Ramblings:
1969...
a Year
in Review

by Ron Hill
08.03.08

Time-Traveling on Mount Desert Island...

For $20 I bought the entire year's worth of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact for 1969. I was 7 years old
in 1969. America was the first country to land two men on the moon in 1969. The legendary John W. Campbell
was still editor of the magazine, all the issues in the bundle were in good shape, and 10 of the covers were
painted by Frank Kelly Freas. I enjoyed reading a couple of the serialized novels by Gordon R. Dickson while
it rained for most of the vacation in Maine...

John W. Campbell, Jr.
From Wikipedia: John Wood Campbell, Jr. (June 8, 1910 – July 11, 1971) was an important science fiction editor
and writer. As a writer he was first influential under his own name as a writer of super-science space opera and
then under the name Don A. Stuart, a pseudonym he used for moodier, less pulpish stories. However, Campbell's
primary influence on the genre was as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction (renamed Analog in 1960), a post
that he held from late 1937 until his death.

His editorials in 1969 are interesting glimpses into the turbulent 60s: one is about the 1968 Democratic Convention,
one is about gun-control and one is about landing on the moon. I knew an artist from my first job at Morgan Studio in
Cleveland who did a handful of illustrations for Analog when he lived in New York, and he said he "changed everything".

Frank Kelly Freas Kelly Freas was born in New York in 1922. He always had a love for caricature, as he told me in an unsolicited email in the late 1990s. He pointed out that we both had attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, both started working as commercial artists, and we both had Ohio ties (I believe he said he worked in Ohio briefly). I was thrilled to hear from him out of the blue like that, he had very nice things to say about my work – this kind of "approval" from one's heros is very important to an artist just getting started as a freelancer. The first Analog magazine I ever bought, May 1975, has his work on the cover. I mailed this to him in California and he signed it and sent it back; it hangs on my wall in my studio. Sadly, we were never to meet, as he passed away in January of 2002. In 1969, apparently he was a favorite artist of John W. Campbell, having painted 10 of the year's covers, and he produced most of the interior illustrations. I remember his work from the 70s in magazines like Analog and the fledgeling Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. The samples below show his love for cartoons as well as the different media he would use: scratchboard, pen and ink, watercolor, pastel, textured boards and papers.
Vincent DiFate The November cover above had to be one of Vincent DiFate's earliest cover commissions, and to start working for John W. Campbell must have been exciting. In 1969 he did a lot of interior illustrations for Analog, most like the one below, using his typical scratchboard style. Born in New York in 1945, DiFate is still an active illustrator, and has served two terms as president of the Society of Illustrators and chaired the Permanent Collection Committee for the Society's Museum for more than a decade. He is also a founding member and a past president of the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists.		Leo Summers Born in 1925, Leo Summers had illustrations in every issue of Analog in 1969. He had a MAD-magazine pen and ink style, very detailed, as shown by the sample below from the June issue. The cover of the June issue was also his first Analog cover. A quick google search didn't yield much information on this artist, apparently he also did books for young readers, like Danny Dunn and the Voice from Space (published in 1967). Next to Freas, he had the most interior illustrations. He passed away in 1985.
All artwork is copright the artists or their assignees. Text is copyright 2008 Ron Hill.