A Tribute to Mark Chorvinsky
By Phyllis Benjamin
FATE :: September 2005

On a bright Saturday afternoon in the early 1980s, Paul Willis, Mark Chorvinsky, and I lounged around the old International Fortean Organization (INFO) office in the Yes! Building in College Park, Maryland, discussing life, or rather, the end of it in the way that only 20- or 30-somethings can. Both guys thought they would die young. Mark told us about a brush with death he had right before he was due to graduate from the University of Maryland. He was involved in a terrible car crash and spent many painful years recuperating. The beard he wore covered scars, and I suspected his bad foot was a lingering reminder of the accident. We both twitted Paul and told him that he would probably die a Fortean death.

“I would hope so. An unexplained one,” Paul nodded gravely as he popped the cap of another beer and handed it around. The conversation shifted to a discussion of a local man called Moody who had a warehouse filled with Ripley-like oddies like a one-eyed giant and a Fiji mermaid. I told them that Moody had claimed to have a piece of the true cross and we all laughed at the implausible delight of the notion while we plotted a way to get into the facility.

We never did.

Whether it was foreshadowing or foreknowledge I do not know, but Paul did die a Fortean death in his middle age and today I learned the sad news that Mark had passed.

Mark was a talented man with a taste for the limelight and a love of the bizarre but who was, when you dug deep, really a bit shy and, above all, a very private person. I’ve hesitated to put into print my recollections of Mark because I know he loved mysteries and always fancied himself a mysterious character.

He told me once that when he was a small boy he was encouraged by his mother to develop his love of magic tricks. She said that while other people could have career skills like typing to fall back on Mark would always have his magic.

One of his first business projects was to open up his own magic shop, Dream Wizards, in the Congressional Shopping Center in Rockville, Maryland. The store was a delight from the first, filled with various tricks, every type of costume and mask imaginable for Halloween, and later fantasy games, Pokemon, and the Strange Bookshop that carried our own INFO Journal. His wife Laurel, a beautiful young woman from New York, managed the shop for a long time. She told me she met Mark at a rock concert and had immediately fallen for the man all in black who always carried a trick or two in his pockets. I knew from the first time I saw them together that it was a good match. They complemented each other in innumerable ways and Al and I had some very good times with them.

Mark was a gourmet chef. He and Laurel would come over for dinner or we would go to their house for drinks and meals and, of course, long Fortean conversations, always with good music in the background.

In the 1980s Mark was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Fortean Organization (INFO) and served the organization well for several years. He loved the INFO Journal, a magazine we produced, pro bono, with a very dedicated band of volunteers for over 35 continuous years, but, from the first, he wanted to start his own magazine with his more considerable funds. And so he did, and there was no acrimony in the parting. We wished him well and helped to promote Strange Magazine in any way we could.

Mark performed his magic act at several of our local meetings and did several presentations at the annual FortFest. I was particularly impressed with his talk on Merlin, which was for a book he wanted to produce. At one of our local meetings at a suburban library he wowed the audience with his mentalist tricks and then talked, for a bit, about his fascination with Harry Houdini’s promise to send a message back from the grave. A long-time reader and lover of and writer for FATE, Mark was also aware of former editor Scott Rogo’s untimely death and the subsequent clues to Rogo’s murder given to a Ouija Board operated by a group of Rogo’s friends.

 As I write this farewell to a friend and Fortean colleague in Baltimore, a city called the birthplace of the Ouija, I am not tempted to rustle up a board. Instead I am reminded of a story I told my old friend John Keel over 13 years ago about a friend who had passed and who had made good on her promise to contact Al and myself through EVP. I would encourage the readers of FATE, along with my Fortean mates, to set up a tape recorder and invite Mark to say one last hello. Mark Chorvinsky always loved a good, strange mystery, and I know he is now exploring the strangest and greatest mystery of them all. Bon voyage, Mark; we wish you well.

You can also visit Mark's website at www.strangemag.com for further tributes and remembrances.