“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

And how did Jane and I meet? I too am a World War II veteran; after three years of service in the Air Force Transport Command I was discharged in 1942. I spent several years freelancing as a commercial artist in the Sayre, Pennsylvania area while living with my parents, Robert Sr. and Estelle (my father called her Stell). They were, I could see, getting older. I felt protective toward them; both of my younger brothers had left home, and one had married. I preferred the small-town life, but had about exhausted my professional options after doing medical illustrations for the local but well-known Robert Packer Hospital (some drawings won prizes in traveling exhibitions), working briefly in radio, painting signs, and so forth. Then I went back to doing comic-book art by mail for various New York City publishers. Finally I decided to return to the city indefinitely to go into advertising illustration, a field that paid much better. I told myself that I had to get back into the world out there.

Well, the pay wouldn’t be as good as I could earn in New York City, I explained to my parents, but my living expenses would be much lower. Besides, I’d be close enough to visit them often, so what could I lose? I could always go to the city. What I didn’t understand until later was that Ed’s seemingly innocent call had set into motion a series of events that one by one would magically fall into place and create a much larger, much longer and more penetrating overall experience. I wasn’t used to consciously thinking in such terms.

Pardon me for using the phrase every so often, but as the years passed and after her two very brief stays in Elmira’s St. Joseph’s hospital, Jane finally came to be deeply skeptical of the value of conventional medical help. It hadn’t helped when it was offered. The connections involving her mother’s bedridden condition and her tempestuous temper, including her suicide attempts, both faked and real, troubles with a succession of housekeepers, the lack of a father, the almost two years she spent in a Catholic orphanage while Marie was hospitalized, the death of her beloved grandfather, the whole strained atmosphere within which the gifted and impressionable child was growing, as well as her conflicts with church dogma and personalities, had, all together, powerful effects indeed. Neighbors tried to help. One gifted Jane with a male dog—a Sheltie—from the city pound. Jane named that loving young creature Mischa, and he was to offer her great comfort for years, just as he did to me when later we met. And I learned that the symptoms were not only a possibility that was native within my wife, but were to become corrosively alive within her all of those years later. Jane took me to meet her mother in the old double house on Middle Avenue three times. The first time, Marie cursed me from her bed; the next two times she ignored me.

Within a few weeks Ed Robbins’ and my labors on the Mike Hammer detective strip came to an end due to policy differences with the syndicate distributing the feature. Both of us ended up out of work. I never did get to settle down in my own place in Schuylerville! A “coincidence,” of course, that my work for Ed ended at the same time Jane told him that she and Walt had amicably agreed to part. Ed talked about moving with his family to New Paltz, a small community about 110 miles south, near the Hudson River; he might find commercial work there with a friend. I thought of returning to my parents’ home in Sayre, and then going on to New York City as I’d originally planned to do before receiving that life-changing call from Ed.

Getting a divorce in New York State was difficult in the 1950s, but easy to achieve in Florida. Jane’s father, Del, traveled with his trailer from Los Angeles to meet us in Daytona Beach, Florida; we followed him to Marathon, in the Florida Keys, where we lived with him and Mischa and Del’s Great Dane, Boo, in that wonderful climate while Jane put in the required few weeks of residency that Florida divorce law required. I found work painting signs, and prepared samples of advertising art to show art directors in New York City once we’d returned north. Besides writing for herself, Jane worked briefly as a cashier in a newly-opened food market; she left the job after a few days when the manager made advances to her. Her divorce was granted without being contested, the papers signed. Del paid the costs. We thanked him, said good-bye to him and Boo and headed north with Mischa in my ancient Cadillac. We hoped we had enough money to get to my parents’ home in Sayre, PA. We made it with only one flat tire on the way.

Finally, then: I was working on this introduction late in October 2002 when Laurel and I were visited by five members of the Houston, Texas, Seth group: Winter Calvert, Theresa Smith, Jim and Debbie Serra, and Yvette Silva. I had corresponded with a few members of the group, and Jim and his wife had visited me some time ago. The five were accompanied by Richie Kendall; he’s an old friend from the days of Jane’s ESP class—one of the New York City boys, as Jane used to fondly refer to that group. Richie had also visited Laurel and me twice last summer with Mary Dillman from his new residence in Westport, Connecticut.

At the end of the first day of the group’s most interesting visit. Richie and Yvette left to return to Connecticut. Jim and Debbie and Winter and Theresa left for the Holiday Inn in Elmira, New York, 15 miles across the Pennsylvania border. At the Inn in 1997 and 1999 Laurel and I had been guests at well-attended Seth conferences organized by Lynda Dahl and Stan Ulkowski. Our rich memories of those gatherings are nourished each time we drive past the Inn on our way to the hill house. We met our guests at the Inn the next morning, and the six of us drove in our three cars to a nearby country restaurant for breakfast. Then, with Laurel driving and our friends’ cars following, we traveled up a steep and winding hill just outside the city to not only a fine view but to Quarry Farm, an old-fashioned but large and elegant wooden homestead where Mark Twain had done some of his finest writing. No admittance, private property, a sign proclaimed, so we stood in the driveway just off the road to study the farm and its open and peaceful setting. Then back down into the city and to the campus of Elmira College. Jane had lectured to a class in creative writing at the college after the publication of Seth Speaks in 1972.There on the school’s green sward stood the small many-windowed gazebo that Mark Twain had worked in during his summers at the farm; it had been relocated to the college long ago. Not surprisingly it was locked, but still easy to inspect—and also to just accept as the people of Elmira and those in the college went about their daily activities. Mark Twain had been one of Jane’s favorite writers.