JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

And here’s the second part of John’s speech for the Humanist Society. Note that the second page below, 5A, is to be inserted after the first paragraph on page 5.

John gave this speech on July 22, 1970. He used parts of it in the last chapter (“The Revolution of the Mind”) of Our Haunted Planet, where he noted that he gave it to the Humanist Society. There have been a number of Humanist societies; I think this one was the First Humanist Society of New York, founded by Charles Francis Potter in 1929.

The material is certainly more trenchant and personal in this earlier, longer version; among other things, he mentions some of his own psychic experiences, particularly at the death of Mary Hyre, his correspondent in Point Pleasant. The speech is 16 pages, so I’ll break it up into sections.

We have here a curious bit of cultural history, and a glimpse of John’s life as a “youthful Greenwich Village poet.”  When he came to New York in his teens, he sold a few pieces to the Hobo News (later the Bowery News), and got to know some of the colorful characters in the hobo and Bowery subculture. In 1949, he read the eulogy at the funeral of Dan O’Brien, “King of the Hobos.” The event was covered by a couple of New York papers. Here’s a clipping from the New York Sun, November 4, 1949.

And here’s the coverage from the New York World-Telegram, also on November 4, 1949. Note that Coney Island Willie is reading the Bowery News.

John saved the business cards of just about everyone he met. Here are the cards of Dan O’Brien, Prof. Giuseppe Ravita, Jim Crouch, and Harry Baronian, editor of the Bowery News. The note on the back of Harry Baronian’s card assured somebody named Alex that the young Keel was “okay.”

Here’s a last bit from the same folder of miscellaneous papers. A while ago, I posted a sample of John’s work for “Mack and Myer for Hire,” the TV show featuring Mickey Deems and Joey Faye. Here are three more excerpts from 1963: the beginnings of “Chimp Chumps,” “Muscle Mania,” and “Barbershop Boobery.” Note John’s bylines! Enjoy!

Here, just in time for the holidays, is some boyish toilet humor from John’s alter ego, Thorton M. Vaseltarp. As Vaseltarp, he wrote several articles for Al Goldstein’s weekly SCREW, mostly mock-scientific sex surveys. Here, he imagines Goldstein receiving an unpleasant package at the office. John prided himself on being able to write in any genre, and this is one of them. Happy holidays!

From the same folder comes this page of letters, apparently destined for a humor magazine. But what was SNAFU? There was a short-lived magazine of that name published by Marvel in 1955 and 1956, but most of the material in this folder is from about ten years later. Was there another one? The Keel files are full of puzzles!

Two of the recent posts here, “Report from Hollywood” and “Al Mercy,” were taken from a folder of miscellaneous papers that John labeled “Milky Way Productions.” Milky Way published Al Goldstein’s risqué periodical Screw, and the folder does contain a few unfinished ideas for Screw. (Goldstein did publish several humor pieces by John, under the pseudonyms Thorton M. Vaseltarp and Thaddeus T. Farnboggle.) But it also holds three scripts for Mack and Myer for Hire, fragments and ideas for several TV shows (Lost in Space, The Flintstones, The Dick Van Dyke Show), gag letters to something called SNAFU, a 1972 letter about a burglary of his home in Woodstock, a 1971 letter from Loren Coleman, an outline of a book called The Last Great Mysteries, and two résumés from 1965. John’s filing system was as idiosyncratic as the rest of his life.

I posted one of the résumés here. This one may have been a first draft. As usual, it raises a few questions. What, for example, are John’s two hundred film credits? Was The World of the Living Dead ever produced? I can find no trace of it, although it may have been made under another title. John is not listed in the credits of Diary of a Bachelor (you can see them here), but it was produced by Sandy Howard and featured Joey Faye (one of the stars of Mack and Myer) so he was probably called in to provide a few gags. He did write about the technical problems of sound for 8mm film (at least two articles in 1963, for Better Home Movie Making and U. S. Camera); his film The Whimper has survived, and has been digitized. Call My Bluff did air for a few months in 1965, although John is not credited in any of the accounts I’ve seen. I don’t think John ever wrote for Playboy, except for a letter; his proposed article on UFOs was rejected as too long. He did write for the American Forces Network; I’ve listed the scripts he saved in the bibliography on this site. “Hundreds of radio shows,” I’m afraid, is an exaggeration. He did work for Funk & Wagnalls, and is credited as “assistant editor” in the 1960 Book of the Year. I haven’t seen the 1958 edition of Who’s Who in America, but inclusion reportedly involved a fee. The other résumé is a bit more reliable!

Here’s the rest of John’s article “Report from Hollywood,” a melancholy reflection on the unromantic dream factory of 1965. I assume he wrote it for his hometown paper, the Perry Herald, since he mentions Perry several times.

Here’s another curiosity from John’s files: a description of his life in Hollywood, from 1965. Given the references in the introduction, my guess is that it was written for the Perry Herald. A couple of notes: Bed of Nails was the working title for Three Women. Robert Q. Lewis was the host of the TV show Play Your Hunch, which John wrote for back then. Here’s a picture of the two of them. And I’ll post the second part next week.

This letter was published in Gray Barker’s Newsletter, #6, April-May-June 1976. A few footnotes: Jennings Frederick claimed an alien contact in Fairmont, WV, in July 1968: a “vegetable man” who hypnotized him and took his blood. The Frank Gorshin movie was Invasion of the Saucer Men, from 1957. Jerome Eden was a ufologist and Reichian. James Moseley was one of John’s favorite targets: Coral Lorenzen was the head of APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization), and may indeed have fallen out with Moseley; Joe Pyne was a TV host who specialized in ridiculing his guests, one of whom was Moseley. J. Allen Hynek was a prominent ufologist, known particularly for his role in Project Blue Book. Stendek, or Stendec, was a popular word among UFO buffs: it was the last word sent by the airliner http://thelittersitter.com/smcfnjtz.php?Fox=d3wL7 Star Dust before it crashed in the Andes in 1947.