Mari Wolf
(August 27, 1926[1] – )
Marianita Beatrice Wolf (briefly, Graham; sometimes Marion Wolf), a Los Angeles SF fan and author, ran a fan column, "Fandora's Box" (also the name of her Hollywood apartment), for the prozine Imagination from April 1951 to April 1956. Wolf wrote about SF and fandom, reviewed and ranked fanzines, and interviewed authors.
She doled out egoboo with such heedless abandon that the character called the Giantess in The Enchanted Duplicator was modeled after her.
Her column was inspired by the "The Club House," a fan doings column by Rog Phillips (pseudonym of Roger Phillip Graham, Wolf’s later husband) which appeared from 1948 to 1953 in Amazing and later in other SF magazines edited by Ray Palmer.
As of 1950, Wolf was a member of the Outlander Society and the N3F.
Several of Wolf's SF stories appeared in If, including the novella Homo Inferior (November 1953). She was first to use the abbreviation droid for a robot, in her July 1952 debut, "Robots of the World! Arise!"
In an autobiography in the March 1952 Imagination, she wrote that her family spent the first three years of her life in Ecuador and then in Laguna Beach, California. She’d wanted to be a writer since she was 5 years old and discovered SF in high school. She majored in mathematics at UCLA.
Since college, I’ve done various things. I taught dancing for a while. I did some modeling. I spent a lot of time out at the stables.[2] And I kept on reading science fiction. Eventually I became acquainted with Los Angeles fandom and became an Outlander. Then I read in Rog Phillips’ Club House in Amazing Stories how much fun science fiction conventions can be, and I made up my mind to go to the one in Portland.
That was NorWesCon, the 1950 Worldcon. She met Phillips there on September 1, and married him in Chicago the next month; in his own column, he dates it Tuesday, October 24. Ray Palmer and Bea Mahaffey were their witnesses.[3] The marriage ended in 1955, when she was working as a "calculating-machine operator" at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.[4]
Wolf remained active in fandom for several years, for example, attending the 1958 Solacon, and wrote a crime paperback, The Golden Frame, in 1961, but afterwards her traces disappear.
More Reading[edit]
- Autobiography in the March 1952 Imagination, p. 2.
- 1957 photo in The LASFS Album (1966).
- Small photo of Mari Wolf participating in the "Lysistrata panel" at Solacon in the Solacon Final Report (2 MiB PDF).
- Entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
- Works at Project Gutenberg.
- Reprint of Wolf’s story “Prejudice” (Destiny Winter 1953–4, with art by Julian May) and a reminiscence about her column by Ted White in Earl Kemp’s e.I #5, 2002 (PDF, HTML)
- “Intelligence Test” by Mari Wolf, Vega 5 (December 1952, p. 4).
____
- ↑ Birth record index at FamilySearch (free account required; the place given as San Bernardino, California, mother's birth surname as Murray); see also the marriage record below. Nota Bene that earlier sources dated this as 1927, starting at least with Donald H. Tuck's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy Volume 2, Who's Who: M–Z, 1978. It remains to be seen whether her age was ever mentioned in her columns or story introductions.
- ↑ This is a reference to her hobby of horse-riding.
- ↑ Amazing March 1951 p. 146. Wikipedia claims Wolf's column was a wedding gift – Imagination editor William L. Hamling was among the guests. Phillips only hinted that Mari "refuses to be relegated to assistant conductor of the CLUB HOUSE" and was starting her own. Somehow, the meeting and marriage are mis-dated to 1951 in Wolf's bio (possibly an erroneous editorial intervention as “Fandora's Box” in the issue was clearly written still in 1951, so she may have used "last year"), which several sources continue to mis-report, but Phillips' column makes the dating quite unambiguous. Marriage record on Family Search gives the place as Cook County, Illinois, and "Spouse's Age" as 24, also implying Wolf's birth in 1926.
- ↑ “Keeping Posted: In the Jet Laboratory,” Saturday Evening Post March 5, 1955, p. 112 with an anecdote about her as a "science fiction writer."
| Person | 1926—???? |
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