The Honorary Napoleons
Biographies
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Page 2
Howard Haycraft – XXV
Howard Haycraft was born in Madela, MN, in 1905 and graduated from the University of Minnesota. In 1929 he joined the staff of the H. W. Wilson Co. of New York, publishers of library reference books. He spent his entire career there, becoming president in 1953 and retiring in 1970. In World War II he was a captain in the U.S. Army's Special Services, working in troop education. His chief interest outside of his work was detective fiction. In 1941 he published Murder for Pleasure, a survey of the field that was called "the most important single work of fiction-mystery scholarship ever produced" by Otto Penzler, owner of New York's Mysterious Bookshop. Haycraft went on to edit several anthologies of detective fiction and won two Edgar Awards. He lived in Hightstown, NJ, and died there on November 12, 1991, aged 86.
(William Hyder)
Laurence P. Dodge – XXVI
Laurence Paine Dodge, whose family owned the Dodge Shoe group in his hometown of Newburyport, MA, was born November 16, 1885. A track star at Harvard, he graduated with an A.B. in 1908 and attended graduate school for a year. He was one of the first people in Newburyport to own an automobile. In the Harvard Class of 1908 Fiftieth Anniversary Report he wrote that he had “a brief experience in the insurance business [and entered] the investment business, retiring in 1930.” By the late 1920s Dodge was active in Democratic Party politics and acted as a Massachusetts elector. He was president of the Anna Jacques Hospital and a trustee of the Newburyport Public Library, was a member of the Tuesday Night Club of Newburyport and enjoyed tennis and golf. In 1964, his local newspaper reported that an outraged Dodge, “a member of the N.A.A.C.P. and C.O.R.E,” offered a $100 reward for the arrest of the person responsible for racial graffiti posted in public places. Dodge was among those who submitted a correct solution to Christopher Morley’s Sherlock Holmes crossword puzzle and was invited to attend the inaugural Baker Street Irregulars dinner on December 7, 1934. He attended a number of the BSI dinners in the 1940s and received the investiture of “The Six Napoleons” in January 1945. Dodge was a member of the Speckled Band of Boston.
(Julie McKuras)
Paul H. Gore-Booth – XXVII
Paul Gore-Booth was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire, on February 3, 1909, and attended Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. His career was in diplomacy. He served in the Foreign Office in London from 1933 to 1936, and then being stationed successively in Vienna, Tokyo (where he received the Japanese declaration of war in 1941 and was interned for nine months) and Washington, returning to London in 1945. Subsequent posts included British Ambassador to Burma, British High Commissioner in India in 1971 and finally Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office and Head of the Diplomatic Service. In 1957 he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (K.C.M.G.) and became a life peer in 1969 with the title Baron Gore-Booth of Maltby. In 1951 he was one of the first to join the Sherlock Holmes Society of London (revived from the prewar Sherlock Holmes Society), and at the inaugural meeting conveyed greetings from Edgar W. Smith and the Baker Street Irregulars. He was invested in the BSI as "The Three Gables" in 1953. In 1969 he became president of the London society and took part in its costumed pilgrimages to the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland in 1971 and 1978. His eyesight deteriorated in his later years, but as a Christian Scientist he refused to consider conventional ophthalmic treatment. He died on June 29, 1984.
