Jessie Bond (1894-1991)

Jessie C. Bond Munroe
Aka Bonnie Bee, Bonnie Bond, Bonnie Munroe
Fashion Artist, Illustrator, Poet, Painter
Born January 4, 1894, Decatur, Illinois
Died January 20, 1991, Palm Beach County, Florida

She was born in January, married in January, and died in January, and so in January I will write about artist and poet Jessie Bond. She was born on January 4, 1894, in Decatur, Illinois. Her father, William Branham Bond (1853-1913), was a millwright. Younger than her husband by a generation, Jessie's mother, Flora Etta (Williams) Bond (1871-1949), was a solicitor of public houses and later kept boarders. (Maybe those two things are the same.) Jessie Bond lived in and received her schooling in Decatur, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri. By 1920, she and her mother were in Indianapolis. Flora Bond lived on Massachusetts Avenue in that census year. In 1930, she resided on 30th Street, just west of Meridian Avenue. By then her daughter had gone far from home and would soon be herself a mother.

Jessie Bond is someone new to me. Her last name is in Jaffery & Cook's Collector's Index to Weird Tales. I found her first name in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Jessie Bond had six known illustrations in Weird Tales, from December 1924 to March 1925. These were in Farnsworth Wright's first half-year as editor of the magazine. I pretty quickly found an artist named Jessie Bond who lived in Florida. But was she the same Jessie Bond? What could her connection have been to Weird Tales? Then I found that Jessie Bond had moved to Florida in late 1924 from Indianapolis. I also found that she had studied at the John Herron School of Art in that same city. Remember that the editorial offices of Weird Tales magazine were in Indianapolis from 1923 to 1926. Weird Tales and Farnsworth Wright had addresses in the Circle City during those years, and they found artists among its residents, including William F. Heitman and George O. Olinick. Jessie Bond was one of them, too.

To start again, Jessie Bond went to school in St. Louis. In 1918-1919, she studied at the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. (One of her classmates was Hoosier cartoonist Russell Berg [1901-1966].) Jessie worked as a staff artist at the William H. Block Company department store in Indianapolis. Founded in 1874 by an Austro-Hungarian immigrant, Wilhelm Herman Bloch (1855-1928), the Wm. H. Block Co., or Block's, was a mainstay in downtown Indianapolis for many decades. I remember going there with my mother when we were children. Maybe that was the first time I ever rode in an elevator. I remember full-page, hand-drawn fashion advertisements for Block's clothing in the Indianapolis Star. These were a mainstay, too. The Block's building, located at the corner of Illinois and Market streets, was designed by architects Vonnegut & Bohn, the Vonnegut part for Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. (1884-1957). He was the father of author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007), who found success early on in the pages of slick magazines and probably never had to turn to the pulps for income. I wouldn't rule out that he read Weird Tales as a child. I wonder if he knew that "The Unique Magazine" had originated in the city of his birth.

About the time that October turned into November 1924, Jessie Bond moved from Indianapolis to Miami, Florida. She must have been joyous in her move from a midwestern November to an eternal far southern summer. In a contemporaneous newspaper feature article, she was quoted as saying, "I find that I go at my work here with a different spirit. Miami is a playground, and that spirit seems to unconsciously enter into one, until one ceases to take even work seriously, and one does it more for the joy of accomplishment."

By the time she moved, Jessie must have already established a connection to Farnsworth Wright and Weird Tales. He was brand new as editor in November 1924. She had one or two drawings in each issue from December 1924 until March 1925, including two in the January 1925 issue. One of these was for "The Specter Priestess of Wrightstone" by Herman F. Wright. Herman F. Wright is an unknown author. I wonder now if he was actually Farnsworth Wright--F. Wright--in disguise. Wright had another work, a poem called "Two Crows," in that same issue. This was published under his pseudonym Francis Hard.

For five years Jessie Bond worked as a fashion artist for William M. Burdine's Sons department store in Miami. She also conducted the fashion page at the Miami Herald for one season. On January 11, 1928, she married New York native Robert Morris "Bob" Munroe (1896-1971) in Broward County, Florida. He worked as a newspaper columnist and as the director of advertising and publicity for the city of Coral Gables. Their son, John Macgregor Munroe, Ph.D., born on February 2, 1931, died just three years and three months ago, on November 4, 2021, at age ninety. He was a musician, educator, and choir director. He named one of his own daughters Bonnie, presumably after her grandmother . . .

