Tyree's Tuppence

by Tyree Campbell

"Life is mostly froth and bubble

Two things stand like stone

Kindness in another's trouble

Courage in your own"

Ye Wearie Wayfarer

Adam Lindsay Gordon

Stand Like Stone

The famous Beeb science fiction slash space opera slash adventure series, Doctor Who, ran for decades in the UK, and even today its re-runs can be watched in this country, if you have the right cable server or dish. Now, you'd think that a series of such duration would have...well, aged. I mean, picture the cast of Friends as sexagenarians [no, that's not a dirty word]. So how did Who do it?

The secret lies in the casting. There are in fact eight actors who successively played The Doctor. In order these are: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton [who was impaled by a church spire in The Omen], Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker [most recently in Dungeons & Dragons], Peter Davidson, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and Paul McGann. [There will be a quiz...]. None of these men bears any physical resemblance to one another, yet they all played the same character...and got away with it! How?

Seems that The Doctor, a Time Lord who hails from Gallifrey and is not human, does not actually die when he dies [yes, I know what I just wrote]. Instead, he regenerates. He transmogrifies. Externally he becomes someone else. One actor serves two or three years, and finds another show, and a new one assumes the role. Forever young. The Doctor. He regenerates. His appearance changes, but he retains the same verve for traveling through time to put things right that are wrong--here, there and everywhere, now, then, and everywhen.

It's a television show.

Doesn't happen in real life.

In real life, James B. Baker Jr. won't be back for next season.

Bam!

Sorry about that. It still hasn't hit some of us.

It isn't fair...

You wanna know who James B. Baker was? Really? Start by going to the Sam's Dot department called Creators Club. Go to the Members section. Click on Jim Baker. You'll find a photo, a brief bio, and some of his work.

It's not enough, you say?

Well, it never is.

I mean, just look at the first couple sentences in the bio. He was born in Darrouzett [spelling correct] in 1925. Little teensy smegging town in the extreme northeast panhandle of Texas. You can pee across it.

Then, before you can say "Esperance," he's going to school in Shamrock, Texas. It's a little bigger town. Two digit population, if you count the prairie dogs.

Tells you nothing. Veni, vidi, vici. Big wow.

He worked, here and there. Got into the last year or so of the war. Lost a job or two. Finally finished school, got a college degree, sold property...

...retired.

Shuffled off the mortal coil.

Okay?

...still not enough?

Fine. Grab some coffee or your stimulant of choice, settle back, and light 'em up if you got 'em. Lemme tell you what they don't tell you about James B. Baker Jr.

Let's consider the early years...say, 1925. See, I know quite a few of you who are reading this right now. I know that 1925 is a good three to five decades before many of you were zygotes. Your frame of reference is maybe The Bangles, and Van Halen, and Stephen King movies, and silicone, and The Simpsons, and shoulder pads, and Japanese cars, and thongs, and Milky Way candy bars on sale for forty five cents. Your frame of reference is the $5 an hour minimum wage, and medical care upon request, and the "born on" date on a can of beer. Yours is a world of, to quote The Doctor, "Unlimited rice pudding." Oh, no, that's not a knock. Not at all. But...if you lose your job, you can pretty much always find another, or you can temp until you find a permanent position. If you take ill, you can get medical care. You live in a house or an apartment [my proof? You're reading this, and you can only do that online...on a computer...which you are not going to find over an air vent on the sidewalk in an alley][yeh yeh, okay, you can read it in a library, too...the point is still valid]. And to solve whatever social or economic problem you have, there is a program somewhere. All you have to do is apply. So a lot of you have it good. Some don't, that's true. But most do.

Wasn't like that in 1925. Or 1926. And in 1929, it got even worse. By 1933, when Jim was seven, it was abysmal.

Maybe you've heard the Bill Cosby parody of an older adult telling some youths about how tough it was when he was a kid. About how he had to walk five miles to school each day. In winter. In six feet of snow. Uphill. Both ways.

Yeh, you laugh.

Jim Baker lived that. And worse.

You don't quite believe me?

Here's Jim's frame of reference.

The Midwestern skies were black in the early thirties. "Black blizzards," the clouds were called. In a prolonged drought, the wind picks up all the loose dirt and blows it wherever it wants to. In the middle of the Depression, thousands of families were forced to leave the area...Okies, as Steinbeck called them, in The Grapes of Wrath [oh, you thought that was just fiction, did you?]. The middle of the United States was referred to as the Dust Bowl. It had nothing to do with football. You can find photos of it easily enough in any library. Check out the National Geographics for 1933, say. Those black and white pictures in them are really in color. And they aren't fake. Believe me.