(Roger Johnson)
S.C. Roberts – XXVIII
Sydney Castle Roberts was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, on April 3, 1887, the year Sherlock Holmes appeared for the first time in Beeton's Christmas Annual. He matriculated at Cambridge University and subsequently became one of the Cambridge University Press's leading figures and governors, for which he was knighted in 1958. He was known as an authority on Boswell's Life of Johnson when, in 1928, he read Ronald Knox’s 1911 Oxford talk "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes," which Knox had included in his book Essays in Satire. Roberts expressed his critical reaction to Knox’s theories in a 1929 Cambridge U.P. leaflet titled A Note on the Watson Problem. The BSI's Edgar W. Smith later fixed this paper’s fundamental place in Sherlockian scholarship with a masterly circumlocution: "The foundation for what was to follow may be said by that action to have been laid." Roberts followed it in 1931 with another landmark monograph, Doctor Watson: Prolegomena to the study of a biographical problem. This was commissioned by Frank V. Morley, an editor at Faber & Faber, who sent a copy to his brother Christopher Morley in New York. The elder Morley praised it lavishly in the March 7, 1931, issue of the Saturday Review of Literature. Looking back in 1946 he named it as one of the four fundamental factors that prompted him to form the Baker Street Irregulars in 1934. Britain's first Sherlock Holmes Society was founded soon after this, at a dinner in Baker Street on June 6, 1934, with Roberts as a participant. His subsequent publications included “Christmas Eve: An Unrecorded Adventure of Sherlock Holmes,” “The Strange Case of the Megatherium Thefts,” Sherlock Holmes: Selected Stories, and Holmes and Watson: A Miscellany. In 1951, when the postwar Sherlock Holmes Society of London was founded, Roberts became its president and served until his death on July 21, 1966.
(Jon L. Lellenberg)
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Stuart Palmer – XXIX
Charles Stuart Hunter Palmer was born on June 21, 1905, in Baraboo, WI. After studying at the Chicago Art Institute and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, he held a number of odd jobs. He began to write short stories in 1928, and in 1931 published his first book, Ace of Jades. The Penguin Pool Murder, his second mystery novel, featured schoolteacher Hildegard Withers and was filmed by RKO the following year. Edna May Oliver starred as Miss Withers in that film and several sequels. Palmer began to write screenplays, including two featuring Bulldog Drummond, and saw a number of his original stories adapted for film. He moved to California and wrote for RKO and Warner Brothers, specializing in mysteries and thrillers. During World War II he spent time in Washington DC, serving as a liaison between the United States Army intelligence and the Hollywood studios, but continued to contribute to B films including the Falcon series. After the war he left Hollywood, gave up screenwriting and resumed writing Hildegarde Withers mysteries, eventually turning out fourteen novels about the character. He also wrote two novels featuring private investigator Howard Rock as well as science fiction short stories. He was a member of the Mystery Writers of America and served for one term as president. Palmer’s Sherlockian pastiche “The Adventure of the Remarkable Worm” was published in Ellery Queen’s The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1944. A second pastiche, “The Adventure of the Marked Man” appeared in an Australian women’s magazine and was reprinted in The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1986), edited by Richard Lancelyn Green. In 1958 Palmer received the investiture of “The Remarkable Worm” from the Baker Street Irregulars. He was also a member of the Speckled Band of Boston. He died on February 4, 1968, in Los Angeles.
(Julie McKuras)
Lorentz Arnold Morrow – XXX
Lorentz “Pete” Arnold Morrow was born on March 1, 1899, in Springfield, OH. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and returned to Springfield where he was “disc jockey, engineer, station manager and announcer for his own radio station, WLAM.” During World War II he was a communications officer in the Navy, dealing with enciphered messages. He settled in Hartford, CT, in 1947, joined the American Radio Relay League and operated an amateur radio station. His wartime work with codes led to an interest in cryptograms. His first published cryptogram appeared the Hartford Courant in 1967, and he went on to publish more than 700. He was a member of the Tunxis Community College English faculty in Farmington, CT, and worked as a copy editor. Morrow was a member of The Men on the Tor and in 1966 was awarded the BSI investiture of “The Grice Patersons in the Island of Uffa.” He died on June 2, 1979, in Marin, CA.
(Julie McKuras)
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Basil Rathbone – XXXI
We reprint this entry in John Goodspeed's column, Mr. Peep's Diary, as it appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun on Monday, December 21, 1953:
As a thespian Sherlock Holmes Basil Rathbone is as responsible as anybody for the fact that a whole generation has mostly heard and seen Conan Doyle’s detective stories enacted – but he was nevertheless honored the other night by the Baltimore club dedicated to reading and knowing the printed works by chapter, verse, line and syllable.
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After narrating a children’s story at the Lyric, Mr. Rathbone received a certificate that makes him Honorary Napoleon XXXI in the Six Napoleons of Baltimore, the group so dedicated. Allen Robertson, secretary, extended the diploma along with sympathy for Mr. Rathbone’s latest Broadway vehicle about Sherlock, which closed last month after three singular performances.
