Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Roberta Rogow

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Interviews by Fans
Title: Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Roberta Rogow
Interviewer: Megan Genovese
Interviewee: Roberta Rogow
Date(s): July 19, 2017
Medium: audio recording, written transcript
Fandom(s):
External Links:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

In 2017, Roberta Rogow was interviewed as part of the Media Fandom Oral History Project. The interviewee was Megan Genovese.

Length: 2h 42mins 50s.

For more information about the origins of this interview, where it is housed, contact information, suggestions regarding future interviewee candidates, and how to become volunteer interviewer, see the Media Fandom Oral History Project page.

Topics Discussed

From the Interview

I was always a science fiction reader from the time I was about ten. But I kind of dropped out of it in the 1960s because a lot of what was being written at that time was either very gloom and doom, post apocalyptic stuff, or it had gone off into the super He Man, Conan clone stuff, or it was pseudo medieval fantasy. And I wasn't attracted by any of this. I was particularly not attracted by the kind of mystical path that Robert Heinlein had gone off in. I was raising very small children at the time, so I really did not want to know that the world was going to end tomorrow and that we would be stuck in some horror scenario where everybody would die.

And I was very happily married. I was not really looking for any superhero to save me from anything. And then came Star Trek, and I was hooked from the very beginning, because this was, first of all, it was a world where women actually did work.

[...]

This was a world where people were competent, where they did what they were supposed to do, and it meant that there was going to be a future that we would get through all the turmoil of 60s. And by that time there was a lot of turmoil, so I was just hooked. And the only thing was that I didn't know anybody else was hooked.

And then I became a librarian ... I attended my first library conference, and at that conference, I met a woman named Devra Langsam, who was organizing these Star Trek conventions, and she said, you missed the first one, but we're having another one. And my husband, God love him, said, you know really like this show. Why don't you go?

... I made a lot of friends. Many of them were women who were fighting the system as it was then. You could call them the second wave feminists, the first ones being the suffragists. But these were the ones who were campaigning for the ERA. These were the ones who were fighting the good fight against sexism in the workplace. And as somebody who had just gotten into the workplace, I was all for that. So, yeah, these were women who were active, who were doing things. Devra Langsam was one. Jacqueline Lichtenberg was one. Jean Lorrah was involved. There were several others who I'm not going to name, mostly because they have passed on, alas.

Trekkie comes from the idea that all Star Trek fans are teeny boppers. Originally, it was a corruption of teeny bopper, meaning that they were all either teenagers or women who never quite left that teeny bopper stage. Who were in it to sort of glom over Kirk without his shirt on, or to sort of get off physically on the actors. Whereas a Trekker was somebody who was serious about the writing, about the ideas behind the writing, about writing more stories about the characters rather than screaming for the actors. It’s what you might call a distinction of intent. Why you watch the show? Why you are a fan?

I was a fan because of the characters, not the actors per se. The writing, especially the first two seasons of original Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry was notorious for getting established science fiction writers to come up with ideas for the show. And he ran afoul of one of them because the idea that Harlan Ellison came up with was not what Gene Roddenberry had in mind. And that has become notorious [1] So I'm not going to get into it. But the point is that Roddenberry had a point of view, a vision, and he asked his friends, some of whom were science fiction writers, D. C. Fontana was one of them, to join him in his vision. And when his vision and their vision didn't quite coincide, he had absolutely no compulsion about changing it, because he knew what he wanted to say.

And at the time, that was what I wanted to hear. And I still have I think it still has a great deal of validity today. 40 years on.

[Gene Roddenberry] had a vision of a world that was perfect. We now know that that vision is never going to happen. But wouldn't it be nice if it did? By the time they got into Nineties and the last couple of seasons of Deep Space Nine, you had a whole new world. You had a new worldview. It was a lot darker, but in a way, it was more realistic because we'd gotten through a lot. And um, but once again, you had people with a vision, a united vision. You had some of what Gene Roddenberry wanted in there, which is that humans and non-humans can work together to make things better for everyone. And this is very much the way I feel. I just wish humans could do it. Are we there?

...by about 1976, I had gotten started on a project called Trexindex. This was BC, before computers. And I’d and I told you I'd gotten hooked on fanzines and fanzine writing, and I read half a story and couldn't find the other half. Well, as a newly minted librarian, I thought, ooh, there's got to be an index somewhere. Well, there wasn't. And you know what happens when you say, well, why isn't there? Somebody gives you this fisheye and says, well?

