Thanks for posting this, David. I hadn't heard the sad news until now.

I started buying Famous Monsters OF Filmland Magazine when the second issue appeared at the local newsstand in Napa in 1958. I thought I had gone to monster heaven. The magazine led me to so many other areas of cinema that in some ways I must pay the ultimate gratitude to Forry.

A few years later when I was 12 and started showing silent classics in my parent's barn, it was because of what I learned from FM that I could find and select the great classics of horror but it also exposed me to all the classics.
I wrote to Forry and of course he wrote back and invited me to visit he and his wife on South Sherbourne Ave in LA. I did a couple of times and he was amazingly gracious, showing me around and then telling me to just have a good time looking around while he went back to writing.

We will miss him for sure but luckily we also have so much to remember him by and thank him for.

My own humble contribution to this symphony of tears.

Damn. Knowing it was coming doesn't make it any easier to hear. I am grateful for the long and happy life he lived, and to you, David, for passing the news along.

Since mine own tribute to Forrest Ackerman is no more than a few lone sentences in duration, I'll happily direct everyone to this fine offering in the accumulating canon of remembrance

I never met the man, but I shared the amsthead with him on a few horror magazines. I remember my first Famous Monsters of Filmland issue, the one with the Harryhausen cyclops on it, which I got off the rack at 7-11 back in the mid-70s. Man, I brought that thing wherever I went, like a Linus blanket; it was perfect for a kid just learning to read, though even then I was still too mature for some of the puns. Still, for a young boy out in the wilds of suburbia with no other monster fans around, finding Ackerman's magazine was like being that fat bee chick in that old Blind Mellon video, and finding the Bee heaven where all the junky band members are playing amidst the bees. Remember that one? Forry might have; god knows how many maladjusted typed he brought together. Would there even be monster film conventions without him? God rest his sweet and gentle soul... unless he chooses to rise up and devour the living, or Tokyo.