While Will’s choice of lifestyle kept him from close relationships with many of his fellows, he admired and respected them. He felt the award was a huge honor, which it was, and winning it gave him a great deal of pleasure.
Eric Flint in The World Turned Upside Down, an anthology published by Baen Publishing, Inc., 2005, comments on the fact that this, and the awarding in 1996 of a Retro Hugo for “First Contact,” were Will’s only major science fiction awards (he never won the Nebula). Flint says: To be sure the major SF awards like all such awards are notoriously subject to the popularity of the recipient with the relatively small numbers of people who cast the votes. And since Leinster paid no attention to them — he rarely if ever attended a science fiction convention, and had very little contact with other science fiction writers — it’s not surprising that they tended to ignore him in return.
Flint further commented, “Maybe familiarity created contempt,” and
“Leinster was there at the creation of science fiction — he created much of it himself.”
It is true that Will attended few conventions but this is probably related more to the fact that he, and he and Mary together, did not travel except by car and on the East Coast. They did not fly. His only airplane flight was after Mary died, and he visited Jo-an in London. During the 12 years that Billee lived in the midwest, he and Mary never visited, and the only time they visited their daughter Mary in New England was when Billee drove them from New York.
In addition, when fans first began to organize science fiction conventions, he was in his forties. The organizers were a generation younger, most of them in their twenties.
During the 1950s, Will became once again reconciled with his mother, Mamie, after twenty years of estrangement. It was his daughter Billee who brought them together. When Billee was a young teen, she knew and enjoyed her friends’ grandmothers and felt a deep sense of loss at never knowing her 124
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own. Asking her mother for her grandmother’s address, she wrote to Mamie, and they began to exchange letters. Then, when Billee was at Sweet Briar College in Virginia in 1945, she found that a classmate lived in Portsmouth.
She went home with her for a weekend and met Mamie for the first time.
Later, after she was married and her oldest daughter, Pamela, was born, Billee took an opportunity to visit her grandmother to show Mamie her first great-grandchild. She found Mamie, at 84, to be as vibrant and interested in life as her son Will.
Mamie lived in a room in the historic Monroe Hotel in downtown Portsmouth which was filled with memorabilia, odd pieces of silver, and bound copies of her son George’s stories. She relished the location, the freedom to walk anywhere she wanted in the center of the city, and the proximity to her brother Oliver Murry, half-sisters Jenny Watts Davis and Grace Watts Syer, and their children. She had her own style. To the end of her life, she wore high-necked Edwardian net inserts that she made herself. Her granddaughter Betty bought the cotton net for her in New York when she could no longer find it in Virginia.
Thanks to Billee’s reconnection, when Will and Mary were beginning to spend more time at Clay Bank, Will began to repair his relationship with his mother. They began to visit her often, bringing Jo-an and, when she was in Gloucester, Betty as well.
In 1953, Will dedicated the book Space Platform to her, an act that pleased her immensely.
Mamie was 90 that year, and The Norfolk Virginian Pilot sent a reporter to interview her. She explained that she was living at the Monroe Hotel in downtown Portsmouth because it enabled her to be free to go anywhere she wanted at any time. “If I want to go to the movies at 9 o’clock at night, I can.” In 1957, when she was 94, the hotel was destroyed by fire, and a newspaper reporter asked her if she had to be carried down the stairs from her third floor room.
“Of course not,” she said. She said she had put on her stockings and her rings, and “I walked down by myself.” But all her belongings, including the bound collection of stories written by Will’s brother George, were completely destroyed.
Afterwards, she spent time with her half-sisters in Portsmouth, and with Will and Mary in Clay Bank, which was much too quiet for her. She stayed for a while at the Botetourt Hotel in Gloucester Court House, which she enjoyed more, because she could sit on the big front porch and chat to everyone who came by. However, at 95, she found it difficult to settle anywhere and finally decided to move into The Home For the Aged in Portsmouth.
