. "I would rather watch a 1,000-ton dredge dig a canal than see it done by 1,000 spent slaves lashed into submission." That quote, from The Hartford Courant, July 17, 1955, I think has hidden meaning in it, for Artzybasheff, having lived under socialism, had had personal experience with the mass slavery of the Machine Age. Another biographical note coming from this image: Artzybasheff was born in Kharkov, later site of four great battles during World War II between Nazis and Communists.

Artzybasheff's art might be called unique but it seems to me to have been a part of a distinctive look of mid-century American illustration, advertising art, and commercial art. For example, this image looks like it could have been created by the great James Flora (1914-1998) . . .

While this one bears resemblance to the crazy art of Basil Wolverton (1909-1978) . . .

And this one looks a little like drawings made by Hannes Bok (1914-1964), who of course collaborated with the Mysterious Dolgov. I'm not sure that Bok had repressed hostility, but I'm pretty sure that he had a repressed something or other.

There is still more to come in this series, including a possible death date and cause of death for Boris Dolgov.

Text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Mysterious Dolgov-Part One

I have written before about the artist Boris Dolgov, dates currently unknown, who contributed to Weird Tales in the 1940s and '50s. You can read what I wrote about him by clicking here. Almost nothing is known of Dolgov. We might wonder whether he ever really existed. I have comments from a couple of readers speculating that Boris Dolgov could have been Hannes Bok or even Boris Artzybasheff. I'll take those speculations one at a time.

Hannes Bok (1914-1964)
Boris Dolgov and Hannes Bok (né Wayne Francis Woodard) were friends who worked together on a few published illustrations under the combined name Dolbokov. I suspect that they met in New York City in about 1939-1941. Born in Kansas City but a wanderer in his childhood and young adulthood, Bok had arrived in the city from Seattle in December 1939. That was the same month in which his first illustrations appeared on the cover of and in Weird Tales. Dolgov's first illustration for "The Unique Magazine" was for Thorp McCluskey's short story "The Music from Infinity," from September 1941.

Dolgov may already have been in New York City when Bok arrived. He may even have been a native. Whatever the case, the two artists had met and had begun collaborating as early as the summer of 1941 when their first joint drawings, published under their Dolbokov name, appeared in Science Fiction Quarterly. The stories they illustrated together were "Earth Does Not Reply" by John B. Michel and Donald A. Wollheim and Michel's own "Path of Empire."

John B. Michel (1917-1968) and Donald A. Wollheim (1914-1990) were active in science fiction fandom in New York City during the 1930s and '40s. Bok (1914-1964) had been, too, in Los Angeles, before moving permanently to the East Coast. Damon Knight (1922-2002) reported that Bok attended a meeting of the New York-based science fiction fan club the Futurians on August 21, 1940. (The Futurians by Damon Knight [1977], p. 53) Those facts lead me to think that Dolgov came out of fandom, too, possibly New York fandom, and that he may have been around the same age as Bok, Michel, Wollheim, and Knight, who was the baby of the group.

Both Bok and Dolgov were acquainted with the renowned American painter and illustrator Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966). Proof of that is in a photograph that I have seen in three different places on the Internet. I'll show it again here:

American painter Maxfield Parrish (left) and Boris Dolgov (right) in a photograph taken by Hannes Bok. The date is supposed to have been sometime in the early 1940s. This image is from an unknown original source and has been repeatedly reproduced on the Internet, here for the fourth time at least. The original photograph was presumably taken at Parrish's home in Cornish, New Hampshire. If so, and if this really is a picture of Dolgov, then he and Bok may have scored a kind of coup, for as Susan E. Meyer wrote, "Parrish was an intensely private man, preferring to keep others at a distance at all times." (From America's Great Illustrators [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1978], p. 115.) There is distance even in this image. In later years, Parrish did not recall having met Bok. Bok told a different story.

Here are the three websites on which I have found the image above showing Parrish and Dolgov together:

• Notasdecine, June 2009, here.
• Null Entropy, October 26, 2012, here.
• Darkworlds Quarterly, January 12, 2020, here.

