Bruce Pelz remembered

[calimac]

rwl reminds us that it's the tenth anniversary of the death of Bruce Pelz: a giant presence in many areas of science fiction fandom - convention running, club building, costuming, filking, apahacking, fanzine collecting ... He was also the editor of one of the first Tolkien fanzines, I Palantir. And, a librarian by profession, one of the librarians whose presence in fandom convinced me that I was making the right choice for my own profession, though I've never met through library work any other librarians at all like Bruce.

I commented to Richard's entry:

Among the many things I would like to talk with Bruce about is experience with cruises. Bruce and Elayne had discovered these as a form of vacation fairly late in life, and he was an enthusiastic convert to their pleasures. B. and I finally got on one ourselves a couple years after his death, a week on a small ship in Alaska, and we had a wonderful time, though for various reasons we haven't been able to repeat the experience. Now it's too late for me to share his enthusiasm with him.

Bruce taught me to play mahjong (a harrowing experience: he was not a patient teacher) and to appreciate ice wine. And of course even across vast expanses of time and haze I remember Lasfapacon at his home, the Tower.

I am pleased that I was able to attend his LASFS memorial session, a special meeting at Westercon two months after his death.

Comments

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I didn't know Bruce as well as I would have liked. I was always happy to see him; conversations with him were guaranteed to be fun. His wit made me try harder to be witty myself, and his laugh made me think I had succeeded, even if I didn't come up to his standards.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. I didn't know Bruce at all, although I met him briefly at an Orycon, but he still was a presence in my fannish life. In my article for the current issue of Chunga, talking about the tenth anniversary of the zine, part of the way that I placed the date of our first issue (which we forgot to put in our colophon) was from the fact that Andy had noted Bruce's death in his piece for that issue.