I didn’t get to go to the first Worldcon I’d hoped I would. That’s because the first Worldcon I wanted to attend was Dallas in ’73 and the 1973 Worldcon was instead held in Toronto. Which explains a lot. But not everything.

Come to think of it, I didn’t get to the first comic convention I wanted to either. That would have been the 1969 July 4th weekend con run by Phil Seuling at the Statler Hilton Hotel. But my parents didn’t think I was old enough to wander off to Manhattan on my own while they were at a bungalow colony out in the country. So I had to wait until ’70 for what was to be my first con of any kind.

When I got there, I looked something like in the photo below, which shows me a year later at Seuling’s ’71 con, snapped as I sat in the front row (as always), with Phil at the podium.

But back to my first (almost) Worldcon. I was a supporting member of Dallascon, and I’ve got the membership card to prove it, signed by Tom Reamy, chairman of the “Big D in ’73” bid. In addition to the neat card with that wonderful George Barr artwork, I also received copies of The Dallascon Bulletin, more magazine than progress report.

But the Dallas Worldcon bid collapsed, and since I wasn’t in the loop back then (I don’t think I was even aware yet that there was a loop), I have no idea why.

Wikipedia states “the long-running Dallascon bid collapsed for complex reasons,” but doesn’t go into them, so it’ll have to be up to some éminence grise to explain it to me. As a result, the ’73 con ended up being held in Toronto.

Here’s where it gets interesting. (Well, to me at least.)

Several years ago, I was asked why an 18-year-old kid from Brooklyn who hadn’t travelled much past the few states that could be reached by a couple of hours drive from New York, had no problem imagining making his way to Texas, but balked at simply hopping on an Amtrak train in Manhattan that would have dropped me in the middle of Toronto. The question puzzled me, because … I had no idea how to answer that. I still have no idea.

It’s possible that international travel seemed too major an event to be seen as within my reach. But I also wonder whether it had anything to do with fear of being stopped at the Canadian border as a possible draft dodger. From this distance, however, I don’t know whether that was part of my thinking.

In any case, my first Worldcon ended up being Discon II in D.C. the following year, which was the first Worldcon for F, Brett Cox as well.

Since then, I’ve attended a total of 21 Worldcons (funny, I thought there’d been more of them), including 18 of the last 19.

But I didn’t go to Dallascon in 1973. And neither did you.