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Disguised in stage make-up and tails, Mr. Rathbone thanked the Napoleons and tucked the paper into the same pocket his pistol was in – if he really is Holmes of the written canon.
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For those desiring more information about Rathbone, we recommend checking out his autobiography, In and Out of Character.
(Greg Ruby)
Stephen F. Crocker – XXXII
Stephen Fuller Crocker was born October 5, 1898, in Wheeling Heights, WV. He attended Northwestern University and was a professor of English literature at the University of West Virginia and a member of the executive committee of the English Department. In addition to his professorial duties, he served on the university’s athletic council for a number of years. Crocker contributed several articles to The Baker Street Journal and at least one to the Sherlock Holmes Journal. He organized The Scion of the Four of Morgantown, serving as Gasogene from 1952 to 1960, and received the investiture of “The Norwood Builder” from the Baker Street Irregulars in 1953. He was the faculty sponsor of the Diogenes Club of the University of West Virginia. He retired as professor emeritus and died on October 19, 1969. The university’s Department of English awards the Stephen F. Crocker Dissertation Fellowship in his memory.
(Julie McKuras)
Richard Hart – XXXIII
Richard Hart, chief of the humanities department at the central Enoch Pratt Free Library, was born in Baltimore in 1908. After graduating from City College in 1925 he signed on as a crew member of the freighter Quaker City and spent several years as a merchant seaman, once surviving a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico aboard the tanker Muskogee. He attended the Pratt Institute School of Library Science in New York and in 1930 became a reference department page at the old Enoch Pratt Free Library building on Mulberry Street. In the following year he became an assistant in the literature department. He was named head of the department in 1940 and in 1973 he retired from what had been renamed the humanities department. Despite his lack of a college education Hart had a vast knowledge of literature and was a Poe scholar. He wrote poetry and was the author of a biography of the library's founder, Enoch Pratt. He was known for his encouragement of aspiring writers and his helpfulness to library users. Hart was married to the former Evelyn Linthicum, who became the librarian at the George Peabody Library on Mount Vernon Place. She died in 1985. Though never a member of the Six Napoleons of Baltimore, Hart occupies a special place in the society’s history. In 1946 Allen Robertson mentioned to Hart his intention to form a local Sherlockian society. Hart arranged a luncheon at the Lord Baltimore Hotel to introduce him to Paul S. Clarkson, another Sherlock Holmes fancier he had met in the course of his library work. The meeting was a success: Robertson and Clarkson became Napoleon I and Napoleon II of the new society. Hart died on March 13, 2007, at the age of 99.
(William Hyder)
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A. Carson Simpson – XXXIV
Alexander Carson “Deak” Simpson was born on February 1, 1896, in Merion, PA, the son of a former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice. He received a B.S. in Chemistry from the Pennsylvania Military College in 1916. In World War I he was commissioned in the U.S. Army and served as an instructor in the artillery. He received his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was associate editor and then editor of the Law Review. Called to the bar in 1922, he joined his father’s law firm, Simpson, Brown and Williams. In 1926 he was appointed assistant city solicitor of Philadelphia and eight years later became special master in charge of the consolidated jury trial list of Common Pleas Courts. He held this post until his retirement in 1964. Simpson was a member of many legal associations and a variety of civic and cultural bodies. His interests ranged from opera and the fine arts to numismatics to railroads and antique automobiles. Simpson was present at the inaugural meeting of the Sons of the Copper Beeches in 1948 and attended many of BSI dinners, receiving the investiture of “The Conk-Singleton Forgery Case” in 1954. He contributed several articles to The Baker Street Journal and from 1952 to 1961 published Volumes 1-9 of Simpson’s Sherlockian Studies. These became collector’s items and were reprinted by Magico Magazine in 1982. Simpson died on October 21, 1965.
