Cofounder and publisher of FATE magazine. Fuller was born March 2, 1912, in Necedah, Wisconsin, and was educated at the University of Wisconsin (B.A., 1933) and Northwestern University (M.S., 1937). He married Mary Margaret Stiehm on September 24, 1938. After a period as a newspaper writer, he was an editor on several magazines in the late 1930s and 1940s. By the mid-1940s he was working for Ziff-Davis, a large Chicago-based publisher.
In the wake of Ziff-Davis's contemplated move to New York and the sighting of flying saucers by Kenneth Arnold in 1947, Fuller and Ray Palmer (also a Ziff-Davis employee) decided to start a new company, Clark Publishing, and issue FATE magazine to explore UFOs and other mysteries. In 1955 he bought out Ray Palmer, who had already withdrawn from active editorial work. In 1966 Mary Margaret Fuller was named editor and Curtis Fuller assumed duties as publisher. He also created a second company, Woodall, Inc., which operated in the travel field and issued directories for trailers and campers.
Fuller had a sympathetic but skeptical view of paranormal phenomena and always insisted on high editorial standards and supporting data on any extraordinary claims made in the magazine's pages. He was a member of the Illinois Society for Psychical Research (president 1961-64) and was active in the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship (treasurer 1962-69). The Fullers directed FATE together through the 1970s and 1980s, but following Mary Margaret's retirement in 1988 the magazine was sold to Llewellyn Publications. The March 1989 issue of FATE contained a farewell editorial from Curtis Fuller. He died April 29, 1991.
Sources:
Clark, Jerome. Encyclopedia of Strange and Unexplained Phenomena. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993.