I suspect that each has simply copied from one of the previous sources, as I have done also. The website Notasdecine shows an accompanying photograph of Bok posing with a painting made by Parrish. That picture was presumably taken by Dolgov. Bok is known to have had art done by Parrish in his possession later in life.

If you look closely, you will see that the image reproduced here has been screened for printing. Presumably, then, this version was originally either in a book, a magazine, or a newspaper. It does not appear to have been scanned from a photographic print for reproduction on the Internet. That tells me that it was mass produced in print, on paper, and that there could be more information on it in that original published source. Now if we can just find the original source. A place to start might be in the writings or collections of either Emil Peteja (1915-2000), Bok's friend and biographer, or Gerry de la Ree (1924-1993), a science fiction fan and collector and also a Bok biographer.

In any case, if the story behind this picture is correct, then there really was a Boris Dolgov (or variation thereof--you'll get my meaning in a few days), and he was not Hannes Bok. I think you can see that in their artwork anyway. There are similarities to be sure, but it's clear to me that Bok had deep psychosexual problems and that these problems came out in his artwork. That's not to say that Dolgov didn't, but if even he did, they don't clearly show through in his work, which is far more innocent and even has a childlike quality. As some people have already noted, Dolgov's work also resembles that of Lee Brown Coye (1907-1981), who had psychosexual or just plain psychological problems of his own.

So, I think we can fairly say that Boris Dolgov was not Hannes Bok, based in part on the photograph shown above, but also, I think, on the respective works of art made by these two men. If you're okay with all of that, we can move on to Part Two.

Revised and corrected February 29, 2020
Original text copyright 2020 Terence E. Hanley

C. Hall Thompson (1923-1991)

Né Charles John Thompson
Author
Born March 17, 1923, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died February 11, 1991, presumably in Pennsylvania

C. Hall Thompson's name came up the other day while I was writing about Viking stories. He didn't write any Viking stories that I know of, but he did write a few Northerns--the Alaskan and Canadian type, not the Viking type--and several Westerns. He also wrote four stories for Weird Tales. While looking into his life and career, I came across an interesting bit of speculation put forth on the Internet. I'll get to that in a minute.

C. Hall Thompson and Weird Tales made their debut in the same month, March 1923. He was born on St. Patrick's Day and was christened almost three months later, on June 10, 1923, at Tabor Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. His baptismal name was Charles John Thompson. The Charles part came from his father. Before he was even out of high school, Thompson, a budding author, had adopted a pseudonym: from at least 1942 until the closing out of his career, he called himself C. Hall Thompson. The Hall part came from his mother, Helen Hall Thompson.

Thompson graduated from South Philadelphia High School for Boys in June 1942. He would have been a year older than his classmates, but I don't have an explanation for his delayed graduation. Even then he was a writer, for Thompson penned the review of his graduating class, calling it "Southern for Service." He may have been the Charles J. Thompson who, as a student at Vare Junior High School in Philadelphia, won second prize (junior group) and the grand sum of $3 for his entry in the National Peace Poster Contest in March 1938. Despite his efforts, war came to Europe a year and a half later. Although Thompson was of an age to serve when America went to war, I don't know that he did. However, he filled out a draft card in 1942 while residing in Philadelphia.

Thompson appears to have lived in Philadelphia and nearby places in Pennsylvania for all or most of his life, but I know almost nothing about him, and neither does anybody else as far as I can tell. Like I said, he had four stories in Weird Tales:

• "Spawn of the Green Abyss" (Nov. 1946)
• "The Will of Claude Ashur" (July 1947)
• "The Pale Criminal" (Sept. 1947)
• "Clay" (May 1948)

All have been reprinted again and again and a couple have even been translated and published in European editions.

Thompson's popularity as a teller of weird tales can be attributed in part to his authorship of some of the first Cthulhu Mythos stories told after the death of H.P. Lovecraft--told, that is, by someone other than members of Lovecraft's circle. (Lovecraft died two days before Thompson's fourteenth birthday.) There is a story on the Internet that August Derleth threatened Thompson with legal action if he did not cease writing tales set in a Lovecraftian universe. That story arrives without citation or attribution, but it would seem to go along with Derleth's reputation. (The more I read about him in regards to Lovecraft, the less I like him: Derleth seems to have been a man who loved something so much that he thought it was his.) Chased away from Weird Tales or not, Thompson sold nearly four dozen stories to Adventure, Argosy, Dime Western Stories, Frontier Stories, North-West Romances, 10 Story Western Magazine, and other titles, mostly Westerns, over the next six years. He also broke into the slicks with stories in Collier's and Esquire.

