S P A C E L I G H T
INDEX
Name: McKENNA, Richard Milton
Aged: 51
Born: May 9, 1913
Where: Mountain Home, Idaho
Died: November 1, 1964
Where: Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Interred: Chapel Hill Memorial Cemetery
Married: Eva Grice
When: circa 1958
Awarded: 1962 Harper Novel Award for The Sand Pebbles, and
1966 Nebula (posthumously) for "The Secret Place."
Richard M. McKenna
"Calling a story 'science fantasy' does not relieve it of the obligation to internal consistency and, so that science-trained readers will not be repelled, the obvious scientific impossibilities must still be speciously justified. In 'science fiction' they must be plausibly justified...but always justified, never ignored."
In the Depression, Mac enlisted in the Navy in 1931, in order to send money home to his mother, and stayed until 1953. Trained as a machinist's mate, his 22 year career included ten years in the Orient, with two of those on a gunboat assigned to the Yangtse River. McKenna's critically acclaimed and historical novel, The Sand Pebbles, 1962, won the 1963 Harper's Award of $10,000 and propelled him into both the limelight and the mainstream acceptance that he had sought. The book was made into a noted movie of the same name.
After leaving the service, McKenna used the GI Bill to acquire a BA degree in English from the University of North Carolina. While there, Richard married one of the university librarians and set up housekeeping in Chapel Hill. He began publishing in 1958 and while McKenna wrote SF stories from the start, he was a mainstream writer in thought...but attended several of the Milford conferences for SF writers. McKenna wrote in longhand and disliked typing anything, often becoming totally reclusive during writing spates. However, a tragic and premature death ended Mac's most promising career. Half of McKenna's SF stories were published after his death and all of his collections.
In 1999, Mac's old school in Mountain Home, Idaho, was renamed the Richard M. McKenna High School. An English teacher there, Jose Madarieta, has acquired many of McKenna's literary effects (including the original manuscript of Sand Pebbles) from Louise Crain, the sister of the late Eva Grice McKenna, with the intentions of creating an archive and repository at Mountain Home.
(Editor's note: Mac was a most personable man, intelligent, attentive, outgoing, and humorous. But all of that aside, McKenna had the largest set of eyebrows I've ever seen. We spent an evening together in New York at Avram's, the night before McKenna was to be interviewed on the "Today" show. I remember wondering what he would look like when the cameras hit him. Next morning, I caught the show and was relieved to see that Richard, or someone at the studio, had cut his eyebrows back to only about two inches long. In Mac's obituary, the New York Times writer said that his "brows (were) as unruly as an unweeded garden." GCW)
Thumbnail from a photo by G. D. Hackett
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.
BIOGRAPHY: Stefanie Stephens wrote one here.
OBITUARY: Associated Press, November 2, 1964