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In a letter to Jo-an at college in 1958, Will wrote: Your grandmother does not look well. She is raising an unusual amount of hell, even for her, but she acts as if her heart isn’t in it and she looks very ill indeed. If I sound cold-blooded, it is because she makes me feel so hideously guilty because I can’t make things the way she wants them. But it is starkly impossible to rebuild the hotel and set her back in it with everything as it was before the fire.
She died, on October 20, 1959, less than three months shy of her 97th birthday.
Billee was disappointed that Will and Mary, still living in New York, couldn’t meet her in Gloucester when she visited Mamie in 1948. She and her husband and baby were heading home to Minnesota after her first visit to Florida to meet her in-laws, and they couldn’t extend the trip to New York.
Will and Mary’s pre-war seven-passenger Plymouth was not reliable enough for the drive down, and they were disappointed, too. Billee’s family car, a 1938 LaSalle, was in no better shape. They drove the last 21 hours without turning off the engine, even when buying gas, because the car had trouble starting. Arriving at their apartment in St. Paul, they parked it in front of the building and had it towed away.
Happily, Billee spent several weeks with Will and Mary in 1952, bringing both Pam and her second daughter, Gail, who was born in 1950. The family was moving to Kansas City, Missouri, where her husband had taken a new job. They had bought a house in Minnesota, and it sold quickly. Rental apart-ments were still scarce in Kansas City at that time, so Billee and her girls went to New York to wait until a new home was ready.
Will had a hard time relating to very young children who were strangers to him, but he enjoyed his granddaughters thoroughly when they were older and spending a lot of time with him in Virginia. Mary, however, relished being a grandmother from the beginning and bored everyone with her excitement, telling anyone who would listen that Pam and Gail were coming. She was forgiving even when Gail, at age two, found a loose seam in the Beechhurst apartment’s wallpaper and pulled off a piece. She said, “I knew I should have fixed that.”
Will’s writing continued without pause. He reported to Jo-an early in 1957: The news is on this order, I’ve finished a novelette for John Campbell, which also finishes a book that both Marty [Greenberg] and [Thomas] Bouregy
[Avalon Books] both want to publish hard-cover, and I think it will be a lousy book which, nevertheless, I will try to sell direct to a reprint. [ This may have been “City on the Moon” published by Avalon in 1957 and reprinted by Ace in 1958. ] I have a feeling that I will get more out of it. I have the page-proofs on
“Colonial Survey” [Gnome, 1957] and take them back tomorrow....
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I’m simply dumb. Copying all day yesterday and the day before, finished up today, proof-reading, and now I’ve got to go and make corrections ... I wish I could think of something witty or whatnot. Tomorrow I go to John Campbell’s, to the new high school magazine, to CBS, to Rogers’ [ Terrill, his agent], to Marty Greenberg’s, and possibly McFadden’s [ sic]. No high adventure there!
Later that year again, he wrote, “I had a play on radio today, and didn’t get a chance to tape it. Galaxy called up. They supply the material for a science fiction radio show [ X Minus One] which is going to use, “Sam, This Is You.” Will and John Campbell met frequently and respected each other. Bob Silverberg, who has the distinction of winning major awards in every
decade from the 1950s to the 2000s, still remembers an incident when he met them together in Campbell’s office.
I didn’t know Will Jenkins well — he was almost 40 years my senior, after all — but I did have one memorable encounter with him in March of 1956, exactly ten years after “A Logic Named Joe” was published. I was a senior in college but I had already begun my career as a professional writer, and that day I brought my newest story to the office of the legendary editor John W. Campbell, who had dominated the SF world since before I was old enough to read. Will Jenkins happened to be in Campbell’s office that day, and I said something appropriately awestricken.
