I described my initial relationship with Susan as "like at first sight," and that's a fair appraisal. But I wasn't the only person who found Susan appealing...
My best friend in 1969 was Gary Steele; we had known each other since junior high and our shared love of comics made us buddies almost immediately. Our tastes in entertainment were sufficiently similar that we both expanded from comics to science fiction, fantasy, Doc Savage, Conan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and James Bond, among many other things.
I was fascinated to meet a girl who shared my interests, and so was Gary. I told him about Susan soon after my first conversation with her, and within a few weeks he was writing to her as well. From time to time, all three of us would even talk with one another, with Gary on one extension phone at my house and me on the other.
By late 1968, Gary and I had convinced Susan to join the amateur press alliance Myriad, which was created by our friend and fellow fan Stven Carlberg. (For those who don't know what I'm talking about: an amateur press alliance, or apa, is a construct in which contributors produce sufficient copies of their own individual fanzines for all the members, then mail those copies to an Official Editor or Central Mailer, who collates those fanzines into bundles containing one copy of each contribution from the various members and distributes those bundles to the membership. Those fanzines might contain art, reviews, original fiction, reviews, personal commentary, and "mailing comments"--responses to the various fanzines in the prior mailing. It's sort of a hybrid of fanzines and correspondence, and a lot of effort and creativity went into producing those apazines.) So not only were we both writing to Susan and occasionally talking with Susan, but we were contributing to the same apa.
Since Susan had no way of getting her Myriad apazine Vendetta reproduced (my apazine was not much'a nothin'--the same title I have now repurposed for this blog site), she asked Gary and me if we could do it. Somehow, we had convinced Mrs. Higgins and Mrs. Armona at West Rome High School to let us use the school's ditto machine if we supplied our own paper and ditto masters, so we provided ditto masters to Susan (since there was nowhere in Cedartown for her to buy them) and she would mail us her contributions, which we would print. A few months later, Gary and I bought our own Heyer mimeo machines, so we could actually print our fanzine at home--and at that point, Susan began doing her apazine on mimeo stencils.
(If you want to know all about ditto machines, aka spirit duplicators, and mimeo machines, there are sites that explain it, but here's a quick, simple explanation: a ditto machine uses a two-layer master that transfers carbon to the back of the sheet on which you type and/or draw. When that master is wrapped around a drum and moistened with an alcohol solution, a little of the purple carbon is transferred to a piece of paper. If you remember those old purple school handouts from the pre-xerox days--the ones that smelled like alcohol--that was a ditto machine. Yeah, I realize that we called them mimeo when we were in school but they weren't. Mimeo machines use a wax-covered stencil; when you type or draw on it, it displaces the wax, which allows ink to pass through that portion of the stencil. Put the stencil on a machine with an ink-covered drum and run paper through it and it makes an ink print on the paper. It's more durable, more permanent, and much more messy. I know of no veteran mimeo fanzine publishers who don't have at least one story about an ink-related disaster involving a spill, a spatter, or a curious cat.)
Sharing an apa with Susan was great--it afforded me one more opportunity to get to know about her, and it allowed me to enjoy her "public writing," which was a perfect complement to the letters that she sent me on average twice a week. I was learning a lot about Susan, her tastes, and her impressive word-crafting skills. The more I read, the more I liked her, even when she made it clear that she had no appreciation for Marvel Comics, finding them overwritten and melodramatic. We would talk about that many times over the years, and I remember her even courteously expressing the same thoughts to then-Marvel-editor Roy Thomas when we met him in New Orleans in 1973. I never did change her mind on that subject.
Susan and I continued to make plans to see one another whenever my family went to Cedartown to visit my grandmother; I would sometimes pick up her stencils when I was there so that I could print her apazine and mail it in with mine. It was during my visit to Cedartown in early 1969 that Susan mentioned that Gary had asked her if it would be okay for him to drive to Cedartown and visit her sometime.
I was surprised, because Gary hadn't mentioned it to me. But then I realized why: in his roundabout way, Gary was asking Susan to go on a date with him. since Gary was a few months older than me, he had his driver's license in early 1969, while I wouldn't get mine until late August of that same year.
I asked Susan if they had made arrangements to get together. "No," she said. "I asked him if you were coming up with him, and he said no, so I didn't talk with him about it any more."
That made me happy.
I had felt vaguely bothered when I learned that Gary might be seeing Susan without me; I now realize that was teenage jealousy rearing its head. But I felt great when Susan indicated that she didn't want to see Gary without seeing me.
And that was the point when, in spite of my teenage blitheness, I realized that my feelings for Susan were more than just feelings of one fan friend for another. And suddenly, I was counting down the months until I could get my own driver's license and make the drive to Cedartown on my own...
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