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Show 'Noname! Author Of Famed Nickel Novels, Is Dead Luis P. Senarens Was the Creator of Fabulous Frank Reade Jr. By ELMO SCOTT WATSON (Released by Western Newspaper Union.) RECENTLY the newspapers newspa-pers throughout the country printed a brief press association dispatch which said: NEW YORK. Luis P. Senarens, Sen-arens, seventy-six years old, often called the "American Jules Verne," who wrote 1,500 dime novels under 27 pseudonyms between 1876 and 1910, died from heart trouble yesterday in Kings county hospital. Senarens, who began be-gan his extraordinary career at the age of fourteen, created creat-ed the fabulous Frank Reade and forecast in fiction many modern mechanical developments. develop-ments. Son of an immigrant Cuban tobacco merchant, Senarens got his inspiration as a boy . from visiting the Philadelphia Centennial exposition in 1876. At sixteen he was earning $200 a week and at thirty he became president of the Frank Tousey Publication company, which published all his works. Thus was revealed, for the first time perhaps, to thou- ' 'PcJlH" l w fiU the uN7Fr?f iti'S Lfc Tti V !-1, 'Mu' Vo I X . S'W tOK, OCTOBER 20 M1-""" j. 2 ' 1 "J ti SiUtm Fit tK KL1DUB," ZSZ , A TKrftHn? Mir; W TrwC krwiml tie WM for ia,eO the Air" was a cigar-shaped balloon bal-loon that resembled a modern Zeppelin. Suspended below it by slings was the hull of a ship, complete with a rudder at the stern and a searchlight at the bow. Thus it was a combined ship of the air and ship of the sea, or in other words a sort of TrnnTr flnn'rfft Ir AiiI ms NEW STEj-ME horse. sands of Americans the identity iden-tity of one of their favorite authors back in the days of their youth when they tasted of forbidden fruit be revelling in the adventures of Fred Fearnot, Young Wild West, Old King Brady and especially espe-cially Frank Reade Jr. For this brief obituary item unmasks, un-masks, at last, the mysterious, mysteri-ous, tantalizing "Noname" whose imagination conjured up for the use of the ingenious Frank a host of mechanical marvels which seemed weirdly weird-ly improbable then but are commonplace enough today. We are greatly impressed when modern science and inventive skill produces a "mechanical man" who can speak and give the correct answer to problems propounded pro-pounded to him when the right buttons are pressed. But back in 1890 Frank Reade Jr. had an "electrical man" who could do most of those things. If Henry Ford and the other motor car makers had read more of "No-name's" "No-name's" nickel novels, the course of automobile design might have been far different. For Frank Reade Jr. had a horse made of steel with jointed legs, driven by a steam engine inside. This animal ani-mal was attached to a solid-tired vehicle in the same location where the automakers attached an engine en-gine covered with a "hood" of steel. Four years later Frank Reade was staging a race around the world for a purse of $10,000. He was piloting his flying boat, which is amazingly like a modern auto-giro, auto-giro, and his opponent in the race was Jack Wright, diving through the seas in his submarine which had a neat, glass-enclosed conning con-ning tower. In fact, Frank was a most versatile designer of flying fly-ing machines. His "Monitor of forecast of our modern seaplanes. By the next year, 1895, Frank had had another idea for air travel. "Noname" called it "Frank Reade Jr.'s Greatest Flying Fly-ing Machine" in which he set out for a bit of "Fighting the Terror of the Coast." The picture on the front cover of this nickel thriller shows a large biplane. driven by two propellers, below which is suspended a land-boat with a hull similar to that on the "Monitor of the Air" but equipped with four wheels on which it could "taxi" along the ground in landing land-ing or taking off. Perhaps the most extraordinary extraordi-nary invention of this ingenious youth was his "Clipper of the Prairie," which was a sort of a cross between a war tank and a trailer home on wheels and which Frank used for "Fighting the Apaches in the Far Southwest." Above the cabin, or living quarters, quar-ters, was an observation platform on which were built two turrets and in front of the cabin was mounted a good-sized cannon. If the "red devils" escaped destruction de-struction by the shots from this cannon, they could be impaled upon a sharp ram-like projection from the front of the "clipper." This ram was also useful in getting get-ting a supply of fresh meat for Frank and his friends, for the picture on the cover of this particular par-ticular volume indicates that it was used also for impaling buffalo! buf-falo! Incidentally the "clipper" was propelled by steam on caterpillar-tread wheels which indicates indi-cates that our "modern" caterpillar cater-pillar tractors are "old stuff." According to Edmund Pearson in his "Dime Novels; or, Following Follow-ing an Old Trail in Popular Literature" Liter-ature" (published by Little, Brown and Company in 1929), the Frank Tousey firm of which Senarens was president in addition addi-tion to the Frank Reade Weekly, also issued "Work and Win" with its hero, Fred Fearnot; the "Wild West Weekly" with Young Wild West and his sweetheart, Arietta ; "Secret Service" with Old King Brady and Young King Brady; and "Pluck and Luck." The Old King Brady stories, he says, "are attributed to Francis Worcester Doughty, who, curiously, was the author of works on numismatics and archeology." Pearson does not give the authorship au-thorship of the other Frank Tousey Tou-sey publications but it is not unlikely un-likely that Senarens, who was the "Noname" of the Frank Reade Jr. yarns, also wrote most of the others under one of the 27 pseudonyms pseu-donyms mentioned in the obituary story quoted at the beginning of this article. IraiHaSe, Jl and His Monitor of the Airf i Or, llelpiMvr.i Prietuf in "Sen!. B "WW.' .. . . .. Ten years ago there died in Orlando, Fla., a man whose writing writ-ing career paralleled that of Luis P. Senarens and the other writers of the nickel libraries and boys' weeklies but whose literary product prod-uct differed greatly from theirs. He was Kirk Munroe and during t?.e period from 1890 to 1910 one of the biggest events of the year for Young America was the appearance ap-pearance of a new book which had come from his industrious pen. Munroe was a descendant of Col. William Munroe, who was an orderly sergeant in the Minute Men of Lexington, Mass., when they fired the opening guns of the Revolution. He was born on April 15, 1850, at Prairie du Chien, Wis., where his father and mother, both New Englanders, were living in a mission. He was educated in the common schools of Appleton, Wis., and later in the schools at Cambridge, Mass., where his parents par-ents returned for a brief time. To the Frontier. When he was sixteen he persuaded per-suaded his father to allow him to spend his vacation in Kansas City, Mo., which was then a frontier fron-tier town. He reached that place just as a surveying party under Gen. W. J. Palmer was preparing to explore the vast region west of Kansas City. By making himself him-self useful about the camp of this exploring and surveying party, young Munroe secured a job as a "tape man." Thereafter, for nearly a year, the boy traveled and camped through the wilds. He saw much of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and California. He was engaged in numerous skirmishes with hostile Indians, was wounded, frequently went hungry and thirsty and suffered in the biting cold of those western plains and mountains. Once he was the guest of Kit Carson at Fort Garland, Colo. He associated associ-ated with pioneers, soldiers, western west-ern bad men and Indians. He was well acquainted with Buffalo Bill Cody. In California he found a job as a transit man, and after he had saved sufficient money he took passage for South America, where he traveled extensively before be-fore returning to Cambridge. Once home he entered Harvard, taking an engineering course, but this proved rather slow and he left college at the end of his first year. He was then nineteen. Once more he went West to Kansas City, but this time he was not so successful in finding work, since the labor of surveying was temporarily tem-porarily suspended, and he came back East. A Star Reporter. Then was to occur the incident that largely determined his future career. His familiarity with the Big Horn country, where Custer's force had just been killed, gave him a chance to land a job as a reporter on the New York Sun. Here he found a congenial field for his talents. He soon moved to the New York Times, and there he became a star reporter. A brilliant career in journalism was fairly opening before him when, again, he was diverted into another an-other field. Harper's started a magazine called Harper's Young People, designed for the youth of the nation, na-tion, and the editorship of this magazine was offered to Munroe at a salary of $S0 a week, about one-third of the pay he had been receiving. Nevertheless, he accepted ac-cepted this offer and began his duties. The magazine was immediately im-mediately successful. Munroe, two years after he had been made editor, began to write stories for boys. His first book, "Walkulla," was published in 1886. From that time on his books multiplied with amazing rapidity, until in all he had published 35 volumes. After publishing the first few of these books Munroe gave up his editorial duties to devote de-vote himself entirely to writing. He had married Miss Mary Barr, daughter of Amelia Barr, the novelist, nov-elist, and a contributor to the ' magazine, and together they traveled trav-eled extensively, both for pleasure and to collect the material for stories. After the death of his vife, he moved to Coconut Grove, Fla., a suburb of Miami, a place A-hich he had visited as a youth in a canoe and had become one of ihe pioneers and founders of thai community before Miami was a town. He lived in seclusion in Coconut Grove for many years and in 1924 married again, this : time to Miss Mabel Stearns, 1 daughter of William F. Stearns i of Amherst, Mass. |