Eulogy for Mark Merlino
Editiors Note: I delivered this Eulogy at TFF 2024 during opening ceremonies.
My journey to meeting Mark started in a house in Garden Grove, Rick and Tess’s.
In the wee hours of the morning, I was sitting there with Stalking Cat and Tess, and we were all lamenting the recent death of ConFurrence and I said, “Well why not start another one? I mean, how hard can it be?”
One thing led to another, and a month or so later I found myself chairing the first meeting of a new convention-what would eventually become Califur
Now, you might ask, “What does this have to do with Mark?”
Well, I was 20 years old, and to put it politely, like pretty much every other 20-year-old kid, I was, to put it politely, dumb as a box of rocks, and mostly unaware of that fact. Luckily, I also figured out pretty quick that I was out of my depth, and started asking around, “Who knows more about how to start a convention?” One name kept coming back, “Oh, you need to talk to Mark!” So, then I cold-called him at home and asked if I could come over and talk.
Now, Mark didn’t know me from a hole in the ground, but my cold open to him was “Hi, I’m Aloha, I’m starting a replacement for ConFurrence, do you think you might wanna help?” He thankfully said yes, and that was the start of a whirlwind for me that lasted two years and set me up for the arc of the last 20 years of my life.
During those next two years, I spent two to three days a week with Mark, and during that time, Mark introduced me to people who are among my closest friends today. He hired me for my first technical job and taught me a ton of skills-technical, organizational, and interpersonal-which helped me make me who I am today. Mark helped turn me from an awkward weird kid to a still weird but more or less fully functional adult.
Also on a very personal level, he also gave me the prototype example of how to build a working multi-partner household and as a con-runner he also taught me how to keep my personal life, my fandom life, and my work life in balance. He also taught me about ensuing that my partners assist in my convention work to avoid leaving them out and making them “con widows.”
In any case, the world is poorer for his passing, and my specific little square of the world is especially poorer for it. Without him, I never would have met my oldest and closest friends, and some of the technology I use at cons wouldn't exist.
The thing I’ll personally miss the most was his ability to tell a story. Mark was the consummate storyteller. He could make a story or anecdote come alive. His face would animate, his eyes would sparkle, his voice would rise and fall, and you felt you had been there with him. You really experienced whatever it was he was telling you and it was always amazing.
Beyond what he meant to me, in the convention world, having founded the first furry convention, he created the prototype for how to run a furry convention and what a furry convention was supposed to be-one we all more or less follow today. He also trained some of the first and second generation of con-runners who went on to found a bunch of conventions on the West Coast. For example, neither Califur nor RainFurrest would have existed without Mark.
He also helped create much of the culture around furry as we know it. He in many ways was the prototypical furry, and that attracted many folks like him to the early fandom.
But that's not all that Mark did. He ran a speaker company in the 70's and 80's and made the Lantana TAD speakers and earlier, the Qysonic speakers. He had two patents on loudspeaker technology to his name.
Aside from Mark being among the most intensively creative people I know, he had a special skill-one I've tried to learn, which was to be a “bringer together of people.”
Mark knew naturally, how to identify a problem which needed solving, how to get the right people together to solve that problem, how to create the right environment for them to work in, and how to feed them enough knowledge to allow them to create great things.
That ultimately is why he's so influential, not just from what he created, but what he helped others create. That is ultimately the thing that will live on forever.
From my perspective anyone who is active in furry, or has gone to a convention, owes him a true debt of gratitude.
Postscript: A little over a week after I delievered this, I made the trek out to Southern California to attend the public memorial service for Mark. It was a bittersweet occasion where I got to connect with old friends, and memorialize someone who was very important to my life, and the lives of others. The world is richer for Mark having been here, and my life was irrevocally changed for the better by meeting him.