Then, to my horror, John proceeded to read my new story right in front of both of us. After about ten minutes he looked up and said, “There’s something wrong with this, but I am not sure what it is. Will, would you take a look?” And he handed my manuscript across the desk to Will Jenkins. I sat there squirming, aghast all over again, as the author of “First Contact” and “Sidewise in Time” read my story, too. And at last he said, in that gentle, Virginia accented voice of his, “I think the problem is here, in the next-to-last-paragraph.”
“That’s absolutely right,” Campbell said. “Get to work, Bob.” He pointed to a typewriter on a desk nearby. I revised that paragraph then and there, and sold the story on the spot.
Always excited by new ideas and information, in 1959 Will became interested in Panama, possibly influenced by new friends recently moved to Gloucester after many years in that country. As he wrote to Jo-an on October 17, 1959:
I got some beautiful material for a book on Panama. (They’re going to try to take back the Panama Canal, a la Suez, probably next year. [ Negotiations toward a new settlement began in 1974, and resulted in the Torrijos-Carter Treaties in 1977. ] I’ve offers of introductions to everybody who knows the story, the Ambas-sador in Washington, free quarters in Panama to write the book, which is so hot it makes the Ugly American look like dry ice by comparison — and so far I can’t find anybody who’ll get excited about it.
His fascination with scientific development was constant, however, as he wrote to Jo-an at college early in 1958:
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Irving Dischinger [ a long-time friend from Gloucester] called. He’s designing a titanium mill. The doggoned stuff is frantically difficult to work. Rolled cold, it is brittle. Rolled at 1000d it is ideal for airplane work. Terrific tensile strength (twice as strong as steel, etc.) and weighs only 60 percent more than aluminum. But when heated it absorbs oxygen, nitrogen, helium, C02, chlo-rine — anything you please. And when it has absorbed them it gets brittle. It should be rolled in a vacuum. Irving’s going to put a set of rollers between two chambers filled with argon (!) as it is the only stuff it won’t absorb, and roll it back and forth between them, with hydrogen-flame “curtains” to keep it hot and confine the argon.... I asked why he didn’t electroplate it and roll it, thus sealed from the air. He said it goes into solid solution, alloys with anything it’s plated with as soon as it’s heated. Quaint?
By the time Jo-an graduated from high school in 1956, Mary and Will were spending more time in Virginia, almost all of the holidays and most of the summer. Betty was working in New York City and joined them when she could. She was beginning a long-distance courtship with William “Billy” DeHardit, a Gloucester native she had known all her life. He was the current editor of the Gloucester Gazette-Journal and the youngest son of Billee’s god-father, George DeHardit. He had been a fixture around the house for a long time, and Will enjoyed talking to him. Billy was also a talented piano player and a member of a local band. Betty liked to join him on the evenings out when he had a gig.
Betty (in a white organdie dress she designed, which was made by Julie Buckley of Beechhurst) and Billy were married at St. Therese’s Catholic Church in Gloucester, June 1, 1957. Jo-an came home from college in Baltimore to be maid of honor. Billee’s daughters Pam and Gail arrived with their parents from Missouri to act as flower girls. Mamie, in her familiar high-necked Edwardian dress and straw hat, attended the wedding with her half-sister Virginia “Jennie” Davis and niece Grace Davis.
Adeline and Lewis Allen and young Adeline were there. Will loved to tell the story of Lewis Allen and Billee’s husband Pete Stallings’ trip to a nearby country store for some needed supplies. The clerk said, “I guess you’re here for the Jenkins’ wedding.” When they said, “Yes,” he said, “I thought so.
You look like one of them.” Neither of them being blood relatives, they got a kick out that.
Will had another favorite story about the Virginia liquor laws then in force. Spirits were sold only in state Alcohol Beverage Control stores commonly known as ABC stores, and you were limited to buying two bottles at a time. When they shopped for liquor for the wedding reception to be held at the Gloucester Country Club, they had to pick out and pay for two bottles, take them to the car, come back in and buy two more, and so on, and so on.
