He has quite a following….who knew!  I don’t think we had any idea as children that this facet of his life would receive such recognition.  I once asked him how he got the ideas for his science fiction (he had a character in one of his later works who was a girlie-girl –whom he told me was based on something I came up with…cloudy-clouds).  His explanation to me at the time was that he had very strange dreams when he had been under anesthesia in the past and that he turned those dreams into his science fiction. 

I asked her if I could use that in the blog, and she kindly said yes and added this:

When we (your dad, Genevieve, Marcia, me, and Erica Lindsey) all traveled by car to Mexico (I was 14 at the time), we often had to entertain ourselves  because the radio didn’t offer anything more than static in certain areas of the country.  One of the songs I sang was Home on the Range.  Instead of singing "where the skies are not cloudy all day" instead I sang "where the clouds are not cloudy all day."  When your dad asked me what in the world a cloudy cloud was — I explained that it was a gray, dark cloud.  A normal cloud was a white, puffy cloud.

Erica Lindsay was about our age too, daughter of a good friend of my father’s. I wasn’t along on the trip because I had my first summer job, for young people who showed promise as scientists. It was a very interesting job, being part of a research team that came up with an estimate of how many people the world could support. I forget what number we came up with, but I think it was smaller than the current total. I didn’t pursue science as a career, but it may have influenced my becoming a librarian later.

His Niece Remembers Paul Linebarger is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.

I get Google Alerts for Paul Linebarger, and the other day an obituary turned up for an American Linebarger in Texas who recently died at age 80. His first name wasn’t Paul, but there was a Paul in the article. There were no obvious clues in the story as the race of this man, but reading it did remind me of a family story from when I was in high school.

My father had some interest in genealogy (which I must admit to lacking) and he was also a very outgoing person. He flew around the United States at times, to give talks, mainly, and since it was before the jet era, the prop planes didn’t go as far and he often had layovers in a variety of airports. He developed a habit of checking phone books at the airports, and calling Linebargers in them, just to say hello and chat a bit.

One day he did this. The woman who answered heard his spiel and then called her husband to the phone to talk with my father. He heard her call out, “It’s somebody who says he’s one of those white Linebargers.”

This tickled my father, and every now and then he’d tell the story.

Linebargers Black and White is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.

W.W. Linebarger was Wayne Wentworth Linebarger, my father’s younger brother. There’s a strong family resemblance but I was pretty sure the photo was of Wentworth (as we always called him). I emailed his daughter and she agreed that it’s definitely him. It was taken in 1943.

It’s a pleasure to me to see Wentworth in a photo again, as he is in large part responsible for my love of photography. He gave me my first good camera, and whenever I saw him we’d talk photography. He loved boating too.

W.W. Linebarger, Paul’s Brother: An Old Photo Turns Up is a post from the Cordwainer Smith Blog, run by his daughter.