It was early 1985. Long after Star Wars but well before the “Comicon” convention, entertainment and merchandise mega-industry mutated — like a super villain bitten by a radioactive capitalist — into what it is today. I was 20 and an SF and fantasy fan, but not quite a fanboy. Somehow I had managed to get “on the board” of a comic book, Dr. Who and Fantasy/SF convention in Miami, Fl — Omnicon VI. I wasn’t really on the board in the sense of making decisions, but I attended some board meetings and was given a key role. For no reason that I could tell other than no one else wanted the job that required endless hours of prep and time away from the convention floor during the convention, I was put in charge of pre-registration, registration and guest check-in at the door of the convention.

It all began, as all real stories do, with a chance event. A new graphic artist in my family’s business and I had become good friends. After Tiki-Al was hired, we quickly realized that we had a shared obsession of everything science-fiction. I have a few stories about Tiki-Al, but this story is about Omnicon VI in 1985. Tiki-Al was on the board of Omnicon VI, thus my connection to the convention started with them ordering the official convention t-shirts through my family’s business, thanks to Tiki-Al.

[While writing this story I did some googling to check my memory on a few things and found a link to the actual t-shirt on eBay that my company made, that Tiki-Al himself illustrated, but it had been sold. Oh, the humanity!! If anyone knows the owner of this shirt, please contact me! You can even see Tiki-Al’s signature (Al Zequirea) below the “Blakes7” art.]

So, somehow, getting paid to supply t-shirts morphed into me having fun with box after box of pre-registered attendee letters (1985, real mail!!) I had to make a master pre-registration guest list and hundreds of frakin’ badges. FOR FREE. Maybe I was a fanboy after all, who else would do that? That’s right, boys and girls, I had to open hundreds of envelopes by hand, and then hand-write the hundreds of name badges. I would not own my first computer, a Commodore 128 with a dot-matrix printer, until 1986. Timing is everything.

Looking back it was a fantastic guest list for a Con our size. Oh! those innocent days. I don’t have the program or a good-enough memory to list half the guests, but we had amazing guests. We had Tiki-Al of course, but this was before he was famous. We had guests from Dr. Who (Nicholas Cortney, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Courtney) Blakes7, the incomparable SF Book Cover and Rock Album artist Michael Whalen (https://www.michaelwhelan.com/home/), the SF author and Symphonic Composer Somtow Sucharitkul, (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._P._Somtow), so many more, and the guest of honor and cause for our great and lasting shame, Theodore Sturgeon (seriously? google him, I’m not giving you a link), whose Star Trek scripts were the least of his achievements, such is his lasting impact on SF.

Theodore was a confirmed guest, but he was in ill health and had become bed-ridden after a long battle with lung disease. He was unable to endure the flight from the west coast to Miami; he was literally on his death bed. Yet, even though he had to cancel his appearance, he recorded his keynote speech and sent it to us.

His last public thoughts, recorded and spoken by himself.

Sent to us.

AND WE LOST THE CASSETTE.

As I said at the beginning, these were innocent times, and this was a convention on a budget. We didn’t have our own security, or a process to record chain-of-custody for the various artifacts we were entrusted to protect. Someone placed the cassette in a boom-box and set it backstage in preparation to play it for the convention. And walked away. Enter stage right, a sticky-fingered fan scoring a fifteen-dollar tape player. Thus, Theodore Sturgeon’s final grain of sand on his wide beach of works, simply walked away. He passed away 90 days later.

But wait, there’s more. Not as tragic a sub-plot, but what it lacks in gravitas, it makes up for with salaciousness.

One of our top-draw guests (I will be discreet until 50 years after his or her passing) was young and, of course, famous, at least famous in this crowd. Now, we (the convention / board of directors “we”) had rented rooms at the Marriot for our guests. It never occurred to us to do things like, I don’t know, have a babysitter for the single guests, put a cap on room service charges, or print or even think of a code of conduct (#MeToo).

You can see where this is going, right? We got notification of a thousand dollar room service charge (ok, maybe it was less, this was the Biscayne Bay Marriott in ’85, not a South Beach boutique hotel in 2020) for the guest-whose-name-I-will-not-speak. Apparently he or she had one or more young groupies in and out of the room, and much alcohol, adult movies, and food was ordered.

Not only was it a more innocent time but I was more innocent than I should have been at my age. At the very beginning of the convention, this randy guest made a pass at me. I don’t know if I was more shocked or flattered, but it never occurred to me to warn anyone to be on the lookout. For the record, I took a pass — but I do believe room service was thrown in as an incentive!

But even with the cultural tragedy and mini-scandal, it will always be the best convention that I will ever attend. As a “board member” I was seated at the luncheon table with Michael Whalen, mixed with all the stars, saw a lot of cool merch, and met…. EVERY. SINGLE. ATTENDEE.

In charge of registration and check-in? Never again.