I have a weakness for fan history, and somebody made a joke about rubber chicken. It may have been Robert Bloch because he has this weakness for chickens. Preferably chicks in showers.
I wondered if it were true that all fan convention banquets served rubber chicken? For many years the allegations were rife, the references many, the jokes extensile. Were fan banquets all rubber chicken banquets? The question itself was enough to light a mental fire, enough to cause me to spring from my rocking chair and dash quickly to the bookcase to consult Harry Warner. (The elapsed time from rocking-chair-spring to bookshelf arrival was thirty-five minutes, but then this is a wide room and I did become entangled between feet and beard on the first upward spring.
I was astonished and disappointed at what I did not find in Warner's All Our Yesterdays. I realized at once the omissions were the fault of Ed Wood and George Price, who labored many hours extracting the index which appears at the back of the book, but nevertheless Warner must share in the guilt, if only by association. The index does not have an entry "Rubber Chicken." Nor does it have a "Chicken, rubber." There isn't so much as a "Banquet" entry. I know very well the fans who attended conventions in the 1940s ate something, because I was among them and I remember eating -- but here, in supposedly living history, was no mention of that fact.
Still unbelieving, I turned to the text itself and discovered that Harry had mentioned worldcon banquets but did not often reproduce the menus. Of Chicago, 1940, he said: "They got free meeting rooms (in the hotel) in return for staging a banquet at which they needed to guarantee only fifty dinners at one dollar each." And later: "The banquet that night had food in quantities approximating the cost of the meal." Nothing about chicken, rubber.
I was at that banquet but creeping senility has long since robbed me of the memory of what was served. (However, I doubt that it was hamburgers or hotdogs.)
Of the 1941 Denver worldcon, Warner reported that bread was the banquet entree: "There were forty fans on hand for the banquet. After the breaking of bread, there were many informal talks." It should be noted that again, Wood and Price failed to include an entry for "bread" in the index, and I'm not aware of any stale jokes about rubber bread in fandom -- not even from Bloch.
But now, at last, a partial success! The Pacificon, 1946, served chicken. Yes, they did. Read Warner on page 262: "More than ninety fans and pros ate thin soup and halves of chicken, and mulled a lot of statistics that Don Day gave ..." Note that. The first admission of chicken appears in history, together with a convention menu: thin soup, halved chicken, mulled statistics. No doubt a satisfactory meal for the $2.50 fee charged in that year. (Also please note the alarming rate of inflation: the official banquet had rocketed from only one dollar per person in 1940, to two and one-half in 1946. Remember this when someone blames Nixon for inflationary pressures.) I shouldn't have to state at this point that Wood and Price are again remiss. The index carries no mention of soup, chicken, statistics.
I do remember the mulled statistics. They were succulent.
As for the 1947 Philadelphia worldcon, Warner says only: "The banquet was served long after most stomachs needed it." The meaning of that statement is unclear. Perhaps it was that everyone had munched on bread, hotdogs, statistics, and frayed collars beforehand; or perhaps everyone was drunk and unable to appreciate a good hotel meal. And then came the first Toronto convention of 1948. Warner reports that: "The final item on the formal program was a meal that had the labored trick name of buffanet." No hint of the available food; no index entry for that labored trick name. "Buffanet" may be a Canadian colloquialism for Po'Boy sandwiches.
The last banquet to be reported by Harry Warner was that one held at the Cincinnati worldcon in 1949. His first volume of fan history ends shortly after that date, but of the Cincinnati event he said only: "The final report also showed that the banquet had attracted 116 persons." Well and good, I suppose, but the sparse statement serves no good purpose by explaining what the 116 people ate or didn't eat. Did they gorge themselves on thin or thick soup, quarter-, halved-, or three-quartered chicken, bread, mulled statistics, or Canadian buffanet? We will never know, but we are free to speculate that the menu must have been tasty, savory. " ... the banquet attracted 116 persons." (Underlining is mine.) Either the food was very good to excite that attraction, or a naked woman was dancing on the guest of honor's tabletop.
So much for published history. But my question is not answered and my quest is incomplete. There remained the time-honored method of determining answers: the fan poll.
I mailed out 193 questionnaires. The final number was 193
because I could locate no more than that many key people.
I queried past worldcon committee men and women, past
guests of honor, past toastmasters, past treasurers (except
those who had absconded with convention funds and now
couldn't be located), and all those fans who had attended
world conventions since the beginning in 1939. And because
every scientific experiment must have a control group to obtain
credible results, I also sent the questionnaires to twenty fans
who had never attended a convention in their lives.
The returns were in keeping with past fannish co-operation.
Fifty-three completed questionnaires were returned to me,
including all twenty from the control group. The competent,
scientifically-trained pollster never asks a direct question,
never reveals the true object he is seeking. The approved
method is to ask an indirect question which only appears
to be direct, and the person who is polled will reveal his
true state of mind while attempting to answer that indirect
question. Rick Sneary, a master pollster, applied that
brilliant technique to fandom in 1945 when, tucked in
among other innocuous questions, he asked the key one:
"If you knew you were going to be hit by a car, what kind
of car would you prefer?"
Well, what kind of a car would you rather be hit by?
He received a score of answers, perhaps hundreds, ranging
from the frivolous to the reasoned scientific statement, and among those which revealed the respondent's thoughtful analyses of the matter was this favorite: "A Stanley Steamer, of course. It is much softer than, say, a Mercury." Rick Sneary considered his poll a success.
My key (and loaded) question was this one: "Based upon your attendance at past worldcon banquets, what do you expect to be served at the Miami Beach convention in 1977?"
Twenty replies (everyone of them from the control group) said T-bone steak. Setting aside the controls, the true response was as follows:
Rubber chicken ..................46%
Salisbury steak ....................29%
MacDonald's Super ............... 18%
Chili ........... 9%
Rotten fish ........... 9%
Ptomaine .......... 3%
Waiter's dirty thumb in my soup ............. 1.5%
Two replies were invalid, being obviously crank answers. One of the invalid replies said: "Don Lundry's body served on a flaming skewer." The other said simply: "More of the same bullshit." These were discarded as being unscientific answers, but from the remaining answers it is obvious that rubber chicken was served at most of the past 34 worldcons. (Don't be misled by those percentages totaling more than one hundred points. My Texas Instrument is broken and I did it with pencil.)
One key person didn't answer my questionnaire, one person who was a 101% true-blue All American Fan, and I was so disappointed by his failure that I telephoned his home in Savannah, Georgia to ask why he hadn't responded. To my surprise, his widow answered. She said that Lee had choked to death some weeks before on a rubber chicken rubber bone.
-- Bob Tucker
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan
Data entry by Judy Bemis
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