In many ways DISCON II was the highlight of our trip but I can't think of it that way. Those moments when the trip seems so worth while happen in an unpremeditated way, one minute nothing much is happening and the next it's all happening. And so DISCON served its purpose mainly by providing a place and a time where it was all happening for a lot of the time. They say that the first convention is always the best one you'll ever attend and it is reasonably true except in the case of WorldCons, I think that you might have to attend two or three of them before you really get into the swing of things, I also imagine that a WorldCon might be a lonely place for many fans who haven't been around too long and don't know too many people but Valma and I weren't in that position fortunately. There were many people we wanted to meet and I guess we saw a couple of hundred of them though only a few really stick in mg mind. People is what conventions are alI about. Fred Haskell rang us with Ken Fletcher from Minneapolis a month or two before the DUFF race closed and spent what seemed like a long time talking. After we had finished we were even more hopeful of winnIng and getting over to America, Fred has that sort of enthusiasm. The next time Fred rang us was in Shayne McCormack's room at the Convention. We were looking forward to meeting him and he must have been even keener to meet us because he rang our room but when we weren't there rang all the other Australian rooms in the hope of contacting us. We'd been out to dinner and only arrived back so he was lucky. Shayne answered the phone and then handed it over to me. We made quick arrangements to meet in my room as soon as we could get there and so Valma and I shot out to a lift, finally caught one (they seemed horribly slow on occasions.) raced across the lobby (where we met Susan Wood but only had time for the shortest of introductions) and made it to our room ahead of Fred. We had the advantage of knowing exactly where our room was by that time and he had to hunt around for it. We waited and soon there was a knock at the door, there was this hairy fellow on the other side when we opened it and he introduced himself as Fred Haskell. For the next few hours we sat on one of the beds and talked about all manner of things, he showed us some of the photographs he'd taken and they launched us into many streams of thought. tie showed us the cover of the next issue of RUNE with Bob Tucker Smooooooothing which was a great help later when it came to meeting that gentleman. Later Fred took us with a couple of guitars to a room of a friend he knew and we spent the rest of the evening listening to he and a few others playing and singing. He is a very enthusiastic person and he plays the same way, one song in particular was played with incredible gusto and if the guitar had splintered in his hands I would not have been surprised, but it didn't. 32