Bill Higgins

(January 12, 1954 –)

Chicago-area fan Bill Higgins (more formally, William Skeffington Higgins) is a leading light of Midwest fandom, where his always-smiling face with its chinstrap beard is a frequent sight at cons, typically surrounded by a bevy of friends and acquaintances. He commonly uses Beam Jockey as an online sobriquet.

A radiation safety physicist by profession, with a long career at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Higgins frequently speaks on science-track panels at cons. He is an occasional fanwriter and fanhistorian and can sometimes be found playing the baritone ukelele at filksings.

He belongs to General Technics and was a regular at Thursday. Higgins contributes to Live Journal with "Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins," where he used to post on fannish topics.

Along with Barry Gehm, Higgins wrote the filksong “Home On LaGrange (The L5 Song)” first published in CoEvolution Quarterly (1978).

In the 1980s, Higgins, Gehm and Renee Sieber organized a Moopsball game involving fans from all over the Midwest. Steve Johnson provided equipment for the game with the unwitting participation of the DePaul University athletic department. The Michigan State University team, The Professor George Edward Challenger Memorial Tectonic Plate Pushing and Freestyle Dinosaur Wrestling Team, prevailed.

He is married to fellow fan Kelley Mathews.

• Higgins on Dreamwidth. (From 2004 to 2017, he blogged as user Beamjockey on Livejournal, but later copied his blog to Dreamwidth.)
• 1993 Windycon bio.

Higgins's Lives of the Fans

From time to time, Higgins has been asked to write biographical essays for Guests of Honor, each published in the program book of a convention. He reprinted many of these in his blog, collected under the title "Higgins's Lives of the Fans," including an introduction, "On the Convention Program-Book Biography."

Subjects include:

• Alice Bentley
• Phil Foglio
• Steve Collins
• Mary Lynn Skirvin Johnson
• Jo Walton
• Tullio Proni
• Steven Silver
• Hugh Daniel

Awards, Honors and GoHships:

• 1980 -- Toastmaster at Whatcon II
• 1987 -- ConQuistador IV
• 1990 -- Millennicon -11
• 1990 -- ConClave 15
• 1993 -- Windycon XX
• 1993 -- DucKon 2
• 1996 -- Nanocon 8
• 1998 -- Congenial 9
• 1990 -- Capricon 10
• 2007 -- MoonBase ConFusion
• 2013 -- DucKon 22
• 2014 -- Boskone 51
• 2022 -- Windycon 48 science goh

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Person

1954—

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