Bill Warren Has Died [updated]

my heart is broken I've known Bill and his wonderful wife Beverly for decades

I knew of him long before that

I was a monster kid

and Bill appeared in the pages of Forry Ackerman's Famous Monsters

he was only ten years older than me

but when you're a kid

and you see an adult doing the cool things you want to do

you say to yourself, "I want to be like that"

Bill and his wife Beverly are beloved by sci-fi fans everywhere

one of the best experiences I've ever enjoyed that didn't involve family members

was a delightful lunch with Bill and Bev and the late Bill Rotsler at a WesterCon many, many moons ago

(a waitress spilled a tray of drinks on Bill R., and to make up for us we were comped our drinks for the meal; we finished the meal well lubricated)

before I talk about Bill

let me mention Bev

men, you should be so lucky as to have a spouse like Beverly Warren

they had one of the tightest / strongest / happiest marriages I've ever seen

oh, Bev, my heart breaks for you; you were such a wonderful partner to Bill and he knew it and he appreciated you so dearly

I have a million happy memories of Bill and Bev

but I can't call them to the surface right now

too sad

we listen to KUSC on the car radio and in the house, LA's classical music station

the DJs (yes, they have DJs, good ones, too) fill the space between records with anecdotes about the great composers and musicians of the past

turns out almost all those anecdotes come from three or four sources, books written centuries ago about the composers, passed along generation to generation until now the only info we have on them is from what was written down back then

Bill Warren wrote many, many articles and several books, but the one that he will be remembered for is Keep Watching The Skies, a vast compendium of 1950s sci-fi movies

(if you snerk and think "how trivial" pay attention to this:  Virtually all our popular films and TV shows today are influence directly or indirectly by those films, because those films inspired an entire generation of filmmakers who transformed the art)

Bill's book is going to be the definitive history of of that era, the summation of a brand of film making that ended up changing everything that came after it in far more important ways than the so-called A-pictures from the big studios

Bill is going to be remembered and relied upon for a long, long time

we should be so lucky to as to have one tenth the influence he's going to have

good-bye, Bill, I remember your big happy smile

God bless you, Bill, and happy trails -- I know you loved Westerns as much as you loved sci-fi

heinlein-beverly-warren-bill-warren-1976-lasfs

Bill & Bev back in 1976 with some hack sci-fi writer (yes, I know it's Robert Fncking Heinlein)