(Julie McKuras)
Reginald Owen – XXXV
Reginald Owen was born on August 5, 1887, in Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and made his stage debut in 1905. Moving to the United States in 1920, he appeared in Broadway productions and in 1929 began a long film career as a character actor. Owen is one of the few actors who have portrayed both Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. In Sherlock Holmes, produced by Fox in 1932, he played Watson to Clive Brooks’s Holmes. The next year, in A Study in Scarlet, he appeared as Holmes with Warburton Gamble as Watson. In 1938 he portrayed another landmark character, starring as Ebenezer Scrooge in MGM’s A Christmas Carol. His later career included appearances in such films as Disney’s Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks and in many television series, including Maverick, One Step Beyond, Kentucky Jones and Bewitched. Owen died on November 5, 1972, at the age of 85.
(William Hyder)
Robert R. Pattrick – XXXVI
Robert R. Pattrick ("The Politician, the Lighthouse, and the Trained Cormorant" BSI, 1954+) was born in Kansas City, MO, on November 21, 1926, but grew up mainly in the Glendale, CA. When a child of three, rheumatic fever left him with a defective heart and a limited life expectancy. He did his best to lead a normal life, taking an interest in children's literature (especially L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz series), comic strips, science-fiction, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's works including Professor Challenger, the historical novels, and Sherlock Holmes. In 1947, when Pattrick was 20, he and his friend Donald Hardenbrook founded The Trained Cormorants of Glendale as a BSI scion society for Los Angeles. (The society’s name came from an unwritten case of Sherlock Holmes, “The Politician, the Lighthouse and the Trained Cormorant,” which Dr. Watson had mentioned in “The Veiled Lodger” and which Edith Meiser had dramatized in her radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, then starring John Stanley as Holmes.) Pattrick’s weak health kept him close to home, but he compensated by cultivating a large and widespread Sherlockian correspondence. He also became a noteworthy contributor to the Writings About the Writings in his own Cormorant's Ring newsletter and in the Baker Street Journal and the Sherlock Holmes Journal. His work prompted Edgar W. Smith to grant him his BSI investiture in 1954 and, a few years later, to visit the Cormorants while on the West Coast. Pattrick's writings also appeared posthumously in August Derleth's The Reminiscences of Solar Pons in 1961 and in the anthology West by One and by One, edited by science-fiction writer Poul Anderson (“The Dreadful Abernetty Business,” BSI, 1960) in 1965. On August 17, 1960, Pattrick's heart failed at age 33, depriving the BSI of further and potentially greater contributions to the Sherlockian world.
(Jon L. Lellenberg)
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Colin Prestige – XXXVII
Colin Prestige was the youngest of the quintet who, in the midst of assembling the Sherlock Holmes Exhibition in Baker Street in 1951, decided that the Sherlock Holmes Society — established in 1934 and dissolved four years later — should be re-founded as the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. The exhibition, part of the Festival of Britain, was open from May to September 1951 and attracted more than 54,000 visitors. Prestige, an alumnus of Oriel College, Oxford, was a member of a leading legal firm, Lawrence Graham. He became a partner in 1959 and remained with the firm for more than fifty years. (A devotee of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, Prestige was also a trustee of W. S. Gilbert’s estate.) For nearly twenty years he served as Honorary Secretary of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and later became Chairman and then Treasurer. Throughout the 1950s he conducted a lively and learned correspondence with some of the leading American Sherlockians, notably Edgar W. Smith, James Montgomery, Nathan L. Bengis and Jay Finley Christ. In 1961 he was invested in the Baker Street Irregulars as “Captain Jack Crocker,” reflecting his period of National Service in the Royal Navy, and in 1967 he was the first recipient of the BSI’s Queen Victoria Medal, awarded for “outstanding contributions to the quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.” He was a prolific contributor to The Sherlock Holmes Journal, beginning in the first issue, and from 1980 to 1995 wrote a column called “The Jack-Knife” which dealt intelligently and wittily with Canonical oddities. He also contributed articles to the Baker Street Journal.