[Remember the dust storm near the end of the movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome? Yeh, exactly!]

People who could, left, because there was no food, no work, and in many cases not even a house remained for habitation.

Jim Baker didn't...or couldn't...leave. He lived through that.

He had nothing. And nothing to lose.

Some years ago, rather before Woodstock and the Moonwalk [not Michael Jackson's...the real one], my folks took us four kids to a rather hilly landhold of about five acres in West Virginia, about forty miles north of Blacksburg, Virginia. My dad's older brother, Johnnie, lived there. The land itself was beautiful, if unkempt. There was, I remember, a small plot of land that had been turned over for planting...corn and beans, probably, and tomatoes. Maybe some root crops. Not a tractor in sight, just an old old brown horse with callouses on its stomach from rubbing the ground. Every spring, Johnnie would hitch up that horse to a plow that is probably in a farm museum now, and turn over just enough land to grow enough to feed himself. And I remember thinking that Johnnie's spine was in much the same condition as the horse's. And had been that way for some time. Because, you see, there was no help for it.

I thought at the time he was a hundred years old.

And so we kids took turns riding the horse, which was docile and tolerant enough, and I think we picked some wild strawberries, or threw dirt clods at one another...something like that...and we all went home, and Johnnie died a couple years later, at the age of 62, on that piece of land.

When I think of the word "poor," that's the image that comes to mind.

I think Jim knew that word quite well as a child.

Day after day. The same clothes. House full of dust. Bed, or maybe a cot, full of dust. Cupboards full of dust. Some bread to eat, maybe, and some stale water. On a good day, if the Ag people came around with the free butter and cheese, maybe eggs, he might have some of that for dinner. Some chicken. Maybe a tomato now and then, or an apple. Darned few potatoes, because the national surplus had been dumped into the Mississippi to keep the prices up. Walking to school, which probably was not all that far away, Shamrock being a town of minute dimensions. Walking home. Reading and writing and 'rithmetic. Trudge. Trudge. Railroad tracks with creaky boxcars. Grain elevators, with dust mixing with the dirt in the air. Coughing was a way of life...and death. Water was a precious commodity in the drought. What was clean then? Hands? Clothes? I don't really know. I can guess, but I'd rather not.

Jim Baker lived through that.

Such were his formative years. The years that make their indelible mark. You're not really all that aware of your own formation, you know. What makes you you? Why are you what you are right now? Whatever that is, it began when you were three, six, eight...ten. Whatever you believe, think, want to do...the seeds of that were planted in those years. And such were Jim's formative years.

Got the photo, as they say?

I have absolutely no idea what made Jim Baker first dream of going to the stars. For me it was at the age of twelve, having run out of dog books to read at the library, and stumbling upon what I assumed was an animal story book, and checking it out, and taking it home...where I discovered that The Star Beast, by someone named Robert A. Heinlein, had smeg-all to do with dogs. But for Jim...the only star dreams available back in the thirties were found in the pulps. Amazing Stories, and titles like that. Gadget stories, where the heroes [almost always men] took great pains to explain to the reader the science involved in the "gimmick" that bunged the story into the science fiction genre. ["Observe, my dear Snodgrass, how the external combustible wombat thruster has incarcellated itself between the derelict folds of the frapterizer, thus causing the starbuckle to clofibrate. I'm afraid we won't be getting laid tonight."] [Actually, in the science fiction of the thirties, nobody ever got laid. You know how Roy Rogers and Gene Autry always kissed their horses? Science fiction heroes always kissed their rockets. Pity...].

So maybe Jim read that stuff. And dreamed. And got his own ideas. We know he started writing around the age of ten, eleven. He used the da Vinci theory of manuscript. Leonardo, who was lefthanded, wrote right to left in Latin, using a mirror to guide his hand. Jim, it seems, had his own way of concealing what he was writing. But he wrote. He had ideas. He dreamed.

In a milieu of blackness and bleakness and hopelessness and despair and grim reality, James B. Baker Jr. dreamed of the stars.

He saw stars through the soot and the grime. He saw them through the black blizzards, and the dust, and the labor, and the sweat, and the poverty, the rags, the stale cheese, the splinters in the bare feet, the chill wind through the cracks in the planks of the walls...through all that, he never ever lost sight of where he wanted to go.

Of where he thought Man should go.

Jim could have quit. He could have given up. He could have found work slinging hundred-pound sacks of grain ten hours a day for some cigar-smoking, Cadillac-driving, boob-fondling, mansion-inhabiting, pension-fund-raiding corporate whizbang. He could have spent his ten cents an hour in the taverns. He could have cursed the darkness...there was certainly a lot of darkness that needed cursing. And he may even have uttered a few epithets, now and then. But he also chose to light a candle.

