I remember Harry . . .

No one has ever accused Harry Harrison of being indifferent to money. And while I'd never want to say that the opposite might be true - after all, Harry is famous for his generosity with his time, his liquor, his expertise, and so on - my first recollection of Harry is at a SFWA meeting at Berkeley, California, where I was soliciting writers to donate their manuscripts to the Library at California State University, Fullerton where I taught everything from Chaucer to Joyce and Science Fiction.

Harry collared me and wanted to know how to make the donations. His manuscripts, proofs, and publishers' co-called "foul matter" were cluttering his garage and every other vacant space in his Imperial Beach, CA, house, he said. To be sure, Joan wasn't being ousted from her kitchen because Harry loves food almost as much as he loves good talk and a good drink. But the "Aldiss Room" of the house was perilously close to being useless to a house guest. And what's the IRS break, he wanted to know.

I explained that the law in force then in the United States permitted artists to donate their materials to some non-profit organization - and manuscripts are artistic works in progress after all - and deduct a certain percentage from their income tax, just as if it were cash given to, say, the Esperanto Society or the Red Cross. "I'll do it," he said, and a week later I drove the hundred miles - oops, 150 kilometers - from Fullerton to Imperial Beach, shared a few beers with Harry, had a scrumptious meal prepared by Joan, and took all of his manuscripts back to Fullerton with me. I've never asked how much he saved on his income tax, because I don't want to reveal the fact that a nameless academic from Fullerton did suggest a tentative value for his manuscripts, so I suppose that Harry's love of money did win out after all.

Thus began a more than three decade long friendship, and while Fullerton's Special Collections Library hasn't acquired any more of Harry's manuscripts in the last ten years of so, we're open to more, even they are computer disks these days. Together with Leon Stover and Brian Aldiss, we helped plan the John W. Campbell Award for the Best Science Fiction Novel of the year together; we've spend time in each other's homes; and indeed, I've become one of his leading defenders to the snobs of the Academy with a number of scholarly articles about his writing, even pointing out that his love of story, his straight-forward ability to tell a rattling good tale, and his sometimes manic sense of humor has few equals, even among the literati that might scorn him.

But Harry has the last laugh - all the way to the bank.

I wish I could say it in Esperanto, but Latin will have to do: Ad Multos Annos, Harry. To many more years!