Earl Singleton

(27 November 1916 – 31 August 1999)

Henry Earl Singleton, aka es and Tex, issued the first fanzine devoted to poetry, Nepenthe. Singleton traveled to Chicon I from Boston with Art Widner in the Skylark of Foo. Following Chicon, he was elected treasurer of the Stranger Club.

He was involved in a feud with William L. Hamling and had a romance with Trudy Kuslan.

All fandom was shocked when his roommate, Oliver King Smith, announced Singleton had committed suicide by shooting himself in the temple with a pistol on February 9, 1941. However, a letter sent to Jack Chapman Miske dated February 10 and other questions led Widner and Louis Russell Chauvenet to contact authorities at MIT, and they learned the suicide was faked, as Singleton had apparently decided to gafiate and drop out of school, taking a job in Washington, D.C. His death hoax became known as the pseuicide, and fans nicknamed him the Zombie.

In later life, Singleton became a very successful electrical engineer and businessman, co-founding Teledyne, serving as its CEO for thirty years, and was an early investor in Apple Computer and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

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Person

1916—1999

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