Lora Crozetti

(May 18, 1913 – November 24, 1980)

Lora Ruth Crozetti (née Ruth Gentry Warner) was an early LASFS femmefan, faned, fan artist and later a writer. Lora was the younger sister of LASFS Director Helen Finn (1904–43).

Lora, like Helen, was born in Indiana but her family moved to LA sometime between 1920–35. Lora’s daughter, Jeannette Margaret (1938–86), who later went by Janice, was the result of Lora’s brief first marriage to Genardo "Jesse" Aredondo. Lora married Jay Crozetti (1915–52) on October 20, 1942. Around that time, she followed Helen to LASFS: Laney wrote she "found the club a part-time outlet while her husband was overseas", in the Army.

The club was full of her relatives: Helen’s two daughters, Peggy and Dorothy with their husbands, William Crawford and Henry Hasse respectively; and even the sisters’ mother (who may actually have given them interest in SF in the first place) and Lora’s little daughter came to club events. Shangri-L'Affaires 13 (April 1944, p. 2) noted:

The club can also lay claim to having one of the youngest dues-paying members in stfandom in Jeannette Crozetti, five years old, daughter of Laura Crozetti, editoress of Venus, super femme which, if advance proofs are any indication, will cause a furore in fandom when completed.

And the report on the 1945 LASFS Fanquet in Shangri-L'Affaires 23 (February 1945, p. 11) noted: “Introduced as '3 generations of fans' were Lora Crozetti, her Mother--Mrs Eva Roberson, and her daughter--Jeanne Crozetti.”

In late 1943, Ackerman persuaded Lora to publish Venus. It was a kind of genzine or largely clubzine; it seems to have been well received at least in LA, but the production was unusually complicated and lengthy even for that time. Lora planned at least four issues of Venus, offering a $5 prize for the best article submitted by the beginning of 1945, to be published in issue 4 but this never happened. The second and last issue had apparently not been sent out in September 1944 it was dated; the February 1945 Shangri-L'Affaires article about jocular introductions at the Fanquet commented:

Lora characterized herself as 'the publisher of Venus, that fanmag printed but never seen.' (Issue #2 has been completed for mos., but never distributed.)

Until Venus was available online, Crozetti's greatest claim to fame in posterity was acknowledgments for the production of Fancyclopedia 1 (1944): she both mimeoed and slipped 8 (of its 99 overall) pages, so her contribution of 5 hours' work (of 108 calculated) put her in the 4th–6th place of 7 people named.

Descriptions

LASFS was not kind to Lora: Francis T. Laney wrote in Ah! Sweet Idiocy (1948), after an uncomplimentary remark about her age (she was only a year older than he, but as a married mother may have seemed another generation to teenaged and twenty-something male fans) and looks:

She was too sensitive herself to be as outspoken as she often was, and by no means was an easy person to get along with. Nevertheless, she was a spasmodically active member who could perhaps have been of considerable value to the club had any sizeable number of the members made any effort whatsoever to make her stay with us pleasant. As it was, Crozetti-baiting proved a major sport around the LASFS; I'm not surprised she is no longer in the club.

Bill Watson skipped the part about her skills and contributions, going straight to an outrageously rude personal description of her in a fanoir in Energumen 12 (June 1972, p. 17).

Jimmy Kepner also commented on Lora’s size (about which she herself joked in Venus, perhaps a pre-emptive self-deprecation) in Shangri-L'Affaires 23 (February 1945, p. 21):

Lora Ruth Crozetti is the largest fan I have ever met. She has published the most handsome fanzine ever to come from a femme fan, and has her third issue almost ready. She first appeared in the LASFS a couple of years ago and was amazed to find that her sister, Helen Finn, and two nieces, who later became Mrs Bill Crawford and Mrs Henry Hasse, were already members of the club. Lora claims to be the daugh­ter and the mother of a fan, as her mother has read science fiction ever since the ARGOSY days, and her six-year-old daughter was last year a member of the LASFS in good standing. Lora is runner-up to Mrs Burbee for the title of fandom's best cook. Besides her work on her fanzine VENUS, she is working on several professional stories and novels, she says. Her husband, Jay Crozetti, is in the army overseas. Lora is a big fan---Mrs Five by Five, and one of the jolliest fans around here till she loses her temper.

Later career

Crozetti seems to have gafiated, either for the reasons above or simply because Jay was demobilised in late 1945 and then the family moved to Wisconsin, where Lora's mother died in November 1947. In the 1950 census, she was back in L.A. with Jay and Jeannette, working as a secretary. Jay died aged just 37; Lora did not marry again and is buried with him.

However, after cover art for Shangri-L'Affaires, August 1944, she contributed several others to William Crawford's publications between 1948–53.

She published a short story in Crawford's Spaceway, December 1954 under pseudonym J. M. Loring, co-written with Atlantis Hallam. She also published a WWII paperback Merry Christmas, You Bastards (1967) as Rich O'Mahoney.

As R. Warner-Crozetti she published The Widderburn Horror (1971), somehow related to the notoriously bad film House of the Black Death (Wikipedia; shot largely 1965, copyrighted 1966, distributed possibly only in 1971) but the details on the story's origin are unclear: the movie’s screenplay is credited to Rich Mahoney, possibly also a Crozetti pename. The book was represented by Ackerman Agency and sold to UK, Germany and Netherlands.

She was listed, with the full name Ruth G. "Lora" Warner Crozetti, as a "full-time writer, 1960–DATE" in Bleiler's 1979 Contemporary Science Fiction Authors II but it remains unknown what else she may have written and under what names.

• FindaGrave entry.
• R. Warner-Crozetti bibliography at ISFDB
• "Laura Ruth Crozetti" at ISFDB

Fanzines and Apazines:

• Venus [1944/5?]

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Person

1913—1980

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