Photos courtesy of DANIEL SAEZ | Marshall University

Marshall University unveiled the Nelson Bond Room last month to pay tribute to its famous alumnus.

Photos courtesy of DANIEL SAEZ | Marshall University

Marshall University unveiled the Nelson Bond Room last month to pay tribute to its famous alumnus.

Courtesy of DANIEL SAEZ | Marshall University

Nelson Bond was always quick to point out that he wasn't truly a science-fiction writer. He wrote detective and sports stories when they were popular, then fantasy stories. When radio began to supplant the pulp magazines, he wrote scripts, and when television started to take over, he was there, as well.

Let me tell you about a man I knew named Nelson Bond.

He wrote a ton of short stories, more than 250, most of them with a fantasy or science-fiction theme, most of them published in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.

He wrote scripts for radio and even for television in the days when the studios were based in New York, not Hollywood. He lived most of his long life in the Roanoke Valley, where after he retired from writing, he first ran a public relations company, then a book store.

Toward the end of his life, he received awards and new recognition for his literary legacy -- but perhaps none of it excited him more than the news that Marshall University in West Virginia, his alma mater, intended not just to archive his papers, but to re-create the office in his Roanoke County home where he wrote his other-worldly stories.

Though Nelson didn't live to see it -- he died in 2006, just shy of his 98th birthday -- Marshall University unveiled the Nelson Bond Room last month. It's on the third floor of the James E. Morrow Library, behind a plate glass window. The same metal shelves that once lined the walls in his basement display copies of the magazines that hold his stories, with cover art ranging from the elegant paintings adorning issues of Bluebook magazine to the garish science fiction scenes fronting copies of Weird Tales and Thrilling Wonder Stories.

Also displayed: the cumbersome Dictaphone set that Nelson used to compose his stories, with a lot of help from his wife Betty, who still lives in Roanoke. Nelson would dictate his stories, and Betty, the faster typist, would transcribe them. Nelson would revise, and dictate the changes for Betty to type, as many as five times per story.

I never saw the Dictaphone while Nelson was alive -- it had been placed in storage long before we met.

How I met Nelson

When I first heard of Nelson Bond, he seemed more like an urban legend than a real person -- a science-fiction writer who worked for radio and television, living right here in Roanoke.

Though I was (and still am) an avid reader of science fiction, fantasy and horror, I'd never run across Nelson's work. Yet his reputation only seemed to loom larger as I studied for my master's degree in creative writing at Hollins College, and the program's director, Richard Dillard, frequently made reference to Nelson's stories, speaking with fondness of Nelson's sense of humor and knack for quirky dialogue.

In 1995, the year after I graduated, I finally met Nelson. As a fledgling writer, I confess I felt a bit intimidated when I pulled into the driveway of his home in the suburbs near Sugar Loaf Mountain -- what would the "dean of Roanoke writers," as he'd been called in this newspaper, make of me?

Nelson turned out to be small in size but not in demeanor. If I began a sentence with, "You know," he immediately cut in, "No, I don't know."

He would emphasize points in conversation by quoting entire poems -- even Middle English passages from the Canterbury Tales -- from memory.

Though he'd been brusque and businesslike on the phone, he was more cordial in person, and it wasn't long before he led me to the book shop in his basement and started showing me treasures, such as a copy of Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man" in which the author -- a fan of Nelson's writing -- had drawn a man in one color ink and tattoos on the man's body in another color.

My visit became the first of many. When I asked him to sign a book I discovered one of his more charming quirks.

Instead of autographing the book then and there, he'd take it into his book shop, which was also his office, to think about what he'd write. Sometimes he returned the book after a few minutes. Sometimes you picked it up the next time you came by.

He always had the television tuned to a channel with a stock ticker, and he took great pride in his business acumen. He bragged about how the IRS once audited his book business and couldn't find a single mistake.

As I learned more about him, I came to understand why, despite his revered reputation -- authors as diverse as Sharyn McCrumb and Neil Gaiman have expressed admiration for him -- I had never run across any of his stories.

As a writer, Nelson followed the money. As he was always quick to point out, he wasn't truly a science-fiction writer. He wrote detective and sports stories when they were popular, then fantasy stories, which sold well for him and earned the most money in his halcyon days.

When radio began to supplant the pulp magazines, he wrote scripts. When television started to take over, he was there -- but when television broadcasting moved from New York to Hollywood in the late 1950s, he found he could no longer make money writing the way he wanted, using his own stories, his own ideas.

Out of frustration, he quit writing altogether. Though his stories continued to make impressions on those who encountered them, most of his work was out of print.

Rediscovering his stories

I made an effort to find his books and discovered a writer of intense imagination with a knack for whip-crack smart-aleck dialogue. My favorite story was "The Fountain," about a rich, hateful miser who drinks from the Fountain of Youth and undergoes a remarkable transformation -- as he grows younger, he forgets the grudges he accumulated as he grew old, and sets about undoing the damage he's caused in the lives of others. It's a tragic story, but also a story of redemption.

When I asked him to tell me about how he created "The Fountain," he said he no longer knew what was on the mind of the young man who wrote it.

As I stood outside the Nelson Bond Room after the dedication ceremony, a young reporter interviewed Bond's sons, Lynn and Kit.

Lynn Bond said that his father believed every person should leave a mark, and toward the end of his life, despite the acclaim and the honors he'd received, he worried he hadn't left one himself.

Lynn told the reporter, "This is his mark."

For my part, I felt, in that room, some of the same old delight I'd felt in those visits to Nelson's book shop -- that sense of being a kid again, opening a box full of delightful new toys. Had Nelson been there, I wonder what he would have shown me.