Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Roger Sherman Hoar (pen name Ralph Milne Farley)
Bucyrus attorney and pulp author Ralph Milne Farley of South Milwaukee (great-great-grandson of Declaration signer Roger Sherman)
$750
Roger Sherman Hoar was Bucyrus’s corporate attorney in South Milwaukee by day and, as Ralph Milne Farley, the pulp writer who sent earthmen to Venus by night. He arrived in 1921, built the Georgian Colonial “The Milestone” at 1503 Fairview Avenue, and stayed forty-two years—the improbable resident inside the mining-shovel factory town. A Harvard lawyer and great-great-grandson of Declaration signer Roger Sherman, he put Myles Cabot on Venus in Argosy’s The Radio Man in June 1924. He taught engineering at Marquette, patented a method for aiming big guns by the stars, and from a South Milwaukee imprint—Stuart Press—published Wisconsin Unemployment Insurance after Washington pulled him onto New Deal unemployment work. He sat with Robert Bloch and Stanley Weinbaum in the Milwaukee Fictioneers; when Ziff-Davis offered him Amazing Stories in 1938 he turned it down and recommended Ray Palmer. City historian Nels Monson writes that he once dated Rose Fitzgerald. He died of a heart attack in The Milestone on October 10, 1963, at seventy-six. The house still stands. The shovels paid the mortgage; the pulps are what lasted.