Mari Beth Wheeler
(June 14, 1922 – October 19, 1987)
From the collection of Forrest J Ackerman, scan by Andrew Porter.
Mari Beth Wheeler was the fan name of Mary Jayne Wheeler (née Coons, later Colvin). She was a longtime fan, beginning in the 1940s, and a member of LASFS.
She attended Michicon 4 and hung out with the Slan Shack crowd, part of the group that moved from the Midwest to L.A.. Her first Worldcon was Pacificon in Los Angeles in 1946 and her last was L.A.con II in Anaheim in 1984.
In 1944, she was buhead of the N3F Welcommittee. She was the uncredited inspiration behind the notorious Three Fingers published by Bob Tucker and Walt Liebscher in 1945.
She served in the military during World War II, coming from Washington, DC, to Chicago for First Post-Radar-Contact-with-the-Moon Con in 1946, “wearing the crow-and-stripe of a third-class Petty Officer, representing a most recent promotion,” according to Tucker’s conrep from Bloomington News-Letter 4 (April 1946).
Les Croutch was rude about her in his 1948 Torcon conrep (Light 36).
In 1941, she married Elmer Lawrence "Larry" Wheeler (1920–1989); they had probably separated by the time she came into fandom and divorced no later than 1950. From the mid-1940s through early 1950s, she lived in Bloomington, Illinois, pubbed her ish and hung out with Tucker.
- Photo in Harry Warner's history of fandom in the 1940s, All Our Yesterdays.
- Photo from the LASFS Album.
- Obituary by Bob Tucker in Locus 323 (December 1987).
- Obituary by Tucker in Science Fiction Chronicle 99 (December 1987).
- Baily's Beads [mid-40s] (with Bob Tucker)
- Rosebud [mid-40s]
| Person | 1922—1987 |
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