Bob Munroe was a humorist and poet. His wife was a poet, too. Jessie Bond wrote under a pen name, "Bonnie Bee." She was also called Bonnie Bond and Bonnie Munroe, and she had poems in the New York World, the Tampa Morning Tribune, and Florida Poets--1931, edited by Henry Harrison. Bob and Jessie Munroe were acquainted with Vivian Yeiser Laramore (1892-1975), the first and only female poet laureate of the State of Florida. Vivian wrote about both of them in her column "Miami Muse," about Florida poets, in the Miami Daily News. Imagine a time when there was poetry in newspapers and a newspaper column was devoted every week to poets and their work.

After the birth of her son, Jessie became a portrait painter. She liked to collect seashells, and she loved the subtropics of Florida and the Bahamas. She seems to have lived in Florida for the rest of her blessedly long life. Jessie C. Bond Munroe died on January 20, 1991, in Palm Beach County, Florida. She was ninety-seven years old.

Jessie Bond's Illustrations in Weird Tales
"Fairy Gossamer" by Harry Harrison Kroll (Dec. 1924)
"Phantoms" by Laurence R. D'Orsay (Jan. 1925)
"The Specter Priestess of Wrightstone" by Herman F. Wright (Jan. 1925)
"An Unclaimed Reward" by Strickland Gillilan (Feb. 1925)
"The Magic of Dai Nippon" by J.U. Giesy (Feb. 1925)
"Black Curtains" by G. Frederick Montefiore (Mar. 1925)

(Of the six authors listed above, two--Harry Harrison Kroll and Strickland Gillilan--can be classed as Hoosiers. If Herman F. Wright was Farnsworth Wright, then that would make three. The FictionMags Index lists another credit for Jessie Bond, illustrations for "New Stories of Gilbert and Sullivan," with Rupert D'Oyly Carte, J. M. Gordon, Isabel Jay, Henry A. Lytton, and Courtice Pounds, published in The Strand Magazine in December 1925.)

Further Reading

• "Business Girls Sound Praises of Work and Recreation in Miami" by Isabel Stone, The Herald (Miami, Florida), November 15, 1924, page 4-B.

• "Miami Muse: A Weekly Column Devoted to Florida's Poets" by Vivian Yeiser Laramore, Miami Daily News, March 26, 1933, Society Section, page 11.

• "Miami Muse: A Weekly Column Devoted to Florida's Poets" by Vivian Yeiser Laramore, Miami Daily News, September 22, 1935, page 7, which includes some of her poems.

• "Gables Artist Plays Role of Santa To Give Orphan Long-Sought Lessons" by Judy Whitney Malone, Miami Daily News, December 15, 1939, page 19. 

Jessie Bond Munroe, aka Bonnie Munroe, in a newspaper photo accompanying the feature article "Gables Artist Plays Role of Santa To Give Orphan Long-Sought Lessons" by Judy Whitney Malone, in the Miami Daily News, December 15, 1939, page 19.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

World Tales (1985)

In 1985, the World Fantasy Convention was held at the Doubletree Hotel in Tucson, Arizona. The dates were October 31 to November 3, 1985. The souvenir book of the convention is entitled World Tales, and it was made to look like an issue of "The Unique Magazine." Not only does it look like an issue of Weird Tales, it is superior in quality to any issue published up until that time. You might as well call it an honorary issue of the magazine, published at a time when Weird Tales was not. The cover art is by Victoria Poyser. That keeps with the precedent of cover art by a woman artist. In the 1930s and '40s, she was Margaret Brundage. In the program book of two years before, she was Rowena Morrill. World Tales is pulp-sized, perfect bound, and contains 88 pages. The paper is off-white and beautifully made. The cover stock is excellent, and the typeface resembles that of a pulp magazine of long ago. Donald D. Markstein was the man behind the book. He designed, produced, and packaged World Tales. Weird Tales-related content includes an appreciation of guest of honor Evangeline Walton, a poem by Clark Ashton Smith, and a letter's column called "The Crow's Nest," but then the whole issue is Weird Tales-related in that it's essentially a facsimile of the original. If you collect issues of Weird Tales, you might want to add this book to your collection.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