He chose to light a candle.

Through all of that, he never lost sight of the stars.

I wonder...I think Jim was the sort who would pick up a hitchhiker now and then. I think so, because he picked up so many of us. See...that candle he lit was not for himself alone. It was for others, too. Isn't that what it says in his CC bio? That he wrote and published for those who wanted to see Man go to the stars? He didn't want to go by himself. He wanted to take with him as many of us as he could. He thought that's where we belong.

He invited us to come along.

How many of us got our starts with Jim Baker? Did that first acceptance slip lead to others, from other publishers? He knew what it meant to each of us to see our stories online or in print, or our art or illustrations as doors to the rest of the magazines, or on covers. They can't bottle that kind of high. It can only come from a dreamer. From one like Jim Baker.

His gift, to us.

His candle.

Well...the candle flickered recently. The stars called him, and he had to go. He went alone in body...but not in spirit. If there is such a thing as human energy, it enveloped him at the last. He knew we were there. With all the calls and the messages, he could not not know it. So he went alone in body, but escorted by our love and caring.

The physical part is gone, but the spirit remains. He wanted us to dream, and we dream. He wanted us to continue what he began, and we continue it. He wanted us to write, and we write. He wanted us to draw, and we draw. That's his spirit.

The spirit remains.

James B. Baker Jr. wrote several novels, and left behind a large body of other work...and of dreams. But more importantly, he was a publisher of science fiction and fantasy and [lately] horror stories. He established several magazines and anthologies, including The Martian Wave, The Fifth Di..., The Sixth Sense, and Just Because. The first two of these still exist. You can read them here.

The spirit remains.

ProMartian Publishing was Jim's legacy. Humans are driven to leave something of themselves behind. The more well-off establish endowments, or donate funds that garner bronze plaques on walls of rooms with names. For others, maybe it's a set of initials in a slab of concrete poured, or a son who can continue the family name and the lineage. For Jim, it was ProMartian. He left, knowing that it would continue. He got his wish. I wonder if he wished on the first star he came to...

ProMartian Publishing has now transformed into Sam's Dot Publishing, which carries over the ProMartian publications active at the time he left for the stars he loved so dearly. Like Doctor Who, the magazines have regenerated. They're still here, the few changes in them cosmetic, the spirit unchanged and undiminished.

The spirit of Jim Baker remains. He's still with us. Charming, irascible, impetuous, gallant...and on occasion perhaps just a bit awed by the fact that people so greatly appreciated him and what he did... In our eyes, James B. Baker Jr. will always stand like stone.

**

I want to close this part of the Tuppence. It's 2:11 A.M., and I've just finished a second slug of Glenfiddich, and I've said enough. But after all the words I've written--not just here, but in stories and articles--you'd think I could find a few to close this piece with. And I can't find them.

And it's occurred to me that maybe it's fitting that I don't close this Tuppence. Let's keep it open. That's what we're doing with Jim's work. We're keeping it open. We're still here...and so is Jim, in each of us.

Hokey? Maudlin? Sophomoric emotionalism? Yeh, maybe, a little bit.

But I'll tell you this much: for weeks after my father died, I had no sense of privacy. I felt his eyes on me everywhere I went, in everything I did. There was nowhere to hide, no little room to sneak into for a smoke or to check out the latest National Geographic. I couldn't even think, believing that now he could read my thoughts.

So...dagnabbit, Jim, quit reading over my shoulder. You can have this when I'm done.

**********

FAQ: What the smeg is the origin of "Sam's Dot"????

It's Russian.

Russia has given Earth's literature many bright stars: Asimov, of course, and Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, Pushkin, Rand, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, among others. But Russia herself has never been known, and probably never will be known, for freedom of anything, especially that of the press. Quite the opposite, in fact, even today. Imprisonment, suppression, torture, the KGB, GRU, OGPU, the Cheka, and the various minions of the Tsars, all failed to quash the writers. They continued to write. They had the gift of vision, and they felt driven, compelled, to share it. They circulated manuscripts in longhand [sometimes, but rarely, from a printing press] among their friends, whom, hopefully, they could trust. In some cases, such as those of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, the manuscripts were smuggled out of the country and published elsewhere.

These writers kept a spirit alive. A spirit not of freedom, an abstract unknown in Russia, even today, but of determination: that the written word shall endure, come what may. And the process of keeping that spirit alive, of passing around these manuscripts so that others might read them and know the truths of the writers, that process was referred to as "self published".

In Russian, that's "sam izdat".

You can work the rest of it out yourself.