Thompson's magazine stories were published between 1945 and 1954 when their author was in his twenties and early thirties. Then, in the same year that Weird Tales came to an end, Thompson's magazine credits seem to have dried up. Pulps in general were dying off by the early 1950s, but Westerns were still strong, in paperback, at the movie theater, and on TV. Thompson had a few Westerns published in the 1950s: A Gun for Billy Reo in 1955, Under the Badge in 1957, and Montana! in 1959. Ace Double Editions issued Thompson's Western novel The Killing of Hallie James in 1969. Thompson is also supposed to have written stories for Sunday newspaper sections.

There is speculation online that C. Hall Thompson was the pseudonymous author of "The Dunstable Horror" (Apr. 1964) and "The Crib of Hell" (May 1965), both in Fantastic Stories of Imagination. (That thread appears on the website Thomas Ligotti Online, here.) Not very long ago (in geologic terms) I was working on some research to do with Lee Brown Coye. As it turns out, Coye illustrated "The Dunstable Horror," a serviceable pastiche of Lovecraft (and far superior to Derleth's own novel The Lurker at the Threshold, from 1945). This was Coye's final work for Fantastic. By 1964 he had already begun working for Derleth and Derleth's Arkham House. Coye had previously illustrated "The Will of Claude Ashur" and "Clay" by Thompson in Weird Tales. If Pendragon was indeed a pseudonym of C. Hall Thompson, then Coye would already have been familiar with his work.

In the summer of 1951, Thompson married Italian-born Isabella Elda Pirritano (1924-2009), a recent graduate of Temple University who had studied secondary education. She was also a choral singer. I don't know anything about their lives nor their long years together after 1969. Charles J. Thompson died on February 11, 1991, and was buried at Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. His wife survived him by nearly two decades and was laid to rest beside him in 2009.

C. Hall Thompson's Stories in Weird Tales

"Spawn of the Green Abyss" (Nov. 1946)

"The Will of Claude Ashur" (July 1947)

"The Pale Criminal" (Sept. 1947)

"Clay" (May 1948)

Further Reading

None except to read Thompson's stories.

C. Hall Thompson's first story for Weird Tales, "Spawn of the Green Abyss," from November 1946, was also his first and only cover story. The cover artist was the unfindable Boris Dolgov. His technique was unusual for a pulp cover, as it appears to be a pencil drawing tinted with watercolors.

Lee Brown Coye illustrated Thompson's next story for "The Unique Magazine," "The Will of Claude Ashur," from July 1947. This was also the first issue in which Coye's "Weirdisms" feature began in Weird Tales and the first in which the Damp Man, created by Allison V. Harding, appeared. Despite the eventual popularity of the Damp Man stories, Thompson had the lead story in that July 1947 issue.

I don't know whether "The Crib of Hell" by Arthur Pendragon was the cover story in the May 1965 issue of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, but I wanted to show the cover because I have detected a swipe, unfortunately made by an otherwise great and very admirable artist, Gray Morrow. You can see for yourself how oddly divided this image is. The part on the right is likely original. The part on the left, executed in an entirely different technique, is obviously a swipe. See the two images below. There is at least one person, by the way, who has speculated that Thompson and Pendragon were the same person. More on that in the next posting.

At the left is Jack Thurston's cover for Satan's Disciples by Robert Goldston (1962), and at the right is another artist's swipe done for the summer 1974 issue of Weird Tales. Who knows where the late Mr. Thurston's artwork will show up next? Update (Jan. 22, 2019): I have been thinking about this image, and it occurs to me that all of the artists who created versions of it may have been guilty of swiping it from an original source, Jack Thurston included. But what would the original source have been?

Text and captions copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley