Though Mom and Dad must have hung out with Forry at science-fiction conventions and maintained longtime correspondence, my first interaction came when Forry asked my family whether they had any Walt Kelly comic books we could send to his friend who was a French SF fan who also loved Kelly’s work. So it was that I really internalized the "better to give than to receive" feeling for the first time, as Jean Linard became a dear friend: a man who spoke almost no English but who read and wrote a delicious mix of "normal" English and Pogoisms. And that was part of what made SF fandom – and Forry – so marvelous: friendship and influences in interactions with people who seldom, if ever, met. Such interactions had grown in the 1930s, before I was born, and were long established by the 1950s and 1960s, as I entered the world and conventions (in both senses) of fandom. And, of course, it was decades before the Internet brought the world what we in the world of SF took for granted.

In 1959, a fan named Dick Eney produced one of the major reference works of fandom, a fan project itself: Fancyclopedia II, an updating of an earlier referenc­­­e. The complete text appears online.

Let me take you back that far to provide an increased appreciation of what Forry was half a century ago. Almost from the beginning, Forry was what was termed a BNF (Big Name Fan), though Forry himself (and such possible entries as 4SJ) didn’t merit a separate entry. But "Ackermanese" did. Because he was that influential Way Back When. Here’s some of the entry for that:

"The grammatical practices followed by Forrest J Ackerman and in part -- the degree varying from fan to fan -- by those in whom his example propagated. Several minor wars were fought over the question of its uses but the invention went on insidiously spreading till about the time of the Insurgent War in LA.

"The practice, tho not the name, was revived about 1954 as described under DEMOLISHISMS.

"Lapse of Ackermanese was not directly caused by the Blowup; it was abandoned by 4e himself, with the explanation that he was disgusted with a lot of things like this that he'd tried to popularize with slight success.

"Originally it was a radical form of simplifyd spelng, like 'U & I r to b praps th lst 2 men to go roketng to an xtra-galaktik planet wher a rekt ship is strandd'."

But here, in 1959, it targets one of Forry's legacies:

"SCI-FI (Ackerman) 4e is trying to popularize this expression as an equivalent for stf, i e a contraction for science-fiction. So far it has attached chiefly to several professional movie-fan magazines and other Hollywood-level stuff."

"Trying to popularize" is right. He popularized it by his creation of (and ongoing editorial control of) the Warren magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. While SF fans had known him for decades as one of its foremost fans, the larger world became acquainted with him via the fascination of a generation of boys who grew up captivated by monthly images of SF and fantasy pop culture both old and new. Forry was the oldest of the 12-year-olds whom he led, and he remained forever that obsessive 12-year-old. With the February 1958 issue (with publisher Jim Warren wearing a Frankenstein’s monster mask and accompanied by a curvaceous young woman), FMoF began years of inspiring young readers to seek out fantastic classics, especially those with vivid horror elements.

At the SF WorldCon in St. Louis in 1969 (1,534 attendees), Forry could be spotted as the tall man surrounded by a shoulder-high mob of young admirers, termed by the rest of us "Forry’s Little Monsters." He was their guru; make no mistake. When they grew up, so many of them became pop-culture professionals that his "sci-fi" coinage was embedded in the very field he’d chosen as his focus. For example, when Don and I met Stephen King on his book tour for (I think) The Dead Zone, the conversation turned to Forry, and we suddenly realized that King might have been one of that herd of Little Monsters; he cheerily confirmed our suspicions.

Forry made his home a tourist treat for friends and young admirers. I recall a conversation in which he told of his discovery that his precious Dracula ring had disappeared. He delightedly told of solving the mystery -- and the social problem -- by contacting the suspected thief to say, simply, "Give me a ring." And it was returned immediately.

Forry was never able to accomplish one of his goals: to be supported financially forever as the lifelong custodian of a museum comprising his collection of memorabilia. But he gave us a word -- and a legacy of a strengthened genre of pop culture that continues to bring goosebumps to the world.