Chuck Crayne and others have been wondering how the 1969 WesterCon is to be selected, if the '68 WesterCon is combined with the WorldCon. If I recall past precedent correctly -- and this may not've been done at all WesterCon-World Con combinations, but it was with at least one -- the legal fiction has been applied that the first day of the 3-day (now 4-day) Con is the WesterCon, and the remaining days are the WorldCon. The WesterCon GOH, if there's a separate one, gives his talk this first day, and the voting for next year's WesterCon is held then. (Everybody gets to vote, since all paid attendees are members of both.) I don't know whether the BayCon will run things this way or not -- maybe not, since they don't have any separate Guests of Honor -- but it's one solution. At any rate, I'm not too worried; I'm sure the BayCon crew is aware of the problem and that something will be worked out.

It occurs to me that the disinterested-voter problem is likely to arise here also. Added to the WorldCon's usual walk-in trade with no background on the bidders, and no real interest in either since they won't be attending any out-of-city Con, you'll have the out-of-the-area fen who've come to the BayCon because it's the WorldCon. These fen won't have any more interest in the next year's WesterCon than the non-fan walk-ins, but they're eligible to vote for it anyhow; and something crazy-sounding like Tijuana in '69 is just likely enough to tickle their fancies to cause them to ignore another serious bid. Maybe Chuck's idea of limiting the voting to only those who've purchased their memberships in advance should be applied here too. In fact, since the WesterCons don't have the strict "rule" problem that the WorldCons do, I don't see any reason why this couldn't be applied at the BayCon, provided that the interested parties and the BayCon Committee work out the details in advance.

What I'm wondering is: who's interested in hosting the '69 WesterCon? I've heard that Earl Kemp is serious about his Tijuana in '69 bid, but I haven't heard much from Earl himself about it. I've heard that Chuck and Bruce are organizing a bid for somewhere in the So. Calif. area, but no more definite word than this. San Diego and Las Vegas are presumably dead, Buz says Seattle'll never bid for another WesterCon, and there's no sigh of WesterCon interest from Denver or Albuquerque (and are they West Coast, anyhow?). Will the Bay Area want the '69 WesterCon after having the '68 WorldCon? So far, Tijuana is the only definitely-announced contender, and it's getting on time for the contenders to announce themselves.

Fred Hollander -- I suspect that Van Arnam's re-entrance into Apa L will stir up interest again. Apa L really needs out-of-the-area members; we need people to talk to that we don't see in person every week. This has been said many times, I know, but it's still true.

Dave Van Arnam -- Maybe Harlan is too powerful for our own good, and should be banned, like the crossbow, poison gas, or the flying wedge in football. I dunno, though -- it seems like we're penalizing Harlan because of our own weak-wills. The most distressing thing about this recent turn of events, it seems to me, is that it's a sign that our bidding systems are becoming more Professional than ever. Instead of bidders just looking for BNFs and pros to second their bids, there's now a rush to get this or that particular speaker, Ellison or Zelazny or the like, because they're such spellbinders. Maybe I'm just imagining this -- or maybe it's an old state of affairs that I just never noticed before, because there haven't been that many real fights for next year's Cons since I entered Fandom, up to now. Or maybe it's that I just was never as personally involved in bidding campaigns as I have been in the last couple of years. But the campaigns, though more exciting, don't seem to be as well-natured as they were between 1961 and 1966, say. ## We (the Pan-Pacificon Committee) knew that BayCon was putting out a First Progress Report, yes; but we never realized that it was going to be distributed before the voting session. We assumed that it was to be held back until after they won (if they won), as has been standard in the past, and we were Caught Short when we found that it was being passed out with the NyCon's Program Book. In fact I had gotten the impression over the years in fandom, that there was an Unwritten Fannish Law against a bidder's actually distributing any Progress Reports before he had actually won the bid, and that this was only relaxed during the last few years when we had that long stretch from 1960 to a couple of years ago where there was only one bidder, and he could publish his Progress Report #1 in advance without fear of its becoming useless. I thought the NyCon Committee was very clever last year when it Solved the problem of not being able to have a PR #1 before the voting at TriCon, due to other serious contenders, by having NYCON COMICS #1 instead. So it's not that we were too relaxed, it's that we were all snug behind a Maginot Line of what we thought were accepted campaign Traditions; and we couldn't maneuver fast enough when we learned where the real attack was coming from. That was too bad; we should've remembered Heinlein's comments on Ethics vs. Survival. ## Another thing that hurt us, and that we couldn't counter, was the way the BayCon used our gimmicks in their support. In their preplanned program, they listed as much of our program as they cared to -- Bĵo running the Fashion Show, the TOFF visitor, etc. -- on the perfectly logical grounds that if they won, they would have all these things, since all fandom always unites behind whoever wins. We couldn't counter this, because what did they have to offer that we don't, besides their hotel, which we could hardly bring to Los Angeles? (Besides, I'll be surprised if it runs out to be really much better than the L.A. Statler Hilton, which is really a good hotel.) Was the BayCon Unethical in using our names without our permission, or Smart in seeing a campaign angle that nobody's ever noticed before? ## Despite Bill's theory that we had lost the '68 bid all along, only we didn't know it, and that they always had all Convention Fandom on their side, I still think we were ahead up to our lousy bidding speech. We really were working up to the last minute -- silk-screening those "L.A. - Tokyo" buttons, mailing out over 200 letters to every fan within 100 miles of New York whose address we could get (within a couple of weeks of Con time), and finishing our PR #1 and our Questionnaire. The two parties we gave on Thursday and Friday nights at the Con were popular, too; in retrospect the walk-in trade, which was a large bloc at the voting, had been going home in the evening and didn't know about them. And of course we were working ourselves exhausted to push TOFF over the top; an obligation we'd committed ourselves to much too far in advance to neglect, despite the BayCon's month-or-less notice that they were going to make a real fight out of the race. So I feel a bit grotched when anyone says we lost because we just "sat back and expected Fandom to hand us the Con", while they Worked for what they got. I'll grant that they worked more effectively than we did, but that's all.