It was Danny Jabob's wandering eyeball that found an article in Famous Monsters about a horror club in L.A. called "The Count Dracula Society" and meant only one thing: ROAD TRIP! "Road Trip" usually meant walking to the curb, sticking out your thumb and hoping you'll get where you're going before everyone had gone home.
It was Sunday, August 30, 1964 and we were fortuitous getting to the Ladera Park Clubhouse in only a few hours.
People in capes, people with fangs, effeminate men, burly women, people who couldn't talk, people who couldn't shut up, people who went by imaginary names and people seeking a higher power. There were also those names familiar to the pages of Famous Monsters: Carroll Borland, Eric Hoffman, Don Glut, Forry Ackerman and of course, the remarkable Dr. Donald A. Reed.
The Guest, Mr. William G. Obbagy, much touted in the pages of FM (direct from Cleveland Ohio) and President of the International Bela Lugosi Fan Club spoke at length on the life and times of Bela Lugosi ().
For a boy from the tepid, stucco world of Long Beach, I felt at home at last and was ready to sell my soul. Danny on the other hand, thought it was a load of crap and never went back. . L.A. Times newspaper article about the society with a photo of Don and Orriel Smith .
OH SAY CAN YOU SEE
Fourth of July was growing nigh and we were diligently assembling our next Crummy Loogie Bomb for detonation. This time we escalated to a shoe box stuffed with thousands of matchheads and a handful of fireworks. The day and time was upon us and thus, under the cover of darkness, we carried the hallowed box to the center of the street and torched the fuse. Spectacular is the only word to describe the flames and sparks shooting into the night sky; the box ceased to exist and all that was left was the three of us, a handful of interested parties nearly orgasmic with giddy excitation, an odd sense of immortality and a bright spot on our retinas. There was also a two inch crater in the street as a memento.
NOTHING LIKE A GOOD NUMBER 2
Thanks to Steve Dobbins' ever doting parents, we were in the planning stages of another "Long Beach Science Fantasy Convention". They acquired a banquet room in a nearby restaurant that was perfect for the event. The "Hawaiian Inn", regally appointed with tikis, coconuts, fish nets, palm fronds and display tables running around the chair filled room. There would be no movies and the lights would stay on so we weren't as terrified about the safety of our collections.
Danny was taking a printing class at school and printed program covers. While hand-setting the type, he mistook a "U" for and "N" and we wound up with "Conventiou". I was still fumbling with my mimeograph but managed to print the inside of the program.
It was a grand day with over 100 fans showing up. Bert Gordon gave a chat on his years of monster movie making on a budget, Ib Melchoir> was a crowd pleaser bringing bags full of filmclips from "Time Travelers" and "Robinson Crusoe on Mars" plus set blueprints and prop building schematics which he dispensed to the eager onlookers! His talk "What's the Gimmick?" went into advertising ploys and the wonders of "Cinemagic". The gracious Marcel Delgado was bombard with questions about the making of King Kong. One question in particular was "Did the Kong armature ever break while you were filming? To which Marcel replied "It broke all the time and we broke it when we'd had enough and wanted to go home!"
Johnny Ball had a collectors item everyone was after; a movie edition paperback for "War of the Worlds". Several times during the day I asked Johnny what it would take to pry it from his hands. "Ain't for sale" he'd say, and that was that! At the end of the day, I thought I'd give it one last try and was surprised to find the book missing from his table.
"Where's the book?" I inquired.
"Forry has it" he said in an odd tone but continued: "Forry came over, laid his books on top of it and we talked for a few minutes. When he left, he took that book with him."
"Why didn't you say something?" I asked.
"Because he's Forry Ackerman" he said, averting his eyes.
Over the years, I've asked Forry what he remembered about the convention and thus he would tell this story: "Well, what I remember out of the whole thing was Eric Hoffman turned up at the penultimate moment just as a caravan of cars was pulling out of my place on Sherbourne, and there wasn’t really any place for him in any cars - I don’t know if he had to sit on someone’s lap, but somebody accommodated him, maybe I did, and that evening, when it was over, I seem to recall one of the fathers of one of the fans. . . (Steve Dobbins) invited everybody to dinner. Eric didn’t quite understand, and I don’t know that any of us knew the dad was going to pick up the tab, and so Eric ate very sparse, I don’t know, a watercress sandwich and a toothpick. When it was all over, he turned to me and said “I could’a had a steak!”
This, would be our final convention. The responsibilities of growing up loomed like an evil specter on the horizon and seemed unavoidable; one being our impending graduating from high school, maybe going to college, maybe not, getting a job, maybe not, but most certainly Vietnam. We were approaching draft age and had to decide whether to volunteer or run like hell.
<Ib & I with poster for "Journey to the 7th Planet"
AFTERMATH
On numerous occassions I visited Ib and Cleo's home. Ib's father by the way, was the Wagnerian opera star Lauritz Melchior. The house was a veritable testament to his father's performances as well as his skill as a big game hunter for the house was ringed with mounted animal trophies.
All was well with the Count Dracula Society. Our next meeting was the ZBT Fraternity House directly off-campus from the University of Southern California at which Dr. Reed had numerous friends. The meeting featured Dr. Reed on Montague Summers, Walt Daugherty with Fritz Leiber and Samuel Russell. We were on a time schedule for this meeting however. Seems there was a planned bachelor party for one of the frat boys to include a stripper, booze and all-night revelry. On one hand, I was surprised Dr. Reed wanted to stay for the fun. On the other I was disappointed he wanted to leave as soon as it got interesting. ().
Tom Scherman gave me a heads-up on the exhibit and beaming he had gotten to work on the original Tim Machine by hastily creating the missing control panel. Seems the original was resting quietly in the Home of George Pal as the whole place burned to the ground during one of those Bel Air fires igniting like clockwork every year.
The common hue and cry of Tom's control panel being it was created for the MGM Auction in 1970, but here it is six years earlier greeting you at the door of the Lytton exhibit.
It's a small world, as many of the objects on display would eventually wind up in the collections of either Forry Ackerman or Bob Burns! Both the Time Machine and Atlantis, The Lost Continent submarine would eventually be sold by MGM to a traveling exhibit before finding homes. Other items of interest were mockups of the "7 faces of Dr. Lao", title creatures from "Dinosaurus!" made by Wah Chang, and several "giant" props like TV vacuum tubes and a giant desk phone. There was even a purported armature from "King Kong", but it looks like "Mighty Joe" to Me. The armature sold in 2009 at Christies in London for a paltry $200,000. There was even a Lilliputian set piece from Harryhausen's "3 Worlds of Gulliver".
e directly off-campus from the 