So I wound up doing this project where I literally read ten years back issues of fanzines. And for the next ten years, what I was doing was collecting fanzines, indexing them, and it was a book index of a type that is now completely obsolete. Completely, because it's all online, as is most fanfic these days, and finding it is a chore that I no longer do, thank God, because it's impossible. It is utterly impossible. There is no central listing that I know of. There may, I don't know, but at that time, mine was it, and I did one volume every year for about ten years.

...the New York conventions were run at that time . . . Once the main committee gave up and said, we can't do this anymore, um, a man named John Townsley, who was an entrepreneur, shall we say. He ran Star Trek stores and he sold Star Trek merchandise, and he ran the conventions, and they were very commercialized. If you think that the Creation cons are commercialized, woohoo.

But yeah, he would get the Star Trek stars, he would get the hotel. And you've got to realize that at that time, this is mid 70s to mid 80s, Star Trek conventions were a big deal. Later on, they became so common, nobody cared. But yeah, this was a very big deal, because this was the only place that you could get these things.

[...]

They were called different things, but basically in fandom, they were called Townsley cons. And they were sort of a partnership between fans and this guy, because the fans provided his scut work labor, and he provided the venue, which was usually either the Roosevelt Hotel on the East Side or the Statler Hilton on the West Side.

And if it was the Statler Hilton, there was a main floor, and there a side room where all the fanzine dealers were. And Townsley used to give fanzine dealers very good rates on tables. The commercial dealers had to pay top dollar. The fanzine people got a major discount... You couldn't make money selling fanzines. Well, I made some money selling fanzines because I was selling fanzines for a lot of people who couldn't get to New York so I was, like, dealing for other people. But it was like a little enclosed circle within everybody else. So if you knew that there were fanzines there, you would come, and if you were a writer, you would come. And, you know, this was the inner circle of fandom, ha, ha, ha.

[Augustrek] was my one and only actually running a convention. And it was a horrible mistake, and I should never have done it, but I got involved in it, and I did. And that's another story. The worst thing I ever did.

[...]

The people running August Party said that we were doing it without their permission, so they boycotted. And the guy who was supposed to be running it was in the National Guard, and I was supposed to be his second. But I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And unfortunately, the weekend that we ran, it was the weekend that the Shah of Iran died. And there was all kinds of things going on overseas and they were taking hostages and nobody knew what was going to happen. And so the National Guard was called up and my co chair was in the National Guard.

So he just walked off the job completely and left everything in my hands. And I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I didn't know how to organize. I didn't know nothing. Nothing. And the result was chaos. Some things happened. Since the guy is now dead, I can't say it was his fault.

But the worst thing that happened was that some kids decided to have a laser battle. And people running around in funny uniforms waving weird weapons with trigger happy hillbillies running loose. This was in Maryland, just outside DC. I just had visions of some of these kids getting shot.

And I sat down with the people organizing, the hotel people, my people, and a local representative of law enforcement. And I said, this is what's going to happen. I explained to the law enforcement people that we have some people with funny looking things and the only thing they shoot out is light, light beams. I told the people organizing the battle, you will keep it on the two floors that are assigned to the hotel. And I told the hotel people, this is what is going to happen. I mean, I was in grandma mode at that time. I was in mommy mode. And God be thanked, nothing dire happened. But I just had visions of one of these trigger happy cops letting loose on some kid. I mean, it was horrible.

And I wound up having major, I'm talking major stomach convulsions. So, yeah, this is the worst thing that ever happened to me at a convention, ever. And then, of course, some dealers said that they'd been robbed, and it turned out that they had a whole bunch of itty bitty little figurines that cost a mint it. And some overzealous hotel person, hotel cleaner had simply swept them up and dumped them in the dumpster. And that meant that one of my people had to go into the dumpster and retrieve them.

Yeah, this was not a good experience, but that's probably the worst experience I've ever had at a convention. Absolutely.

Well, first of all, a mystery convention is a whole other ball of wax. A mystery convention is writer oriented, completely and totally. You are not dealing with masquerade. You are not dealing with films. You are not dealing with gaming. You are not dealing with cosplay. You are not dealing with laser battles. You are not dealing with computer nerds. You are simply not dealing with any of this garbage.

