Julie Wall, Vice President
Birmingham, Ala.
jlwall@usa.net

Julie has been reading science fiction for as long as she can remember. For this Julie credits her parents, though her dad might object. Her mother is a voracious reader and has always had all kinds of fiction around the house all the time, including SF. Julie’s father is a biologist and so gave her an interest in science.

Julie was very fond of Robert Heinlein. She wrote to him when she was about 12 to ask about the L5 Society. One of her prized possessions is the L5 magazine that he sent to her (which was addressed to his wife, Virginia), along with a short note. Star Wars also came out that same year. Julie saw it 31 times during its initial release. She and her best friend would pack a picnic lunch and go see it five times in a row during that summer. Later, they amassed over 1,500 handwritten pages of an epic novel with amazing similarities to that screen classic.

Julie discovered fandom while in high school. A creative writing major at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, she somehow heard about the Birmingham Science Fiction Club and arranged to interview then-president Jim Gilpatrick for a journalism class. So, even though Jim has long since moved to Atlanta and subsequently gafiated, Julie says it’s all his fault.

The first fannish event Julie attended was the BSFC Christmas party in 1980 at Jim’s house. She was 15 and it was a blast. There was a showing of Hardware Wars, music, conversation, and shenanigans with gingerbread men. It ended with a group going to see a midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Julie was thrilled. Fandom had such a high ratio of Not-Stupids, as Mike the Computer would say.

Julie turned 16 at her first convention, Chattacon in 1981. She was a B’hamster at Deep South Con that summer. She worked in Operations at her first Worldcon, Baltimore in 1983. In 1984, at age 19, Julie chaired her first con: BACHCon. She probably was one of the youngest con chairs ever. The BACH stood for Birmingham, Atlanta, Chattanooga and Huntsville and it was a relaxicon in the mold of the the old ABCCons.

In 1985, Julie moved to Williamsburg, Virginia with her then-husband. It wasn’t long before she discovered the Hampton Roads Science Fiction Association and its convention, Sci-Con. She was Secretary of HaRoSFA for a while, and introduced the Saturday night dance to Sci-Con. She also ran the consuite at a few Sci-Cons. Because Julie stole the recipes for Bill Zielke’s popular frozen blender drinks and started serving them at HaRoSFA parties, she was dubbed "Blender Bunny." She worked for Charlotte Proctor in VIP relations at the 1986 Worldcon in Atlanta, ConFederation.

Julie came back to Birmingham in 1991 sans husband. Unbeknownst to her, the Birmingham SF Club (BSFC) had anticipated her return by electing her president. She missed the election, but when she showed up for the February meeting, the kazoo band struck up "Hail to the Chief". She held the position for two years. She helped Charlotte Proctor produce the last few issues of Anvil and chaired the Deep South Cons in Birmingham in 1994 and 1998. In 1998, Julie was elected to the presidency of the SFC. In 2000, she worked the Green Room at the Chicago Worldcon where she met a fan from Canada that she currently dates.

In the mundane world of work, Julie is a network systems administrator for a printing company. She works with Novell, NT and Win95, UNIX, and her favorite, Macintosh. Despite this, she says she is really not that big a tech head, but that her particular job requires her to be a jack of all protocols, master of none. It does give her access to a lot of cool technology, which came in handy while putting out the Bulletin for many years. Julie has now passed the torch to Randy, but she’ll always be an important part of SFC.

Tom Feller, Secretary
Nashville, Tenn.
tomfeller@aol.com
http://members.aol.com/tomfeller

Tom was born in St. Clare’s Hospital in Monroe, Wisconsin on September 28, 1954. His father was a dairy farmer living near Monticello, WI. When Tom was twelve, his father switched to hog farming exclusively and farmed happily until his semi-retirement. (His evenings were not occupied with the nightly milking.) Tom’s mother was a farmwife until Tom went to college. She then studied to become a real estate agent. After serving stints with various firms including Century 21, she has become a partner in her own firm, affiliated with Better Homes and Gardens. She sold her firm in 1998. The parents retired to Florida in 2000, although the father returned to Wisconsin this spring to help with the planting and plans to return again in the fall to help with the corn harvest.

Tom has one younger brother who stayed on the farm. The brother is divorced and has one son and one daughter. Tom’s nephew is farming with his dad, and Tom’s niece attends Madison Area Technical College.

Tom’s ancestry is a mixture of Swiss, Norwegian, Pennsylvania Dutch (German), Welsh, and English.

Tom graduated from Monticello High School in 1972 and then attended Ripon College in Ripon, WI. He received his BA in 1976, spending one semester of his junior year in Bonn, West Germany. He majored in philosophy with the equivalent of minors in political science and German literature. He spent the next two years as a graduate assistant in the philosophy department at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Graduate school did not work out, so when the assistantship expired, Tom got a desk clerk job at one of the Holiday Inns in Baton Rouge. For some mysterious reason, the managers liked his work and promoted him to night auditor and, finally, to front office manager. In 1981 he was once again promoted, this time to the position of internal auditor with the operator of the BR Holiday Inns, Mississippi Management (now called MMI Hotel Group). This promotion required a move to Jackson, Miss. Tom lived there until 1997 until he moved to Nashville to marry Anita Williams. MMI allowed him to become a remote worker. His current position is Director of Special Projects, and it requires a lot of travel.

A few years after moving to Jackson, an event occurred that led to Tom’s primary leisure time activity. Up until then, he had not been successful in forming a circle of friends in Jackson. Then he read the Mid-September 1983 issue of Analog, a science fiction magazine. Among the classified ads for ordained ministers and university degrees was an ad for a science fiction club in the Jackson area. Out of the 100,000 or so readers of the magazine, Tom was the only one to answer the ad. He discovered it was for the Chimneyville Fantasy and Science Fiction Society. This was Tom’s introduction to science fiction fandom. Since then, he has been a member of more organizations than he can remember, president of two clubs, chairperson of two conventions, and the editor of three fanzines.

Janet D. Hopkins, Treasurer
Clarksville, TN
stormwolf2001@cs.com

Bio pending...