Midwestcon 5

Hotel Ingalls, Bellefontaine, Ohio.

Midwestcon 5, also known as the 5th Indian Lake Convention, was held May 22–23, 1954, at the Hotel Ingalls in Bellafontaine, Ohio. The committee was Doc Barrett, Don Ford, Lou Tabakow, Stan Skirvin, and Roy Lavender.

Attendees included John Millard; Bill Grant; Bill's mother, Mrs. Grant; Ken Hall and Gerald A. Steward from Toronto; Roy and DeeDee Lavender, Doc and Evelyn Barrett and Don Ford from Ohio; Bob Bloch and Phyllis Economou from Wisconsin; Evelyn Gold, Isaac Asimov and Marty Greenberg from New York; Buck and Juanita Coulson from Indiana; Bob Tucker from Illinois and Norm Browne.

Buck Coulson recalled in Mimosa 13:

The convention was spread over two hotels; we went to the Ingalls because it was cheaper; it was something like $1.50 per night. There was a reason for this, of course; even in those days, that was a cheap room. The bed was okay, but there was no attached bathroom. There was, in fact, one bathroom per floor, with tub and toilet. If someone actually took a bath, everyone else on that floor held themselves in or hunted another floor. Our room did have a laundry tub, however. Juanita commented that this was all right for the males, but uncomfortable for females. One year the hotel manager caught a bat in the lobby, and Noreen Falasca convinced him to take it outside and let it go. You don't have entertainments like that these days.

Midwestcon Incident

This was the convention with the famous door-breaking incident.

While there have undoubtedly been many "incidents" at Midwestcon worthy of note, this usually refers to the incident of the [[Door] at Midwestcon 5 in 1954, when Harlan Ellison supposedly waterbagged Jim Harmon, and Harmon, out of anger, retaliated by putting his fist through Harlan's hotel room door; the police were called by the motel management to haul Harmon away, and the attendees had to pass the hat both to pay for the door and to get Jim out of jail.

This has become a fannish legend, with many "first-person" tellings by people who were at that Midwestcon but who did not actually see it take place. (Dick Eney told the traditional version of the story in Fancyclopedia 2 under Door.)

According to rich brown (who wasn’t there), Harlan didn't waterbag anyone, he emptied a pitcher of water out his window so the "splat" would get the attention of Harmon and others who were, in Harlan's opinion anyway, being loud and obnoxious.

Since, in this version of the story, they were across the courtyard, not a drop got on any of them, but Harmon, who was inebriated, took umbrage anyway, charged up the stairs and knocked down Harlan's door. Harlan only locked the door because a femmefan was in his room, reading the stencils for the next issue of his fanzine Dimensions, and he thought she might feel compromised if people talked/gossiped about it in subsequent fanzine tellings of the event ("to read his stencils" might be read as "to see his etchings," a euphemism at the time for seduction).

A number of years after the event, the femmefan in question wrote it up herself and verified this account. But, as with other urban myths that have made it into legend, perhaps it all sounds better the way it was originally told.

The story was undoubtedly helped along in its rise to general notoriety by Ellison's pronouncements of Phony Seventh Fandom, a group widely regarded as loud and obnoxious.

However, Buck Coulson, who was there, recalled in Mimosa 13:

The Ingalls Hotel was old-style, opening directly onto sidewalk and street, and the front rooms overlooked the sidewalk. My knowledge of the event is mostly hearsay; Mary Southworth, who was on the spot (and who still comes to conventions here and there as a huckster), had a somewhat less dramatic and perhaps more factual account, but I don't recall it well enough to retell it exactly. The report I heard was that Harlan Ellison was amusing himself by dropping water bags out the window, restricting himself to fannish targets. Jim Harmon, who was both a big-name fan of the day and a rather large, rotund one as well, got splashed and resented the fact. He stormed up to Harlan's room, where Harlan had prudently locked the door. When Harlan refused to come out, Jim began to batter his way in, knocking out one panel of the door. There was a lovely story that Harlan was frantically calling the police while Jim was trying to drag him out the hole in the door, but this seems to have been fiction -- for one thing, the Ingalls didn't have telephones in the rooms. Someone did call the police, however, and Harmon disappeared leaving Harlan to explain things, while most of the rest of the convention milled about in the hallway enjoying the show. The police left and that evening Harlan came around to various room parties, apologizing for the affair and taking up a collection to pay for the broken door. A bit later, Harmon came around, 'disguised' in Lynn Hickman's coat (which was about half the size he usually wore), apologizing for the incident... and taking up a collection to pay for the broken door. Our group tossed quarters to each one.

The next year, we were back at the same hotel, to find that the broken door had been repaired with a piece of unstained and unpainted plywood, and that the hotel now had a redecorated meeting room. I've always wondered just how much money was collected for the door...

And Bob Tucker, who also was there, recalled it this way in Mimosa 16:

It was at the Hotel Ingalls. Jim Harmon and Harlan Ellison were involved. And also Doc Barrett, who kept Harlan out of jail. Harlan was up on the second floor, dropping paper bags of water out on passersby on the sidewalk below. Everything went well until Jim Harmon strolled by; Jim was a muscular young man in his early twenties, with a hair-trigger temper. All of a sudden, here came a paper bag down *bang* on his forehead. He looked up, saw Harlan, shook his fist and said, "You (expletive)! I'm coming up there!" So he raced up the stairs to get him, but Harlan had locked the door to the room. Jim banged on the door, but it didn't open, so he knocked it in. By that time, he had made so much noise that the hotel management was right behind him. Doc Barrett kept the both of them out of jail by passing a hat; we collected enough money to replace the door. It was a memorable weekend!

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Midwestcon 4	Midwestcon	Midwestcon 6
	1954

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