Fanoclasts
An invitational New York City fan club founded by Dick & Pat Lupoff, Larry & Noreen Shaw and Ted & Sylvia White. Dick Lupoff remembers that "The Fanoclasts came into existence in late 1960, in a manner well supported by New York fan traditions: we schismed from another club."
The name (a contraction of 'Fannish Iconoclasts') was proposed by Bill Myers, to which Algis Budrys commented, "Fan smashers? Okay, I guess, if that's what everybody wants." Note that the club is called Fanoclasts but an individual member is referred to as a Fanoclast.
It was a closed group -- you had to be invited to become a member. A member would propose a new member but any other member could veto the person. Most, but by no means all, members were fanzine fans, but the only real requirement was that of compatibility with other members.
Besides the six charter members, with a year membership included Walter Breen, Algis Budrys, Terry Carr, Peter Graham, Larry Ivie, Will J. Jenkins, Hal Lynch, Bill Myers, Bhob Stewart, Steve Stiles, and Jim Warren.
The original small, intimate group didn't last long: within a year, meetings were averaging twenty members. Meetings were held every other Friday night in Brooklyn, sometimes at Ted White's home. Meetings were informal usually involving fanzine production in some form, especially for their apa, APA-F.
In the mid-1960s, under Ted White's leadership, the club bid for and won the right to put on the 1967 Worldcon in New York (NyCon3). Besides winning a Worldcon, the bid (New York in 1967) was responsble for some of the club's most renown activities in the 1960s, its Great Fanoclast Treks, which were driving excursions by club members to Midwestcon and then to Westercon to promote the bid.
The first, in 1965, was the more epic of the two, because of the adventures of Arnie Katz and Mike McInerney. Katz, whose eyesight was so poor that he was considered legally blind, astonished everyone at the Midwestcon when he and rich brown won a spur-of-the-moment miniature golf tournament, dubbed the 'Midwestcon Open', against two other Fanoclasts, Ted White and Andy Porter. When they reached Las Vegas, McInerney had an amazing run of luck, which transformed a twenty-dollar stake into hundreds of dollars, first by hitting a jackpot at the slot machines, then cleaning up at the blackjack tables. The others had difficulty pulling him away to continue the trip.
The club lasted for decades as one of the stronger New York clubs.
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