You are only dealing with setting up two tracks: a reader's track and a writer's track. You are not dealing with any of the electronics or the logistics or the people moving. You are simply not and you are not dealing with the numbers. Deadly Ink, which I co-chair, runs 75 to 100 people. Shore Leave runs 3000. Big difference. Huge, big difference. Shore Leave involves film programs, it involves music programs, it involves setups for film and music programs. It involves at least five, no, six tracks: a science track, a writing track, several acting tracks, the kids program, the arts program, art show, whole other ball of wax. I would never, ever deal with running such a thing. Running one track at Lunacon or Philcon, this I can do. This is being a dealer’s room track at some of the early Trek cons. Yes, I could do that. I couldn't do dealers room now because it's far more complicated. There's a lot more tax stuff involved. As soon as somebody realizes that people are making money, the government gets involved. And dealers rooms at most of the major conventions now, you have to show that you have a dealer's license or a state, if you're from out of state, you have to show you have a state temp license to sell. It's ridiculous, really. But if you have 75 people and one dealer who is local, you don't have to worry about this. They're covered. Then there's the insurance. Oh, God, yes. The insurance. I'm not even going to get into that. I mean, just covering stuff for insurance.

And there's also the personal factor. Um, you have some kids, I call them puppies off the leash. At one point, there were many incidents, which I'm not going to go into, but it's the kind of thing that is the reason why they now have personal behavior codes written into the program book. In other words, you have to tell people not to touch other people. They don't learn it in kindergarten. Sheesh.

And you also have to remind people that just because the goods are in the window, that does not necessarily mean they're for sale, because there are some women who are very well built and know it and like to show it. And on the other hand, they are not selling anything, they are just displaying. Need I say more?

Yes, I [still think uncharitably about slash].

My main problem with slash was that it was being written by people who didn't know what the hell they were writing about. Of course, I didn't know what I was talking about either, but I felt that a lot of what was being written was being written by people who had no concept of what was really involved.

I now have found out differently, but I still think that some of the pairings are a little silly.

And again, I told you I'm squeamish. I really don't want to know about people's love lives. I skip the sex scenes in novels. Uh, I don't want to watch other people having sex. It's just not something I feel like doing. And a lot of the hurt comfort stories, a lot of the slash stories verged on the sadomasochistic.

And some of the pairings were a little bit stupid. People who had been pretty much labeled as super macho heterosexual. I wasn't so upset about the Xena/Gabrielle stuff because that was pretty obvious on the show, and the Starsky and Hutch stuff had been touched on. It was a possibility. But a lot of the other pairings. The Kirk/Spock stuff no, I just wasn't interested. And as somebody put it, the catamite stuff with Will and Captain Picard. Oh, ick. No.

[It's more a question of whether or not it's feasible or plausible in canon] and of course, a lot of the problem with this stuff was that it was very sadomasochistic. It had to do with one of the characters being tortured or injured in some way. And the other one giving comfort either physical or mental, and it got pretty soppy. And once again, um, this wasn't Star Trek, this was something else. And I didn't believe for one minute that these were the right characters. This was somebody else's concept of what the characters might be like. This was a very alternate character and I wasn't going to go there, but I got rather snippy about it and I lost a lot of good friends because I was very intolerant. I have grown more mellow with the years.

[...]

There are some characters who are gay on television. I'm still not interested. Really? I don't want to read it. And there are so many books that I do want to read that I don't see myself wasting my time with it. I don't know how much time I have left.

I did a lot of knitting and crocheting. I did one costume that I called Greptz. G-R-E-P-T-Z greptz. Which in Yiddish means burp. And I crocheted a rather elaborate blouse out of black yarn with silver glitters in it. And there was a piece of fabric that I sort of wound around myself. And my mother had an old pillbox hat with all kinds of glitters on it, you know, sequins and things. And so I sewed some fake braids to that and I was Greptz, the Klingon goddess of food. And I crocheted and knit a matching outfit in heavy black yarn. And I persuaded somebody, a couple of somebody's, to be Plots, the Klingon god of drink. And the idea was that at a Klingon banquet you eat till you greptz, that is, you burp and then you drink till you plotz, which is fall down. And so we marched on stage and I was in my outfit and waving a very large ladle or mixing spoon, you know, one of those big metal spoons. And the guy or the girl playing Plots in full Klingon makeup staggered on, waving a bottle and I would bang him on the head and he would fall down. Big laugh. I got a Most Interesting on that one.

