A few days ago, I shared an ancient diary entry in an attempt to solve a comics mystery, and I can’t resist sharing another, this time to give some insight into one of our great fantasy artists—Roy Krenkel, who won the Hugo Award in 1963 and is perhaps best known for his Edgar Rice Burroughs-related work.

I knew Roy from the convention circuit, but one day in 1980, my wife and I had a revealing encounter with him in a Brooklyn mall. In the interests of giving some insight into the man, here’s an excerpt from a entry made on January 20 of that year.

Irene and I went over to Kings Plaza yesterday afternoon, visited the bank, bought cheese, cookies, etc. As we were leaving we ran into Roy Krenkel, who was just hanging around a first floor fountain wasting time because he didn’t want to go home. The three of us had a very pleasant conversation. Roy spoke of his incredible bad luck, and how it had enabled him to devise a plan to overthrow the Ayatollah Khomeini. Simply get a group of people to sign documents which committed them to paying Roy a monthly sum as long as Khomeini were alive, claimed Roy, and the Ayatollah would live two more months at the most. The Fates were allied against him, said Roy, and no way would they allow him any good luck. He’s frequently told friends that the way to make sure that they survive when flying is to make him beneficiary of their insurance; their plane could crash into the side of a mountain, everyone else would die, but THEY would walk away unscathed because there was no way that Roy would ever be allowed the good fortune of collecting. We also spoke of making out wills for our collectible items (he figures he’s worth half a mil, but that he’s never going to see it because he couldn’t bear parting with his etching collection), of the pettiness of comics, of convention fatigue, of the love of books. I tried to look up his age in one of my science fiction encyclopedias after we arrived home as we were interested because he hasn’t appeared to age in the past fifteen years, but no luck … the info was unavailable, unlisted. Irene owns a drawing of Red Sonya by him which is hanging in the hallway downstairs, and afterwards Irene realized that she should have mentioned it (he might have appreciated knowing one of his piece was enjoyed daily), but she forgot. Roy gives the good impression of a wonderful eccentric, something I imagine I shall work at cultivating later in life.

So 35 years later, how am I doing with cultivating that eccentricity?

BTW—at the time, Roy, born July 11, 1918, would have been 61.