Raymond Fisher (fan)

Raymond D. Fisher (October 15, 1935-May 16, 1988), aka Ray Fisher, Ray "Duggie" Fisher, and Duggie Fisher Jr. was a science fiction fan, fanzine editor-publisher, SF club founder and president, and Worldcon chairman of the mid-20th century. He was born and raised in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, where he first discovered SF and its fandom. He later migrated to St. Louis, where he worked as an insurance claims adjuster. He was a founding member of the Poplar Bluff Science Fiction Club and a fanzine publisher in the late 1940s-early 1950s, and of the Ozark Science Fiction Association, which he co-founded in St. Louis in 1964 after a period of gafiation. He was also a member of The Saturday People, in St. Louis, in the 1960s, and was known for his science fiction fanzine Odd. He, along with his wife Joyce Worley Fisher, co-chaired the 27th World Science Fiction Convention in 1969. Subsequently, the couple divorced and Ray permanently left fandom, remarried and had a son, and moved to Texas where he died, in the late 1980s, of complications of diabetes.

Odd

Odd (also stylized as ODD) began in the 1940s and was resurrected, after Fisher's first gafiaiton, in the 1960s before it was discontinued. The fanzine was nominated for a 1968 Hugo Award for best fanzine, but did not win.^[1] Oddpromoted a counter-culture, anti-establishment viewpoint,^[2] saying that "SF is just as fundamentally distrustful of the straight world as is the archetypal hippie, and both have apparently latched on to each other".^[3] At the time it was considered to be an example of a new type of fanzine that was "a large-scale, large circulation fanzine" that was of a far higher quality than the average fanzine of the era and dealt with all aspects of the science-fiction world as opposed to just a smaller portion of it.^[4]

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