The Society’s First Members

Six weeks after we announced the Society’s founding, only three people had signed up for membership — hardly a promising start. But after we began distributing our brochures and the first issue of THE FUTURIST, people began to sign up in more significant numbers. By March 1, 1967, the Society had 340 members (along with a growing stack of unpaid bills), and by the end of our first year we had 1,500 members.

Who were these early members? Clearly, most of them were intelligent, imaginative people, many of whom were quite successful in their careers. And they were certainly well-educated as a group. I often felt like a country bumpkin when I found myself surrounded by people with doctorates. Perhaps a third of our early members were university professors or otherwise engaged in higher education. But there were also many government managers, city planners, engineers, authors, and business people involved in long-range planning, marketing, or product development.

These people were clearly interested in new ideas about technology and society, and they seemed to be highly imaginative and free in their thinking. Altogether, I found them the most fascinating group of people I had ever known, partly because they approached the future in so many different ways.

The very first person to become a Society member was, as I recall, William T. Gay, a retired English professor living in Montgomery, Alabama, who had a passionate interest in utopian literature. Gay gave a gift membership in the Society to Marion Bellamy Earnshaw, daughter of the nineteenth-century journalist Edward Bellamy, who wrote the famous novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887. A best seller after it appeared in 1888, Looking Backward described the wonders of Boston in the year 2000: airplanes, electric lights, radio, television, and equal rights for women.

I later recruited Gay to be the utopias editor of THE FUTURIST, and he contributed notable articles on Bellamy and Jules Verne, whose book on a flight to the moon inspired rocketry pioneers Robert Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Other early members included well-known science-fiction writers such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Heinlein. Arthur C. Clarke not only joined but sent in a membership for Stanley Kubrick, the producer/director of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Gene Roddenberry, creator of the Star Trek series on television, also signed up and gave a gift subscription to actor Leonard Nimoy, who played the character Mr. Spock on Star Trek.

My sons were very excited when they saw the Star Trek envelope containing Roddenberry’s application for membership. I had never watched the show myself and had no idea who Roddenberry was. Years later, however, I did get to know him when he spoke at a Society conference where he explained how he developed memorable characters like Spock by imagining a person with certain characteristics and then questioning him to find out what he thought about specific things.

The early members also included some politicians, such as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who later participated in the Society’s 1975 conference.

And, of course, there were corporation executives such as William W. Simmons, IBM’s director of exploratory planning, and Ian H. Wilson, who was leading a study of changing American values for General Electric.