Seeing Larry Niven at Windycon 51 reminded me that back in 1969 I went to the World Science Fiction Convention for that year, St. Louiscon. It was my first Worldcon and only my second SF con. I went with friends from the University of Chicago Science Fiction Club, which I had discovered the year before. Some of us put together a costume presentation for the masquerade, in which we won the prize for best group costume. For this effort we dressed up as characters from Randall Garrett’s novel Too Many Magicians. The novel does not say much about how the characters were dressed, so someone in our group (I am sorry to say I have forgotten who) suggested an 18^th century look and help us pull it off.

Photograph by Jay Kay Klein in Calisphere.

The clean shaven young man is me, age 18. I was Lord Bontriomphe. Next to me is Mike Bradley as the Marquis of London. I again regret to say that I do not recall who the two women were. Randall Garrett based some of his characters on those of other writers. The Marquis of London is Nero Wolfe and Lord Bontriomphe is obviously Archie Goodwin.

On the original picture I was able to zoom in to my left hip:

You can see the hilt of the sword I borrowed from my father. He got it when he taught at The Citadel, briefly, in the 1930s. It was not a good fit and he was fired. Afterwards he published a glossary of the cadets’ slang which gained some notoriety. The reason is that included a term for smuggling a prostitute into the barracks, implying that the cadets engaged in that activity, or at least fantasized about it.