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Page 7 of 'A Short History of Baltimore Fandom' © Jack Chalker | ||||||||
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WSFA) often came. This quickly made it impossible to hold election meetings in members' homes,
and so, in 1964, we wound up renting a function
room for the night at the Holiday Inn downtown.
The attendance for that all-night election party was
so large and had so many out-of-towners, we decided to have a relaxacon-like convention the next
year that wouldn't be limited to a mere room with
its various restrictions. | 
Balticon 1, as it is now known, was held over
President's Day weekend in 1965, at the Emerson
Hotel in downtown Baltimore. The Emerson was
across the street from the theater district, and so it
was the hotel where visiting performers usually
stayed. The entire top floor was an elaborate and
ornate penthouse suite with a central master bar and
tons of room. The modest BSFS treasury covered
its rental, but not its stock nor other amenities, and
at that time I was in my last semester of undergraduate
college and had very little money to contribute.
Roger Zelazny put up a fair amount of it, but
pretty much got it all back at the end of the convention.
That first Balticon was an enormous hit.
There was no guest of honor, but it was a grand
time with just the right folks there. I remember
Randall Garrett leading his inimitable filk sings,
and Lin Carter pontificating in another area of the
suite, and half the convention going out for breakfast at
dawn. One other thing that happened was
that the Emerson security man got himself fired --
he liked us so much he, er, oversampled our bar.
The Lord Baltimore wasn't nearly as well laid
out for us, but it was good enough. We used only
the lower floor halls and meeting rooms. The hotel
management tended to look the other way on corkage
but did insist on a minimum twenty-five rooms
per night for Friday and Saturday. This time we
had a token program and a Guest of Honor. It had
occurred to me that our kind of convention was the
right size to invite a single GoH and have him or
her not only do whatever they wanted as program
but also to interact one-on-one with the con attendees.
As chairman, I also wanted somebody new
who wasn't already a 'regular', and for this I picked
Samuel R. Delaney, whose first couple of books
had impressed me. This was also his first real con
experience, and he and we all seemed to fit rather
well.
The budget for the convention was not at all
high, so we cut costs as much as we could (to give
one example of economy, I remember Paul
Schaubel coming back from Allied Chemical with
twenty gallons of pure grain alcohol, which we then
diluted 50-50 with tap water and poured into Smirnoff
bottles -- nobody complained, and we had all
that 'vodka' for about ten bucks). I also rushed
down and rented three rooms, which I gave away,
when I discovered we only had 47 room nights. It
was expensive, but cheaper than paying the facilities
bill for not making our room night commitment.
I wasn't around for the next Balticon. Back
then, with the Vietnam War near its peak, there was
very limited protection from the draft, and I'd received
a draft physical. Bill Osten, a local SF fan
and BSFS member who'd wound up marrying my
old girlfriend Enid, had gotten into the 135th Air
Command Group, an Air National Guard unit
where my cousin, WWII vet Laurence Volrath
(from whom I get my middle name) was a colonel,
and tipped me off that there were openings. I went
down there, tested, and on the same day as a postcard
arrived stating that I would be drafted within
the next thirty days, I joined the 135th and went off
to basic training on February 3, 1967 -- two weeks
before Balticon 3. Ted Pauls, with some help from
Dave Ettlin and Ron Bounds (both 4Fs), ran it with
L. Sprague de Camp as GoH; it reportedly went
okay. I didn't get back into town until late August
and remained on active duty for a while after that. I
had gone through special forces training at Howard Air Force
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