Science fiction fan, artist and writer, Joe Mayhew, passed away peacefully at 9AM, Saturday morning. Memorial arrangements follow the tributes by Mike Glyer and Warren Lapine.

Joe Mayhew
Appreciation by Mike Glyer

Fans learned that Ian Gunn's fight with cancer had taken a serious turn for the worse when Joe Mayhew announced the news as part of his emotional speech accepting the 1998 Best Fan Artist Hugo. Both men had been nominated, and Joe almost seemed impatient that Ian hadn’t been the first of them to win. Gunn died soon afterward, leaving Mayhew a passionate executor of his legacy until Gunn received his own Hugo, posthumously, in 1999. Now, Joe Mayhew has unexpectedly passed away, and fans are mourning his loss.

Joe Mayhew died at 9 a.m. on June 10, at the end of a month-long struggle against a disease his doctors never definitely diagnosed but suspect was Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a relative of "Mad Cow Disease," extremely rare in the U.S. He was only 57. Mayhew’s brother and sister-in-law, Bill and Maren, are making arrangements for a Catholic funeral at Joe's local parish.

A teen-aged Joe Mayhew was part of the Washington Science Fiction Association that Jack Chalker discovered in 1959. "WSFA was quite active during that period and had a number of members around my age," Chalker wrote in Mimosa 20. "The teen clique became basically Tom Haughey, Joe Mayhew, Don Studebaker, and myself. Meetings were held at the home of a retired elderly railroad lobbyist named Elizabeth Cullen and were being run by George Scithers, who was stationed in D.C. at the time. It was a golden time for the club." WSFA inspired some Baltimore fans, Chalker among them, to start BSFS. Chalker writes, tongue-in-cheek, that although a friend his tried to recruit newcomers, "The trouble was, there wasn't anything there to recruit folks to. When you included Mayhew, Studebaker, and Haughey, we were more of a kind of gang of nerds than a real club."

Mayhew grew as a WSFA leader over the next four decades, an officer, a conrunner, and occasional editor of the WSFA Journal. Evan Phillips remembers Joe as "an active fan who did some of his best work as the unseen hand that encouraged people to try things such as run a con or be an officer in a club when they didn't realize on their own that they could. Joe was constantly striking up a conversation with folks at cons, and always fitting them into fandom -- this one would be good on a panel, that one could run a con suite…. Joe was my lunchtime buddy most Saturdays and loved conversation, ideas, and Chinese all-you-can-eat."

Mayhew more recently forged an international reputation as a fanartist.

I ran a bid party at an early-90’s Disclave where Joe came in and parked for the evening, showing off the collected "Spaceman Tad" comics he’d drawn for the clubzine. They were fabulously funny, cleverly drawn and deserved much wider circulation. Mayhew spent the evening taking care of that in his own way, lending his copies to a series of fascinated readers. It was just in the past five years that Joe became a prolific cartoonist and a fixture in every printed fanzine. Mayhew worked at the Library of Congress until his retirement. As its Recommending Officer for Science Fiction, he developed the LoC’s official definition of science fiction.

Retirement gave Mayhew more time to pursue his ambitions as a writer of fiction and as a critic. His stories appeared in Tomorrow, Aberrations, and Aboriginal SF. He reviewed science fiction, most notably for the Washington Post. Mayhew told fans at a 1998 Boskone panel how difficult it was for him to review the work of friends like Jack Chalker and Gene Wolfe. (The WSFA website includes a wonderful picture of Mayhew and Wolfe posed beside "Dragon Growly," the comical monster head Joe created for the 1989 Disclave.) It was well-known that Joe disliked saying anything negative about a book, with the exception of Battlefield Earth – and Bridge Publications retaliated against that review by pulling advertising from the publisher.

One of Mayhew’s most traumatic experiences came as the chair of the never-held 1998 Disclave. The con’s annual difficulties in booking a hotel, for economic reasons, had been made infinitely greater by the notoriety Disclave gained by being flooded out by a broken fire sprinkler in 1997. Mayhew reversed another committee member’s amazing decision to invite the "ASB" group back and give it an entire floor, but Disclave’s economic and image problems doomed hotel negotiations. He described winding down his Disclave as "a bit like building a casket. Perhaps for a child."

Mayhew was beset by medical problems during the last five years. He was a diabetic. He underwent a quadruple bypass heart operation in 1996. He needed treatment for tachycardia the weekend after officially announcing the cancellation of his 1998 Disclave at WSFA. Despite all of these trials, Mayhew was blossoming as one of the best fanartists ever.