R.M. Mally & the Misattributed Cover

When I started writing this blog in 2011, one of my beginning sources was The Collector's Index to Weird Tales, written and compiled by Sheldon R. Jaffery and Fred Cook and published in 1985 by Bowling Green State University Popular Press. It's an indispensable book and the result of some real yeomanlike work. If you doubt that, consider sitting in a library, before there was an Internet, and making long lists from 279 issues and thousands of pages of a magazine that may very well have crumbled a little bit more every time you touched it. Even so, there are errors in the book. One of them involves a cover created by an artist that Jaffery and Cook called "Washburn." That cover was for the November 1923 issue of Weird Tales. We now know the real artist's name to have been R.M. Mally.

In this blog, I have perpetuated Jaffery and Cook's error. I'm in the process of correcting my errors. I believe it was a reader named Jean-Yves Freyburger of l'Île-de-France who pointed out my error to me. On December 13, 2014, I posted an entry called "Ghosts on the Cover of Weird Tales" in which I misattributed the authorship of Mally's cover to the presumably nonexistent Washburn. Jean-Yves wrote two comments, the first on September 15, 2023, the second on November 21, 2023. In his second comment, Jean-Yves referenced his post on Facebook under a group heading called "Pulp Magazines Imagination." He posted his message and images on October 7, 2023, in between his two messages posted on this blog. You can see what he posted by clicking on the following URL:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/pulpsmagazines/permalink/1063225801286581/?mibextid=oMANbw

Jean-Yves was kind enough to post nine images. In his second image, a close-up of the upper righthand corner of the November 1923 cover of Weird Tales, you can clearly see the artist's last name: Mally. I believe Jean-Yves received those images from David Saunders, who writes about pulp artists on his blog Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists. Mr. Saunders' entry on Mally is at the following URL:

https://www.pulpartists.com/Mally.html

In that entry, David Saunders identifies R.M. Mally as George William Mally (1892-1971). Even so, there is the question of the initials and Mally's use of a seal or cartouche below his signature. Mr. Saunders has identified that seal as containing the initials of Mally's wife, Ruth Lena Mikelson Mally (1896-1977). "R.M. Mally," then, would seem to be the initials of Mally's wife, in which case, we should consider the possibility that she was the artist, or that they were collaborators. David Saunders brings up that possibility as well, but I believe I read about it somewhere before he posted his biography of Mally, which has a copyright notice of 2023. Now we should go back in time again.

On June 9, 2013, Weird Tales scholar Randal A. Everts wrote to me asking my opinion of his supposition that Mally the Weird Tales artist was George William Mally of Chicago. He had received a message from Mally's granddaughter, who had consulted her own father, Mally's son, before responding. In reference to her grandfather, she wrote: "While he did live and work in Chicago his whole life, and was an artist, we don't think he is the person you are looking for. His work was mostly watercolors of farm or landscape scenes, with some oil portraits and etching of bridges." Based on the evidence, I expressed an opinion to Mr. Everts that George William Mally was not R.M. Mally. The difference in the initials alone would have argued against the idea. However, I did point out Mally's use of a seal or cartouche below the signature (I called it a "doo-dad"), writing that, if we knew what it says, "[i]t might offer a clue." In any case, if David Saunders is correct, then Randal Everts was correct before him, ten years before him in fact. That's nothing at all against Mr. Saunders, but I believe Mr. Everts deserves every credit for being the first (apparently) to solve the mystery of who was R.M. Mally. And I regret expressing my opinion that George M. Mally probably was not R.M Mally. I also regret, though I had nothing to do with it, that Mally's family seems not to have known that George W. Mally created covers for Weird Tales.

That still leaves open the question of Ruth M. Mally's involvement in the creation of those covers of 1923-1924. If she was in fact an artist--or the artist--then she was the first woman cover artist for "The Unique Magazine" and possibly one of the first--if not the first--for any pulp magazine. And I guess if she was the artist, I was right after all. But I take no pleasure in that.

