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Page 2 of 'A Short History of Baltimore Fandom' © Jack Chalker | ||||
time had the most famous graduates in the arts (although they were always fond of noting that
Leon Uris had been expelled from it) and it looked
like a good bet if I was going to do any college prep
work. Baltimore City College had the reputation, but
it was not local to me; it required me to catch a bus
in front of my house and take it for six miles
through rush hour traffic, then change to a second
bus that went at least that far again through even
worse streets and traffic. I lived in the northwestern
part of the city, while City was just to the east of
the middle of Baltimore.Decembers in Baltimore can be chilly or warm;
sometimes they can be both in the same day. I
woke up one Wednesday morning in December,
1961, to find it well over 60°F and mostly sunny,
and I never even checked the forecast (which was
wrong, anyway). I got into school, and it proceeded
like a normal day until about noon, when the temperature
suddenly began dropping like a stone. By
two o'clock it was in the thirties, and because of a
general class disruption when the first snowflakes
began to appear my English teacher kept the entire
class after school. By 3:15 pm, when he decided
to let us go, there was already four inches of snow
on the ground and it was falling like mad. Major
snows in December are unusual; this one was a
whopper.Bus after bus went by as the snow piled up, all
full with anxious students from the several high
schools that funneled through the area. It was close
to four o'clock before I finally got on one, after just
about all the student traffic had already gone. The
bus had to go west to connect to the second bus I'd
need, which intersected at the end of the first bus's
line. We pulled by the Johns Hopkins University,
very slowly, and got onto the mile-long bridge over
the deep Jones Falls Valley that essentially splits
Baltimore in two. In the middle of the bridge, the
snow and traffic were too much. We were stuck.The bus driver urged us not to get off, since it
was a long way to anywhere from where we were.
The snow was still falling, and he had plenty of fuel
so we had heat and light for many hours. Believe
me, in that position, there was very little incentive
to get out and walk, nor were any of us dressed for
doing so. In the next few hours, those of us on that bus got to know each other very well indeed. One
other City student on the bus was David Michael
Ettlin, who was a year behind me. After I discovered he read science fiction, I got to talking about
science fiction fandom and the recent Philcon I'd
attended, and he was fascinated by discovery of all that was out there.
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