Elspeth Kovar wrote online that people noticed Mayhew’s latest problem because "for the first time in anyone's memory Joe left Balticon and did not return, saying that he was overwhelmed by all the people -- and things came to a head about two weeks later and he was admitted to the hospital."

Michael Nelson saw Mayhew in the hospital on May 31 and wrote, "Joe is trapped inside himself. I think he recognizes people most of the time, but either he can't understand us or can't communicate, not even by blinking or other movement. Last night, he was drifting in and out of sleep every few minutes. Sometimes he would appear to recognize someone and give one of his big grins and other times he acted like a startled deer caught in a car's headlights."

Sad as it was that Mayhew slipped away over the past few weeks, I’m comforted to know he went in the company of the friends he made in fandom. And through his artwork he’ll remain a lively presence among us for some time to come.

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Warren Lapine

It is with great sadness that I pass the news onto you of Joe Meyhew’s passing. As many of you know Joe has been the lead reviewer for Absolute Magnitude for several years. When I first started going to conventions to promote this new magazine that I was going to put out most of the sf processionals dismissed me immediately saying essentially, "talk to me once you’ve put out an issue." Joe, who at the time was the science fiction recommending officer to the library of congress, sat down with me and asked me what I knew about copyright. Precious little: Joe walked me through the process, he actually did all the paperwork and got Harsh Mistress its ISSN. Joe then proceeded to spend hours with me giving me a great deal of advice on how to proceed, his perspective as a long time fan was invaluable to me. Once I published the first issue of Harsh Mistress most sf processionals then said, "talk to me if you’re still around in a year." Joe, of course, sat down with me and went over the magazine page by page. Over the next couple of years his advice was invaluable. I was very happy when I offered Joe a position as a reviewer and he accepted. It was Joe’s idea that we also cover small press magazines since no one of any appreciable size was doing that. We both felt that letting people know about these magazines would make for a less inhospitable climate for them. When ever I was feeling down or business wasn’t going as well as I would have liked, I picked up the phone and called Joe. He’d unfailing remind me that I was doing god’s work, as it were, in the sf field and that, from his point of view, no one else was willing to put the success of the science fiction field ahead of their own and that I had to keep on pushing forward. Those talks got me through some dark hours. I will miss Joe tremendously. The next issue of Absolute Magnitude will be dedicated to his memory.

Joe Mayhew, long-time science fiction fan and for many the heart at the center of the Washington Science Fiction Association, passed away at 9 a.m. on June 10th, 2000. Joe was an active science fiction fan all of his life. He won the 1997 Hugo award for cartooning and was also nominated for 1990, 1996, and 1999. His cartoons have appeared in Asimov's, Analog, Pirate Writings, and numerous fanzines. As the Library of Congress' Recommending Officer for Science Fiction, Joe developed the official government definition of what was science fiction. In his last years, Joe became a professional science fiction author with stories appearing in Tomorrow, Aberrations and Aboriginal SF. He also reviewed science fiction books for the Washington Post, Absolute Magnitude, and TV's Fast Forward.

Joe chaired the 1987 Disclave and the cancelled 1998 Disclave. He served as WSFA Secretary and editor of the WSFA Journal several times, most recently 1995-1996. He was the club's unofficial greeter of new people and storehouse of information about the club's history, its constitution, parliamentary procedure, and indeed everything else.

Joe died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (the hospital's best guess), a relative of Mad Cow Disease that is considered extremely rare in the U.S. He is survived by a brother, a sister, and multiple cartoons and carving.

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Memorial Arrangements

The memorial service will be at 10AM next Saturday at St. Bernard in Riverdale, Maryland. St. Bernard is next to the shopping center which is East of Kenilworth Avenue and South of Riverdale Road.

(The church is at N38deg57.445' W76deg54.942')

Riverdale Road, East-West Highway, and Kenilworth Avenue are all good approaches to the area. Riverdale Road can be reached from the BW Parkway; go west at the exit.

From the DC beltway, take Kenilworth Avenue South to its intersection with Riverdale Road/East-West Highway. Turn left onto Riverdale Road. Make a right onto the service road you will see very soon after you make the turn. From the service road turn right into the St. Bernard school parking lot and head for the far end of the school where a bridge will take you into the St. Bernard church parking lot.

If you approach on Kenilworth Avenue from the South, turn right onto Nicholson Street shortly before you get to the intersection with Riverdale Road. Nicholson goes behind the shopping center. At the end of the shopping center you will see a driveway entrance for St. Bernard.

Updated June-30-2000