He not only created one of the first fanzines in 1933, as a teenager, he became the managing editor for Wonder Stories magazine from November, 1933 to April, 1936.
Some of these fans such as Julius Schwartz, Mort Weisinger, Connie Rupert, and Milton Kaletsky became friends with Charles.
He was pleasantly surprised when H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth and other writers agreed to send him some manuscripts that had been rejected by the paying magazines.
[2] So he convinced Connie Rupert to hand set and print 250 copies, 12 pages each of the first issue of The Fantasy Fan.
When Gernsbach sold Wonder Stories to Standard Magazines Charles lost his post 2 ½ years after he started, but he continued his work with science fiction editing by working freelance for Science-Fiction and Future Fiction while he pursued the job he had been learning in high school and that was accounting.
This eventually led to his meeting his future wife, Florence Koch, in New York City at a Fellowship of Reconciliation luncheon.
While he was in prison at McNeil Island in Washington State, having been sentenced for going AWOL, his first child, Ruth Cecelia, was born in June 1944.
Following his release from prison, he and his family moved to Los Angeles, where his son, Charles Evan, was born in early January 1946.
During his years in accounting he continued the love he held in the 1940s for Esperanto, went on numerous peace marches, and joined up with the Humanist and Quaker communities.