(Roger Johnson)
William S. Baring-Gould – XXXVIII
William Stuart Baring-Gould was born on August 7, 1913, in Minneapolis, MN. He was the grandson of Sabine Baring-Gould, a British clergyman and author who wrote the words to the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1935 he moved to New York City to work for the Hearst organization in merchandising and promotion. Hired by Time as a copywriter, he became the magazine’s promotion manager in 1940. Having been interested in Sherlock Holmes since the age of 14, when he received a copy of the Canon from his aunt, Baring-Gould attended his first Baker Street Irregulars dinner in 1947. He was awarded the investiture of “The Gloria Scott” in 1952. In 1955 he self-published The Chronological Holmes: A Complete Dating of the Adventures of Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, As Recorded by His Friend John H. Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department. His biography Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street came out in 1962, and he received the BSI’s Two-Shilling Award at the 1963 dinner. Baring-Gould and his wife Ceil collaborated on writing The Annotated Mother Goose, published in 1962, and he began to consider preparing an annotated Canon. It would take five years of research and considerable negotiations and correspondence with Adrian Conan Doyle before the book became a reality. While working on it he contributed writings on Holmes to The Baker Street Journal, The American Book Collector, Sports Illustrated, and Esquire. He was a member of The Five Orange Pips of Westchester County, the Diogenes Club and the Musgrave Ritualists and was supportive of the fledgling Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes. He died on August 10, 1967, while in the final stages of preparing The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. His widow Ceil completed the editorial chores and the two-volume work was published later that year. Baring-Gould’s collection The Lure of the Limerick was also posthumously published in 1967, followed by Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street in 1969.
(Julie McKuras)
Felix Morley – XXXIX
Felix Morley ("The Second Stain" BSI, 1944) was born in Haverford, Pa. on January 6, 1894, four years after his brother Christopher, who called Felix "the second Garrideb" and settled upon January 6 as Sherlock Holmes's birthday partly because it was Felix's. The family moved to Baltimore in 1900. As boys Felix and the third brother Frank (b. 1899) were drilled about the Sherlock Holmes stories by Christopher in what he called their "academical household." Like both of his brothers, Felix was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. After World War I he worked as a Baltimore Sun correspondent and became a foreign policy scholar, earning a Ph.D. from Washington, DC's Brookings Institution in 1933. Joining the Washington Post, he was put in charge of the editorial page and in 1936 won the newspaper's first Pulitzer Prize for his editorial writing. In 1940 he became president of his alma mater, Haverford College, where his father had taught mathematics. At that year's BSI dinner, he delivered a Mycroftian talk about "The Significance of the Second Stain." Christopher Morley considered this the most scholarly paper the BSI had heard at its dinners, and Edgar W. Smith included it in his anthology Profile by Gaslight in 1944. After World War II Felix returned to Washington, writing about international affairs and serving as an NBC radio news commentator. In 1948, when Christopher was unable to attend a Six Napoleons dinner meeting to which Allen Robertson had invited him, he suggested, “Why not ask Uncle Felix, who is only 45 minutes away? He would be thrilled. He does his broadcast, as you know, at 6:45 pm and he could easily be in Baltimore by 8 pm. Smite him over the head and extract his black pearl.” After Christopher Morley died in 1957, Felix spoke about him at the following January's BSI dinner. His talk, "In the Spirit of Christopher Morley," is preserved in W. T. Rabe’s Voices from Baker Street recordings. Felix retired to Gibson Island on Maryland's Western Shore, where he continued to write on political philosophy and, in 1977, produced his memoirs, For the Record. He died on March 13, 1982, aged 88.
(Jon L. Lellenberg)
William Gillette – XL
William Hooker Gillette (July 24, 1853 – April 29, 1937) was an actor and playwright known for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in over 13,000 stage productions along with the recently found 1916 silent film and a few radio dramatizations. So iconic was Gillette’s performance that illustrator Frederic Dorr Steele based his drawings in Collier’s Weekly of Holmes on the actor. As Gillette had passed away nine years before the Six Napoleons formed, he never attended one of our meetings. For more information on Gillette, we recommend William Gillette, America's Sherlock Holmes by Henry Zecher.
