F. Huffman Prize, science fiction writer and longtime friend of Robert E. Howard and Howard Phillips Lovecraft, leaned back in his old worn naugahyde armchair and gazed at the white painted steel bookcases holding hundreds of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks and pulps on their strong new shelves.  He was getting old, real old, and some day he'd have to get rid of these old things.  If he ever had to move he supposed he'd have to get in touch with Beau Raymond to try to sell them.  Nobody bought this stuff today except collectors and they were all out in the middle west somewhere.

     But he was losing his chain of thought again.  It seemed to be happening all the time lately.

     “Ah, yes, Howard Lovecraft and Bob Howard.  The two Howards.”  He pondered.  But so unlike each other it wasn't funny.  Howard the tall angular one called by his friends since high school “Lovey” was altogether different from the other Howard, Bob Howard.  Both wrote stories for Farnsworth Wright, editor of the pulp Weird Tales.  Lovecraft wrote eerie tales of decrepit New England seaside towns with steeples, about people who vaguely resembled fish, while Bob wrote sword and sorcery tales with a swashbuckling hero, Conan, lopping heads off right and left. 

     They had another thing in common besides writing for Wright.  They were both eccentric.  Lovecraft used to go out at night around the dark secluded lanes of Providence, Rhode Island visiting old church belfries and weird old fenced-in cemeteries, looking for eldritch adventures, while Bob, somewhat more loopy,   liked to ride around Cross Plains, Texas, shooting the heads off rabbits.  No wonder good solid citizens of both these towns gave these guys a wide berth.

     Huffman laughed to himself as he pondered how these two guys ever got acquainted, but he knew.  Lovecraft was always writing letters to everybody.  He even did ghost-writing for some would-be writers and even knew Robert Bloch, then a young lan, and Belknap Long himself and Bob Howard. 

     Lovey thought a lot of all of his friends and they liked him just as well, except for Bob Howard.  Bob was a nice guy too despite his oddness.  “Why, I remember going five hundred miles out of my way on an auto trip just to visit him once in Cross Plains.  He and his mother and father made me feel right at home.  Bob was one sweet guy!  Nice in spite of his always toting guns and putting boxing gloves on to pose as a fighter.  You know he wrote the IRON MAN fight stories.”

     Yes, Lovey always wrote the most charming, informative and friendly letters to Bob Howard and always got one back making fun of  him or belittling in some way and it wasn't right!  Lovey was not a sissy as that fine lady Sophie he married could tell you.  “Howard was a real man!” she would often tell her friends.  “He just wasn't cut out for marriage.”  Huffman continued: “Now Bob Howard was a real man.  He never married but lived with his father—a doctor—and mother, a real lady.  She was always reading poetry to both of them.  Yet Bob just couldn't accept Lovey as a friend.  Nothing mean, mind you.  But none of that sweet accord friends ought to have.  Howard was always telling Bob he was going to visit him but I'm not sure that it ever happened.  Lovecraft often spent his money visiting his pals.   He was a great walker, sometimes covering twenty-five miles in a day's ramble.  Too bad they couldn't get together.  Then the tragic news came telling that Bob Howard, sitting in his Dad's car, had put a bullet through his head.  He was only thirty! It broke his parents' hearts as well as his friends'.  Poor Lovecraft didn't fare much better. Lovie lived with a maiden aunt in a shabby-genteel neighborhood on the east side of Providence.  Both his parents were dead.  His grandfather, old Whipple Phillips, had been a bigshot in Coffin Corners, Rhode Island around the turn of the century.  Mayor of the town, he was.  He owned and ran a cotton mill there…though I doubt Lovey got much of his money.”

     He stretched his legs.   “Such is life!  Someday I'll tell you about my own life with its ups and downs.  I'll tell you those stories about China and that space opera OPERATION LONGLIFE I wrote.  You'll have one helluva time reading that story.  It's a humdinger!”

    Editor's note:  Spell-check does not recognize the word “naugahyde”, used in the above piece of writing to describe a type of chair.

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