The Mallys were young at the time they created their covers, George in his early thirties, Ruth in her late twenties. As an artist myself, I recognize the signs of a young, inexperienced, or untrained artist at work. The draftsmanship in Mally's cover, shown below, isn't firm, to be sure. There's barely enough torso under the man's coat to make him a fully normal human. The skeleton in the foreground is also not very well made. "Untrained" might be the operative word here, in which case we might conclude that Ruth Mally really was the artist. Maybe she created some of their covers, maybe her husband created some, and maybe sometimes they worked together. Or maybe as a commercial artist, he received the assignment and simply passed it on to her. By the way, there was a precedent for an artist's code placed below the artist's signatures: when Fontaine Fox, creator of Toonerville Folks, signed his work, he underlined his signature, sometimes a lot, sometimes with only a few lines. The more lines that appeared under his name, the more it was his own work rather than the work of his assistant.

Before closing, I should point out that there was a writer for Weird Tales named Kirk Mashburn. I wonder if Jaffery and Cook got their notes mixed up somehow, and on top of that, turned an M into a W. Another mystery.

I would like to thank Jean-Yves Freyburger for his contribution, but I would also like to thank Randal A. Everts for his own yeomanlike work over the last several decades in uncovering and discovering the authors and artists who contributed to Weird Tales, as well as for all of his contributions to this blog and to my understanding of the magazine. If you're reading, Mr. Everts, I would like to hear from you again.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Belle Goldschlager (1902-1988)

Aka Belle Baranceanu
Illustrator, Printmaker, Painter, Muralist, Teacher
Born July 17, 1902, Chicago, Illinois
Died January 17, 1988, La Jolla, California

Belle Goldschlager was born on July 17, 1902, in Chicago to Romanian-Jewish immigrants Abram Goldschlager and Mary Agnes Baranceanu Goldschlager. Belle had one sister, Teresa (1904-1987). When they were young, their parents divorced or separated and the girls were sent to live on their grandparents' farm in Williston, North Dakota. Belle was interested in dance and art, Teresa in music. Their family encouraged them in their interests.

The girls' parents reunited in 1920. Belle and Teresa went to live with them once again, in Minneapolis. Belle Goldschlager graduated from West High School in 1921 and studied at the Minneapolis School of Art under Anthony Angarola. She graduated in 1924 and spent 1924-1925 in post-graduate studies. In 1925 or 1926, she went to the Art Institute of Chicago to further her studies. Angarola was there at about that time also, and in that brief window, Belle Goldschlager contributed three illustrations to Weird Tales magazine. They were printed in the February and April issues of 1926.

Belle's father objected to her relationship with Angarola, one that had grown from teacher-student to something more. In 1926 or 1927, he sent her to live with her uncle, Zack Baroney, in Los Angeles. She spent two years in California and returned to Chicago in 1928 or 1929. Anthony Angarola had spent the year in Europe (Aug. 1928-Aug. 1929) on a Guggenheim Fellowship. At some point the two were engaged to be married, but Angarola died suddenly within days of his return to Chicago. Despite the loss, Belle Goldschlager stayed on in Chicago, teaching, painting, and exhibiting her work.

In 1932, Belle Goldschlager changed her name to Belle Baranceanu, her mother's maiden name. The following year she relocated to San Diego. Belle Baranceanu was a painter, printmaker, illustrator, and muralist. She also taught at numerous institutions, including the Frances Parker School (1946-1969), the San Diego School of Arts and Crafts (1946-1951), California Western University (1959), and the La Jolla School of Arts and Crafts. Her students called her "Miss B." Belle also painted murals in the La Jolla Post Office, La Jolla High School, and Roosevelt Junior High School. In 1950 she was elected president of the San Diego Art Guild.

Belle Baranceanu took part in many exhibitions from 1926 to 1985 and won a number of awards from 1931 to 1945. In addition to drawing pictures for Weird Tales, she illustrated two textbooks of gynecology written by Dr. George Huff. Late in life, she was afflicted by Alzheimer's Disease. Belle Goldschlager Baranceanu died on January 17, 1988, in La Jolla, California. Her estate is managed by the San Diego Historical Society.