(Greg Ruby)
David Callahan – XLI
David William Callahan was born on August 8, 1908, in Boston, the son of recently arrived Irish immigrants. The family moved to Swampscott, MA, when he was a baby. He graduated from high school in 1925 and worked as a stock boy at Jordan Marsh while taking night classes at Bentley College in Boston. Graduating in 1929, he entered the Jordan Marsh Company’s executive training course and worked in merchandising, in time becoming director and general merchandise manager of the Jordan Marsh basement stores. He traveled to South America and throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East buying merchandise. On a trip to Czechoslovakia during the Cold War his driver got lost and they were detained by Russian authorities for 24 hours. After retiring in 1974 as a vice president, he worked part-time as a consultant for companies in financial difficulty. When his wife died, he returned to full-time work as a buyer and consultant for McQuade’s Department Store in Manchester, NH, finally retiring in 2001. Callahan was a member of The Speckled Band of Boston and active in civic affairs in Swampscott. He died July 30, 2004.
(Julie McKuras)
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Frances George – XLII
Frances George is the daughter of William Henry Haussner and Frances Wilke Haussner, who founded Haussner’s Restaurant in 1926. She attended Baltimore’s Bryn Mawr School and matriculated at the University of Denver, majoring in hospitality and restaurant management. Realizing that she had learned from her father most of what the university could teach her, she dropped out. Mr. Haussner died in 1963. The following year Frances Haussner married Stephen George, who took over management of the restaurant in 1966. Mrs. George joined him in the early 1980s, and the couple ran Haussner’s until it closed in 1999. Haussner’s was a Baltimore institution, known for its crab cakes, its vast menu and the oil paintings and statuary that covered its walls. The Six Napoleons held its meetings in the restaurant’s Museum Room on the second floor for many years, and the society’s 50th anniversary dinner was hosted by Haussner’s in 1996. Frances George took a warm interest in the Napoleons and never failed to look in on our meetings to greet us and make sure we were being well taken care of.
(William Hyder)
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Thomas J. Stix, Jr. – XLIII
Thomas L. Stix, Jr. served as the leader of The Baker Street Irregulars from 1986 until 1997. He was the son of early Irregular Thomas L. Stix, Sr. In addition, Tom Jr.'s wife Dorothy and their son Stephen are also members of the BSI. A stockbroker by profession, Tom succeeded Julian Wolff] as leader of the BSI and took the title of "Wiggins", a tradition that has continued since. Prior to his appointment, Tom was the mainstay of the Annual Silver Blaze Race, following in the work done by his father. Tom was a truly visionary leader and made many positive changes in the administration of the BSI. Most importantly, Tom opened full membership and investiture in the BSI to women. He put the finances of the BSI on solid ground while also establishing The John H. Watson Fund, which assisted needy Irregulars in making the trip to the NYC Annual Dinner. Tom also moved the venue of the Annual Dinner from a crowded site to more comfortable surroundings. Tom made efforts to visit scions, attend meetings, and maintain communication and correspondence with the entire membership. His attempts at a plainspoken demeanor did not hide his puckish sense of humor and genuine concern for the welfare of the organization and all of the membership. His home in Northern New Jersey was the site of frequent gatherings and many were the beneficiaries of warm hospitality offered by Tom and Dorothy. Tom loved Sherlock Holmes and he loved being with Sherlockians. Tom encouraged both solid Sherlockian scholarship along with the friendly hoopla that often characterizes BSI Dinners. His impact on the depth and diversity of BSI membership and the solidity of our administrative foundations are amongst Tom's legacies to The Baker Street Irregulars.
(Bob Katz)
Jon L. Lellenberg – XLIV
Jon Lellenberg ("Rodger Prescott" BSI, 1974) was born in Kansas City, MO, in 1946, and passed away in Santa Fe, NM. An alumnus of the University of Southern California's School of International Relations and the U.S. National War College, he was a policy and strategy official at the Pentagon from 1971 to 2006. He joined The Red Circle upon arriving in Washington, DC.