The highlight of my career, the highlight of my night of my career was a variation on the fanzine. It was the art show. And what I did was I took several needlepoints and crewel and floss embroidery blackwork and I mounted them on a piece of muslin and I folded it. I fixed it so that my arms would be in it and folded inward across my chest so that you had two sides like an opening door. And I freestyle, cross stitched two panels, one with typical art show hours, the other one with typical rules, two bids, goes to voice auction, pick up your stuff at time, that kind of thing. And I marched onto the stage to the tune of bum bum bum bum, bum bum bum bum, bum, bum, bum, bum um Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky. And when I opened my arms, you saw all these mounted pieces of artwork. And that one won a number of awards, including a workmanship award at Worldcon. That was Boston 1990 World Norseascon 3 which was the height of my career. Really

Well, basically, [dealing is] trying to get a return on what you're doing, because the practicality of it was that I couldn't continue going to conventions unless I had another source of income, and that source of income had to be the conventions themselves. So I would take my fanzines to the conventions to sell them, to get enough money to go to conventions. And this also became a major factor in which conventions I would go to do. And for a while there, I would go to three or four or five conventions a year simply to sell things, to get enough money to go to the next convention.

But hotel bills got higher, printing bills got terribly high and it became simply uneconomic to do it.

And getting tables was another matter. I could sell off club tables at one point. At one point I was getting a free or discounted table if I brought fanzines for people to read, in other words, my fanzine library. And I would get a small room with the library just for me to sell my fanzines in. But as I said, people started cracking down.

The fanzine market just died in 96 when everybody started getting their own computers. That was when the home computer market really started picking up. That was about 20 years ago. And that was when most fanzines started dying off because people said, well, why should I buy a fanzine when I can just download and all it will cost me is the paper and the ink and why should I pay for your paper and ink when I can do it myself?

So dealing was the hardest, really. Also it took the most time, it was the most physically wearing. I had to schlep the zines up and down elevators. I had to physically wrestle with them and put them out. And then you had to stand at the table and talk to people, and it just got really hard. I don't do it much now, although I'm still selling things, but I sell off other people's tables.

Right now, what I'm really hooked on is the 1632 books. These are books, not TV or movies, but this is a series that started in the year 2000 and has just gone on and on and on. I don't think, I am rereading some of the early ones to ground myself again. Eric Flint started this idea of an alternate universe in which a town in West Virginia gets plopped into the middle of Germany in the middle of the 30 Years War and what happens to the people in the town and what happens to the Germans that they're plopped in the middle of.

And what happened [laughs] what happened as it turned out was that a lot of tech oriented people got involved and a lot of writing people got involved. And the next thing that Eric Flint knew, there was a whole bunch of fan fiction being written and he didn't quite know what to do about it. But his editor, Jim Baen, of blessed memory, at Baen Books, said, okay, let's regulate this. And he set up mechanism whereby people who wanted to write in this universe could do so under supervision.

And the result has been an absolute spate. I think I've got 20 of them sitting there now. Over the last 15, 20 years of novels, he set up something called The Grantville Gazette for short stories. They've been publishing them under the name Ring of Fire. There are, I think, three Ring of Fire and eight Grantville Gazette anthologies. And what's really happened is that it has become a powerhouse for new talent, that the writers in the 1632 universe are now branching out into their own universe. And at least two of them have won Hugo's, not for 1632, but for their own work.

I got hooked on the Darkover books originally because of the culture clash elements, and I was very friendly with a particular person at the time, and that relationship got extremely sour to the point where there had to be a complete and total break, and the results were very bad. And so, at the same time, the [Darkover] books started going in directions I wasn't going to go. And so I just did not do any more in that area, period. I will not say anymore.

I actually had a story that Marion Zimmer Bradley published in one of her fanzines [2], and I wrote a lot of Darkover filk. But I attended a couple of Darkover conventions. I attended one in particular, and again, these were people that were going in directions I did not wish to go. And by the time I was finished, it was just not a place I wanted to be. So I left

It was kind of self preservation. There were things that were going on that I'm not going to get into now, but they were very bad, and husbands got involved. [3] And when that happens, you walk away. You just walk away. It's a situation that is bad. You go away and you do not go back. And I have never seen any point in berating, in belaboring a situation. If it ain't working, it ain't working. Go away and don't bother me with it.

[...]

The relationship ship with Darkover did not end well. I don't regret being involved in it. I regret how it ended. I would have liked to have ended it better, but at the time, there was just nothing else I could do.

Bill Hupe was a wonderful guy. He would basically funnel Brit fanzines through his computer and just spewed them out like mad. And he was one of the major sellers at MediaWest*Con. And so I would go and he would pick up my zines. I would pick up his zines. I would sell for him in New York. He would sell for me in Michigan. It was a very good relationship.

[...]

