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MU honors 1935 graduate, writer
Betty Bond and sons Lynn and Kit Bond are pictured in the Nelson Bond Room in the Morrow Library at Marshall University on Saturday, April 19, 2008.
Purchase this photoHUNTINGTON -- As Nelson Bond grew older, his son, Lynn Bond, said his dad was concerned he didn't have anything to leave behind.
"He believed everyone on this earth should leave a mark, and he was afraid he hadn't left one," Lynn Bond said.
On Saturday afternoon, nearly 19 months after his death at the age of 97, Nelson Bond's mark was unveiled. His home office, where he wrote hundreds of short stories and radio and television scripts, was duplicated in a renovated third-floor office in the James E. Morrow Library of Marshall University.
The Nelson Slade Bond Room contains actual items from the office he kept in the family's home, primarily from the 1940s to the 1960s, said his other son, Kit Bond. The desk and chairs, framed photos, a Remington Rand typewriter and even the Dictaphone he used all are there. The room also includes original copies of the science fiction magazines containing his works as well as original manuscripts.
Bond was born in Scranton, Pa., but through his travels wound up at Marshall College learning under the direction of Page Pitt, for whom the school of journalism and mass communications is named. He also met his wife, Betty Gough Folsom, at Marshall.
He started his career in public relations, but his science fiction writing became so popular that he wrote full time. His works were bought and published in some of the most widely-known pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s.
Lisle Brown, curator of the special collections section in Morrow Library, said Nelson Bond stories were adapted to radio. Never satisfied with the adaptation, Nelson Bond started writing his own. Eventually, the television era started, and he moved into that medium as well.
The transition to Hollywood never developed, and he stopped writing to open a public relations firm, Brown said. Later, he became a book dealer.
Mike Allen, a columnist with The Roanoke Times, was the guest speaker Saturday. Having known and written about Nelson Bond since 1995, Allen described Nelson Bond's writings as cutting edge for the time and called him "a master of the 1930s whip-crack dialogue."
"I wish somewhat selfishly that Nelson had continued to write, even sparingly," Allen said. "That problem that Nelson's legacy faces is not literary but availability."
The Nelson Slade Bond Room, Marshall officials hope, can indeed preserve that legacy and provide students, the community and Internet surfers with access to a writer held in the highest esteem in the school of journalism.
"What this does is create a tribute to a man whose work gets lost," Kit Bond said. "Here's a chance to know who Nelson Bond was. The highest compliment any author can get is someone reading their work."