In 1972 he attended his first Six Napoleons meeting in Baltimore and counted such Napoleons as Steve Clarkson, Bill Fleischauer, Don Pollock Sr., and Phil Sherman among his early mentors. As the Baker Street Irregulars' historian since 1989, one of his favorite research experiences was a three-hour lunch at Haussner's Restaurant in 1994 with Napoleons Sherman, Clarkson, Jim Bready, Ralph Edwards, and Bill Hyder. Their reminisces of Allen Robertson, founder and longtime Tantalus, or secretary, of the Six Napoleons, provided material for his 1995 volume Irregular Proceedings of the Mid 'Forties. In 1996 he was a principal speaker at the Napoleons' 50th anniversary dinner at Haussner's, presenting a talk titled "Christopher Morley, Baltimore, and Baker Street Irregularity." Lellenberg has been declared the Irregulars' Thucydides for his historical work and has won the BSI's Morley-Montgomery and Two-Shilling Awards. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, his 2007 collaboration with Daniel Stashower, BSI, won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for that year's Best Critical/Biographical Work and was a BBC Book of the Week in Great Britain. His associations with the Conan Doyle Estate go back to the mid-70s, when the late Dame Jean Conan Doyle was Sir Arthur's sole surviving child. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of four other books about the creator of Sherlock Holmes. His other memberships include the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, the Sherlock Holmes Klubben i Danmark, The Hounds of the Baskerville (sic) of Chicago, The Sons of the Copper Beeches of Philadelphia and The Dining Detectives. His 2010 historical novel Baker Street Irregular, which Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine gave four stars, won him membership in the International Thriller Writers.
Lellenberg passed away on April 24, 2021, after a brief illness.
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John C. Sherwood – XLV
John C. Sherwood is a Michigan native who has returned to his home state. A journalist for 40 years, chiefly for Gannett Co. newspapers, he now operates MysteryVisits Communications, offering freelance writing and editing services. He edited Neil McAleer’s Visionary (2012), the authorized biography of Sir Arthur C. Clarke, contributing substantial text to it, and has written nonfiction books and articles for publications including Michigan History and Skeptical Inquirer. Sherwood has made innumerable theatrical appearances in the United States and the United Kingdom, notably in the role of Sherlock Holmes. Between 1987 and 2001 he created and hosted more than 110 performances of “Sherlock Holmes Mystery Weekends” at The Victorian Villa Inn in Union City, MI, spending about 2,000 hours in the role of Sherlock Holmes. He later presented a series of solo demonstration/talks in states ranging from Wisconsin to Georgia. In 1999, in of his U.K. appearances as Holmes, he greeted visitors and answered questions at London’s Sherlock Holmes Museum. In 2012 and again in 2018 he developed, produced and directed "Sherlock by Wireless!" programs for the Great Escape Stage Company in Marshall, MI. In these he re-created the radio studio atmosphere of the 1940s and presented classic Rathbone-Bruce scripts with the original introductory material, complete casts, period costuming and sound effects, with himself in the dual role of Basil Rathbone/Sherlock Holmes. He has appeared as Holmes at many private and public events, including appearances in Denny Dobry's re-creation of 221b in Pennsylvania and Peter Blau's birthday event hosted by The Red Circle of Washington, DC. He performed in five Saturday with Sherlock Holmes programs at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. Sherwood is a member of Watson’s Tin Box of Ellicott City, MD (serving as Gasogene XVI) and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and has contributed to Irene's Cabinet, The Baker Street Journal, and publications of the Beacon Society.
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Dr. George A. Vanderburgh – XLVI
Major (retired) George A. Vanderburgh, C.D., M.D., graduated from the University of Toronto in 1971 and served with the Canadian Forces in South Vietnam, Somalia and Kenya. He practiced as a family physician and coroner in Shelburne, Ontario, for over thirty years. He is a coin and stamp collector, a bibliophile and an apiarist specializing in swarm retrieval. In the Sherlockian world he is a Master Bootmaker of the Bootmakers of Toronto, a Master Copper Beechsmith of the Sons of the Copper Beeches (Philadelphia), and a member of the Hounds of the Baskerville (sic) of Chicago, the Speckled Band (Boston), The Amateur Mendicant Society (Detroit), Rochester Row (Rochester, NY), the Maiwand Jezails (Omaha), the Barque Lone Star (Texas) and many other Sherlockian groups. As founder/proprietor of The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box he has published many Sherlockian works as well as memorial libraries of Vincent Starrett and Michael Harrison. He has also served as editor at Arkham House Publishers and Mycroft and Moran. Dr. Vanderburgh is the only Honorary Napoleon who later applied for regular membership in the Six Napoleons. He became Napoleon CCLX at the society’s 70th anniversary dinner in 2016.
