65 Years of Amazing Stories

They’ve lived in the 21st century most of their lives.

No wonder there was such little nostalgia Wednesday as founders of the world’s oldest science fantasy club said goodbye to the 20th century in Los Angeles.

Visions of atomic power, Earth-circling satellites, Martian exploration, genetic cloning and hydroponic food production began dancing in fertile imaginations at the Los Angeles Science Fiction League in 1934--long before scientists followed with the real thing.

“A lot of what we wrote came true sooner than we thought,” said writer Len Moffatt, 75, of Downey. “But a lot of it hasn’t come fast enough. We should be much farther in space than we are, for example.”

Wearing a dress shirt imprinted with the images of planets and stars, Moffatt was among nearly two dozen pioneering members of the club who gathered for a reunion lunch at Clifton’s Cafeteria on Broadway at 7th Street.

The downtown cafeteria served for years as the club’s first home--offering free meals to fledgling science fiction writers like 17-year-old Ray Bradbury, who sometimes showed up for meetings without enough cash for food.

An upstairs dining room was where farfetched-sounding plot lines were argued over and movie special effects were analyzed and criticized. It was also where club members picked the brains of visiting experts such as the youthful experimenters from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who would drop by to discuss rocket thrust levels and payloads.

The cafeteria meeting room was a sanctuary for teenagers viewed by others as the geeks of the 1930s.

“We were outcasts. So we grabbed on to one another,” said club co-founder Walt Daugherty, an 82-year-old retired electronics consultant who now lives in Santa Maria.

“Other kids would say to us, ‘Oh, you think little green men are coming for you.’ The average person, the ordinary everyday person, would see you reading a science fiction magazine on the streetcar and think you were not only crazy but dangerous.”

The public’s attitude about science fiction changed only slightly after the atomic bomb helped end World War II. By then, the club was known by its current name, the Science Fantasy Society.

“There was still contempt. Some didn’t care for that Buck Rogers stuff,” said Hollywood writer Arthur Jean Cox, who joined the club in 1945.

Cox, 70, pulled out a snapshot taken at a 1945 club meeting and handed it to Russ Hodgkins, another co-founder of the society. “I haven’t seen Russ in 40 years!” he exclaimed.

Hodgkins, 89, of Oceanside, said nuclear warfare was a disappointment to science fiction writers, whose vision of the Atomic Age had been one of benign, limitless nuclear power that would propel man into space and toward exciting new worlds.

“What’s missing from today’s world is peace, and the opportunity to really explore the solar system,” said Hodgkins, a retired aerospace planner.

The real turning point for sci-fi came in 1969, when the United States sent a man to the moon, the veterans agreed.

“I cried. Science fiction writers were the ones who dreamed it,” said author Terri Pinckard, 69, of Santa Maria.

“The first step on the moon was vindication,” said 82-year-old club co-founder Forest J. Ackerman, a literary agent who published Bradbury’s first short story in 1938.

Before saying their farewells for what they acknowledged may be the last time, the old-timers reminisced about the time club member L. Ron Hubbard, later the founder of Scientology, hypnotized everyone at one meeting. And there was plenty of fretting about today’s genre of sci-fi films.

“Today there’s a lot of virtual reality with no thinking to it,” said Stuart J. Byrne, 85, of Winnetka, whose published work ranges from magazine pieces written in 1935 to a book published on the Internet last year. “Today, the love for science and knowledge often isn’t there.”

Bradbury, a 78-year-old West Los Angeles resident whose classics include “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles,” agreed.

“They they kick you in the stomach and blow your brains out and that’s called being creative,” he said.

Bradbury sat next to legendary sci-fi filmmaker Ray Harryhausen (“Jason and the Argonauts”) at the luncheon. Harryhausen, also 78, lives in London.

“We promised to grow old together. But to never grow up,” Bradbury said.