Belle Goldschlager's Illustrations in Weird Tales

"Red Ether" (Part One) by Pettersen Marzoni (Feb. 1926)

"The Other Half" by Edwin L. Sabin (Feb. 1926)

"The Outsider" by H.P. Lovecraft (Apr. 1926)

Further Reading

A simple search will turn up plenty of information on and images by Belle Baranceanu.

Note: In Jaffery and Cook's index to Weird Tales, Belle Goldschlager is misidentified as "B. Goldschlagel."

Three paintings by Belle Goldschlager Baranceanu, top to bottom: "The Bobs at Riverview Park," "Still-Life," and "The Johnson Girl." 

And because she is so striking, two photographs of the artist in her roles as muralist and printmaker. Notice how her pose in the top photograph echoes that of the figure behind her.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Lucille Webster Holling (1900-1989)

Illustrator, Advertising Artist, Commercial Artist, Fashion Designer and Illustrator, Set Designer, Teacher

Born December 8, 1900, Valparaiso, Indiana

Died December 31, 1989, Verdugo City, California

Lucille Webster was born on December 8, 1900, in Valparaiso, Indiana. Her father, George A. Webster (1854-1924), was a Canadian-born photographer. Her mother was Nellie Carpenter Webster (1862-1951). As a child, Lucille lived with her parents and her older sister in Bloomfield, Indiana, and in Chicago. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and shared a studio with her sister, Mildred. Lucille Webster married another artist, Holling Clancy Holling (1900-1973), in 1925, the same year in which he legally acquired his new name. Born Holling Allison Clancy in Holling Corners, Michigan, Holling graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and worked in taxidermy at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He also studied with anthropologist Ralph Linton. Together Holling Clancy Holling and his new wife Lucille Holling set out on an adventure in 1926-1927 with the first University World Cruise, sponsored by New York University. Lucille designed scenery and costumes for the drama department while her husband served as a shipboard instructor of art. There would be many more travels to come.

Lucille Holling and her husband worked in advertising and as commercial artists and illustrators. In addition to drawing fashion illustrations, Lucille Webster Holling illustrated Kimo: The Whistling Boy by Alice Cooper Bailey (1928), Wedding of the Paper Dolls (a coloring book, 1935), and Songs from Around a Toadstool Table by Rowena Bastin Bennett (1937). She also contributed a cover illustration--one of the finest--to the pulp magazine Oriental Stories (later called The Magic Carpet Magazine) in Autumn 1931. Holling Clancy Holling is renowned for his many beautifully illustrated children's books. Less well known is the fact that his wife assisted him on several of them, including Roll Away Twins (1927), Choo-Me-Shoo the Eskimo (1928), The Book of Indians (1935), The Book of Cowboys (1936), Little Buffalo Boy (1939), and Pagoo (1957). The couple also illustrated Road in Storyland (1932) and The Magic Story Tree (1964).

The Hollings lived in southern California as early as 1930. In 1951, Lucille Holling designed and oversaw the construction of their home and studio in Pasadena. Holling Clancy Holling, a jack-of-all-trades and a man well worthy of his own written biography, died on September 7, 1973. His wife survived him by more than a decade. Lucille Webster Holling died on December 31, 1989, in Verdugo City, California, at age eighty-nine.

Lucille Webster Holling's Cover for Oriental Stories

Autumn 1931

Further Reading

For further reading, see the blog devoted to Holling Clancy Holling, called, conveniently enough, "Holling Clancy Holling," here. There is or was also a museum devoted to him in Leslie, Michigan. The Hollings' papers are at UCLA and the University of Oregon.

Two illustrations by Lucille Webster Holling from Kimo: The Whistling Boy by Alice Cooper Bailey (1928). Incidentally, an illustration I posted previously on my Indiana Illustrators and Hoosier Cartoonists blog, drawn by Lucille and showing a biplane over a tropical coastline (at this link), is also from this book. It may or may not have been used as a travel poster.

Lucille Holling's lone cover for Oriental Stories (Autumn 1931) and perhaps her only pulp magazine cover. She would very likely have outclassed many in that field.

Finally, the cover of Songs from Around a Toadstool Table by Rowena Bastin Bennett (1937), drawn by Lucille Webster Holling.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley