ALFRED J. SCHELLBACH 1922 - 2011
by Richard J. Schellbach
comedies were his favorite genre. Instead of watching A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM with Dad, it was much more fun for my brother Bob and me to watch
W
Dad watching A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, just to bear witness to a laughing fit so strong that it would often make him pound on the arm of his easy chair, gasp for his next breath and—when the home video age came along—rewind the tape so he could catch all of the lines he missed while he was arm-pounding and/or gasping. In fact, for years I thought the running time of FORUM was four-and-a-half hours. Just recently, while reading the DVD cover, I realized that I was way off the mark—it just took that long for Dad to watch the movie. So how does this differentiate Dad from most of
the other fathers of the era? It doesn’t. I think it’s safe to say that if you sat almost any dad in front of a TV and played FORUM, MY FAVORITE YEAR, THE PINK PANTHER, etc., you’d have a laughfest of epic proportions. What made my Dad different was his approach to Science Fiction and Horror films. Instead of treating them like the film industry’s bastard stepchildren, Dad embraced them for the oft-times clever little gems they were and always gave the good ones the respect they so deserved. Throughout most of my early years, Dad had a jarhead haircut.
(He served in both the United States Army and the United States Air Force in World War II.) When I asked him why his hair stood up so perfectly like that, he told me that he had seen Boris Karloff in FRANKENSTEIN when he was a kid and it scared him so much his hair stood on end and it had fought the law of gravity since that day. (I later found out it had less to do with Boris and more to do with Brylcreem. But hey, who else’s dad serves that up as a style explanation?) Dad watched me sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor,
rifling through issue after issue of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND during most of my pre-teen and teenage years. When he learned that I got the gig here, he considered it a wonderful full circle event. That night, he handed me his credit card and told me to go online and get him a subscription. I told him there was no need—that I would get each issue to him. Well, he wouldn’t hear of it. So I had to get in touch with Phil and Jessie—both
hile far from a geek, my dad was a bigtime, no-kidding-around movie fan. Broad
who said there was no need to have him pay for a subscription—and explain that my dad always supported my writing and if they didn’t take his money, they’d instead earn his wrath. And that’s how Alfred J. Schellbach became
FAMOUS MONSTERS
OF FILMLAND’s oldest paying subscriber. Talk about full
circle,
he’s the one who used to pay for my FM subscription when I was a kid as part of my yearly birthday present. One day,
either late 1977 or
early 1978, I came home and found my dad in the den pouring through my latest issue of FM (#130, to be exact) He was shaking his head and re-reading an article entitled “The Most Horrifying Article We’ve Ever Published”. It was a letter to James Warren from a guy named Ron Leeds, from Santa Ana, California, who took to task both Warren and FJA for putting out such rubbish and corrupting his son’s mind, along with the minds of all
of the youth of America. (Well, to be fair, he did mention rock ‘n’ roll as playing a part in that too.) The next day, Dad sat down and handwrote a four-page letter, letting Leeds know just what he thought of the burning of magazines. He also told the Santa Ana resident that his eldest son was a huge monster fan and how proud he was of that son. He ended the letter by saying that even though Mr. Leeds had left his street address off of the letter, Dad had no doubt that he was obviously the village idiot and, therefore, known to everyone in town, including the local postal authority. Now, I’ll never know for sure whether or not there was a Ron Leeds of Santa Ana, CA—but, in a way, I’m glad Dad’s letter was returned to sender about two weeks later; because since that day, its home has been in my copy of FM #130, on the first page of the article. Mr. Leeds would have tossed it out with the rest of the things he considered to be rubbish. I, on the other hand, will keep it for the rest of my life as a testament to the type of father Alfred J. Schellbach was. Space does not permit me to tell you about Dad’s love for all
things PLANET OF THE APES or any of the myriad monster-related stories I have about him. But I want to thank Phil Kim
for
suggesting that I talk about my father in the pages of the magazine that meant so much to his first born… and to him. Rest In Peace, Dad.
FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • SEP/OCT 2011 49
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