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Michael F. Whelan – XLVII
In 1950, Mike Whelan purchased The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Garden City edition, with his caddy tips. Neither he nor his mother, who had sparked his interest in Sherlock Holmes, had an inkling of where that particular purchase would lead him. That passion, thus ignited, has continued unabated for over 50 years.Sherlockian zeal, wrapped as close as an Inverness cape, has accompanied him from coast to coast and around the world. Whelan was "Wiggins," or chairman, of The Baker Street Irregulars from 1997 to 2020. He is a retired business executive, married to Mary Ann Bradley ("The Woman" of the BSI, 1993, and "Mary Morstan, BSI, 2012), with three sons and six grandchildren. He served as the Board president of The Friends of the Lilly Library and a member of the Indianapolis Literary Club, as well as a proud member of several Sherlockian societies. Whelan received his BSI investiture of Vincent Spaulding in 1974. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s he resided in what many have called the Land of Pleasant Living (as Maryland was once described in a series of television commercials) and helped to organize the Denizens of the Bar of Gold in Cambridge. Whelan considers Sherlockian Saturdays at the Pratt “the best long-running one-day conferences held in the U.S.” and was a leading proponent of the BSI Press’s 2014 publication of Sherlockian Saturdays at the Pratt, a collection of talks from the series. For more information about Whelan, we recommend A Quiet Air of Mastery”: An Appreciation of Michael Francis Whelan by Leslie S. Klinger for the BSI Press.
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Michael H. Kean – XLVIII
Michael H. Kean was introduced to the Canon while in graduate school, when his girlfriend, (now wife of over fifty years), gave him a copy of the Doubleday edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes as a birthday gift. Upon moving to Philadelphia several years later he joined the newly formed local scion, The Master’s Class, and then was invited to become a member of the Sons of the Copper Beeches. As his career took him across the country, he became a member of Hugo’s Companions and The Hounds of the Baskerville (sic) in Chicago; and The Scowrers and Molly Maguires of San Francisco; and served as an officer of the Diogenes Club of Carmel-by-the-Sea (CA) for over thirty years.
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Michael was invested in the Baker Street Irregulars by Julian Wolff in 1979 as “General Charles Gordon.” Since then, he has served as Co-Publisher and Acquisitions Editor of the Baker Street Irregulars Press, and as the BSI’s “Cartwright.” In 2020 he succeeded Mike Whelan as “Wiggins,” becoming only the sixth person to lead the Organization since the BSI’s founding in 1934.
In addition to Sherlock Holmes, he also enjoys trekking, and has hiked the Inca Trail in Peru, the Milford Track in New Zealand, has climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and has walked across England, from the Irish Sea to the North Sea on the Wainwright Way.
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Michael received his B.A. from Penn State, and a M.A. and Ph.D. from Ohio State. A retired publishing executive, he and his wife, Connie (The Woman of 2012) have two children and four grandchildren, and reside in Pebble Beach, California with Violet Hunter, their English Springer Spaniel.
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Grace Bluestone – Never Assigned
Grace S. Gassen Bluestone was born June 21, 1923, in New York City. Her senior high school entry noted her “love for writing and drama; an author or actress she hopes to be” before she entered Hunter College. She was married in 1948 and with her husband, moved to Philadelphia. In 1953 they relocated to Baltimore where they were involved in civic activities such as the Baltimore Art Festival. They later moved to New York. Her other interests were science fiction, volunteer work for the Citizens Planning and Housing Association, and mental health. In her later years she was involved with synagogue activities at Congregation Shir Shalom-Buffalo.
She was introduced to Sherlock Holmes at the age of 8. The 1956 Baltimore Sun article indicated that when Pratt Library’s Richard Hart met her and was so impressed with her Sherlockian knowledge that she was invited to the Six Napoleons dinner meeting. She was later described as “a female Sherlock Holmes buff testing her knowledge before an appearance on the ‘$64,000 Question’ television show in the 1950’s.” Bluestone was selected by unanimous motion as the group’s first honorary woman member.
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Grace Bluestone died September 18, 2020.