Tiffany Ellsworth Thayer (March 1 1902 – August 23 1959) was an American actor, author and founder of the Fortean Society. Born in Freeport, Illinois, Thayer quit school at age 15 and worked as an actor, reporter, and used-book clerk in Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. Aged 16, he toured as the teenaged hero in the Civil War drama The Coward. Thayer contacted American author Charles Fort in 1924. In 1926, Thayer moved to New York City to act, but soon spent more time writing. In 1931 Thayer founded the Fortean Society in Great Britain to promote Fort's ideas, but the Society was primarily based in New York City headed by first president Theodore Dreiser, an old friend of Fort who had helped to get his work published. Early members of the original Society in NYC included such luminaries as Booth Tarkington, Ben Hecht, Alexander Woolcott and H.L. Mencken. Towards the end of his life, Thayer had championed increasingly idiosyncratic ideas, such as a Flat Earth, and opposed others, such as the fluoridation of water supplies . The Fortean Society Magazine (also called Doubt) was published regularly until Thayer's death in Nantucket, Massachusetts in 1959, aged 57, when the society and magazine came to an end. The magazine and society are not connected to the present-day magazine Fortean Times. Writers Paul and Ron Willis, publishers of "Anubis", acquired most of the original Fortean Society material and revived the Society as the International Fortean Organization(INFO) in the early 1960s which went on to incorporate in 1965, publish a widely respected magazine, The INFO Journal: Science and the Unknown, for more than 35 years and created the world's first, and most prestigious, conference dedicated to the work and spirit of Charles Fort, the annual FortFest which continues to this day.
References
- Nichols, Lewis, "A Talk With Tiffany Thayer", New York Times, June 10 1956
- Skinner, Doug (Summer 2005) "Doubting Tiffany", Fortean Times