I had a table [at MediaWest*Con] and he was running deal. I don't know whether he was running Dealer's Room or he certainly had a huge table at Dealer's Room, but basically, I wound up funneling, selling a lot of fanzines for him in New York because he had a lot of fanzines that he would send me to sell. And he took over Trexindex when I couldn't do it in 1987. And he did it his way because he had a computer.

At that time I didn't have a computer. My husband was on Delphi and had gone broke on it, and I was furious. And we had a very rudimentary TRS 80 computer, but we didn't have any kind of online presence or anything like that. And this was just the beginning of Internet. We just didn't have access at all. So I didn't have anything like that and Bill did, and so he could do this, and so he could provide me with product and I could sell for him. And that was what the relationship was, basically. He provided me with a lot of fanzines to sell, and I provided him with a market three times a year where I sold them.

[...]

I would send him some of my zines, which he sold some of, but not many because he had lots and lots and lots of zines to sell. And I had one, but it worked. And when the bottom dropped out of the market, I was left with a hell of a lot of his zines, and I just had to ship them back to him because I could not sell them.

But it was basically a commercial relationship.

I was absolutely sure I never would be [in the Filk Hall of Fame]. I don't go to a lot of filk conventions. I don't have a huge filk presence anywhere but the Northeast. I had made a number of people extremely unhappy with some of the filks that I wrote. I'm known as a rather pushy dealer, and I had made it very clear that I didn't think I was ever going to get recognized for anything... I don't fawn over the big name filkers. And I didn't even know that I was known very much outside of the Northeast circuit. So when I was nominated, when I was named to the Filk Hall of Fame and I got the phone call, I said, this is a joke, right? Somebody's being nasty. And they said no, no, no. You come up to Toronto and get named and get the plaque and all that and yeah. So I am now in the Filk Hall of Fame, and I think that is one of my finest moments.

Read, write, express yourself. Find something that you are really, really gung ho about and just pursue it. Pursue your passion. There are some people coming in now who are doing cosplay, costuming, that are absolutely fantastic.

There are new writers coming in all the time. I'm going to cite one person, Ada Palmer. She started with a group called Sassafras, who were a bunch of her friends from Bryn Mawr who do a capella choral work. She has concocted a huge saga based on Norse legend, and she has gone on to write a book, which is now up for a Hugo and a Campbell Award. She just has the passion. There are people who have the passion. Find your passion and just follow it wherever it goes.

That’s my advice. Find whatever, you know it can be phrased in many different ways. Whatever floats your boat. Just find something, anything, something that really turns you on and something that you really want to do and just go for it.

It works for anything. It’s, it’s what you do with your life. Um, when I was a kid, I wanted to do several things. I wanted to write, I wanted to tell stories, I wanted to sing, I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to get people interested. One of the, one of the things I did when I was ten years old and the local library opened a branch, I marched everybody on my block to the library and got everybody library cards. And I have been lucky enough in my life to do everything I ever wanted to do. I wanted to be an actor. I was an actor. I wanted to sing and write songs. I've done it. I haven't done it on a massive scale, I haven't done it on a world scale, I've done it on a small scale, but I've done it. And that’s the whole thing.

It's not just the scale, it's the doing. Even if, like my Grandma Sadie, you only sing for your family, get out there and sing.

References

  1. ^ Ellison wrote the episode, "City on the Edge of Tomorrow" - his original submission is much altered from the viewed episode, one that Ellison calls "absolute bullshit" and railed against for years: " ... all I was concerned about was telling a love story. I made the point that there are some loves that are so great that you would sacrifice your ship, your crew, your friends, your mother, all of time, and everything in defense of this great love. That's what the story was all about. All of the additional stuff that Gene Roddenberry kept trying to get me to put in, kept taking away from that. The script does not end the way the episode does. Kirk goes for her to save her. At the final moment, by his actions, he says, "Fuck it. I don't care what happens to the ship, the future, and everything else. I can't let her die. I love her," and he starts for her. Spock, who is cold and logical, grabs him, holds him back and she's hit by the truck. The TV ending, where he closes his eyes and lets her get hit by the truck, is absolutely bullshit. It destroyed the core of what I tried to do. It destroyed the art; it destroyed the drama; it destroyed the extra human tragedy of it." -- from "The Fifty Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History" by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, published in 2016 by St. Martin's Press
  2. ^ Rogow edited the first five issues of Contes di Cottman IV and wrote a lot between 1978-1990 for that zine as well as a story for Jumeaux, but she may be referring to one of the DAW Anthologies here.
  3. ^ This is likely a reference to Walter Breen and more.
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