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After their marriage, Will encouraged Betty and Billy to start their own bi-weekly local paper, Glo-Quips, and had a part in naming it. He started writing a column for the new paper, “Isn’t It Odd?” It included thoughts and short pieces that were interesting to him. In December 1973 when there was excitement about a new comet expected to be visible, he concluded the column with the comments:
Right now there is a comet on the way to visit us. Especially knowledgeable persons will say that when it gets near enough to the sun it will sprout a tail, or maybe two or three or maybe even more. I shall watch this activity solely as an innocent bystander. I may count the comet’s tails and let it go as that. But maybe I should do more than watch. I may learn this comet’s name. Under other circumstances it would be Kohoutek Two because it was discovered by Mr.
Kohoutek — a citizen of whom Czechoslovakia may well be proud — because he discovered two comets in the same year, and even one discovery of a planet is quite an achievement. And two comets in one year bagged by a man named Kohoutek seems more remarkable still. Anyhow — Isn’t it odd?
Will continued writing the column until shortly before his death.
With Betty married and living in Gloucester and Jo-an in college in Maryland, Will and Mary began to spend more and more time at Clay Bank, making regular business trips to New York and spending a couple of weeks in the Beechhurst apartment on each visit. By the time Jo-an graduated from college in June 1960, they were living pretty much full time in Clay Bank. In the autumn, after spending the summer in Clay Bank, Jo-an went to New York to take a job and moved into the Beechhurst apartment.
In 1958, Billee and her family moved to Haddonfield in southern New Jersey from where they had been living in Missouri. The whole family was now together on the East Coast. They were now only a six-hour drive from Clay Bank and could make frequent visits. On one of these visits, they brought their pregnant cat along. She delivered four kittens in the bathtub the first night. Will had never liked cats, but both he and Mary fell in love with one of the long-haired ginger tabbies and, when he was old enough, kept him naming him Rickki-tickki.
Will seemed to be enjoying the back and forth life he and Mary were leading between New York and Virginia. Although he was happy to be back at Clay Bank, he recognized the need to be in New York and found enough diversion there to keep him from resenting it.
One of Will’s great friends was Austin Stanton, who founded Varo, Inc., a company that developed high tech equipment for the military. He created
Opposite: Betty’s wedding. Will, Grace and Jenny Davis, and, in front, flower girls Gail and Pam Stallings.
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night vision telescopes, electronic night inverters, and guided missile launch systems for military aircraft. He was an early supporter of spaceflight.
In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun, the German V-
2 expert who became U.S. Army’s top missile advisor, was developing plans for sending a satellite into orbit using the already tested Redstone missile beefed up with booster rockets. A committee including Stanton met with von Braun in Washington in March 1954 to develop Project Orbiter under the joint auspices of the United States Army and Navy.
In 1955, anticipating the start of the International Geophysical Year scheduled for July 1, President Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to develop a satellite program. The National Security Council was called upon to decide how to run the project. The decision was made that the satellite project should be separate from military ballistic-missile research and that the navy should be put in charge. This spelled the end of the joint Project Orbiter and the beginning of the navy’s Project Vanguard.
On October 4, 1957, the Russian satellite Sputnik was launched. Life magazine ran an article “Why the Reds Got There First” and Austin Stanton was quoted as follows: “Ample funds improperly applied. Our first satellite program could have beaten the Reds, but efforts to get contracts and personal fame stymied American scientists.”
After Sputnik, Project Orbiter was revived as the Explorer program under the army. They hoped to speed up a launch by using an existing rocket called Juno 1. Meanwhile the U.S. Navy’s launch of Vanguard TV3 on December 6, 1957, failed.
The Juno 1 rocket was launched on February 1, 1958, putting Explorer 1
into orbit. It became the first Earth satellite of the United States. The navy’s Vanguard TV4 was successfully launched on March 17, 1958, and is the oldest satellite still orbiting.
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