The Titanic and the Open Ocean, Ruminations

Navy Flashbacks 

I only gasp now, after 36 years, at the expanse and depth of the Atlantic Ocean, which I crossed several times in the Navy.

Once, while crossing eastward to England, we came upon a research vessel with a deployed platform, and we had to delete all logs and data about it because they were still in the early months of the Titanic's discovery on the ocean floor, and they wanted to protect their find from treasure hunters, I would suppose. We complied.

The ocean route that is shortest to England steams along the exact same line of latitude now as it did then. But even though we often traveled common tracks, over my 5 years I crossed many deep oceans and seas where you wouldn't see a surface contact/ship for days.

You'd step out on deck and imagine you were in a lifeboat instead of a ship, with the horizon everywhere. And I always knew the current water depth, both because I was the Combat Information Center's (CIC) Chart Petty Officer who corrected and updated every chart before we used it and because we maintained our ship's navigational plot in CIC to ensure concurrence with the Quartermaster's plot on the bridge. But the depth never bothered me then.

Now? I had to stop watching Professor T on PBS because the episode was about treachery on the open ocean, and I was suddenly struck by the depth and expanse, and a shiver ran up my spine.

And to put a finer point on this: when I came aboard the Tico, and Lawson went AWOL, I was technically replacing the Operations Specialist (Norton) who went missing on the aft lookout. He either fell overboard, jumped, or was pushed. The seas were calm, so falling overboard was unlikely. It's possible he jumped, committing suicide out of job stress, but unlikely. He had supposedly been a loan shark. So there could have been a murderer on board. And since most of his loans were to guys I shared a berthing space with...

Every ship has yearly casualties of one sort or another.

Navy Schools and Orders

Hiding my shock at being assigned Company Master-at-Arms (MAA), it was necessary that I address the men while also having no idea what to say, so I paused — a long, pregnant pause risking the impression I froze — so I started boringly recapping how each of the previous MAAs had failed us as a unit. Then I identified my job as getting us ALL through the next 15 weeks smoothly and successfully. Then I explained how all my orders would come from my role as MAA, as required by duty, and never from me personally. My only role was to see us successful, not shout orders or demean fellow shipmates. I explained that I worked for them, but I also would never beg them to follow orders. I would give orders bluntly. Then I established a standard of fairness and drilled in the point that it’s beneficial to follow someone without ego invested in their rank. If anyone ever had a question about an order, I’d be happy to explain it in the evening before (barracks) “lights out.”

Then, after the Commander left, I privately let the gossip chain know that, to appease the Commander and reassure him I had a hold on the unit, I’d be “dressing down” men in front of him from time to time. (Dressing down: furiously and thoroughly bitching out a guy in the stereotypical military way. Also, something that never happened to me in my 4.5 years on board the ship.)

I role-played what I’d consider an ideal MAA, and it worked!

---

Plenty of alcohol flowed at the on-base Shifting Sands enlisted club tucked into this side of the Atlantic seaboard’s dunes. It had a huge music-video screen, and it was all guys. It really tested my celibacy because my gaydar would easily ping on several guys a night, not to mention how obvious it had become to me which good-looking guys in our class of 40 were at least bi. We were all just out of boot camp, in top physical condition, and randy as hell. But you could never be certain who was actually part of our Naval Investigative Services (NIS). So I remained a very good boy.

The MAA takes the last top bunk in the barracks for surveillance purposes. I came back sloshed one night and was kicking back and throwing my blanket open over me when the urge demanded I sit up straight, and instead of getting down, I hurled into my blanket, and the waves of hurling began where I first folded my blanket in half, hurled, folded it into a quarter. And maybe a fold later, I dropped it and jumped down onto it. The squish was terrifying. But surprisingly, clean. I got my small box of detergent, rinsed the blanket in a laundry room sink, put it in the washer, and woke up to, “Hey, Shook, someone put a whole box of detergent in the laundry machine, and the guys are cleaning up the two feet of bubbles that came up from the floor drain.”

By then, I’d saved so many guys’ hides as MAA; they could plainly see I was missing a blanket, but they were already cleaning up my mess without orders, out of mutual respect.

---

Orders

I maintained the highest score in our class, resulting in a 98.7% average. This mattered because the orders for your first ship depended on it.

Everyone filled out a dream sheet where you declared 2 billets (assignments/orders) you wanted. I declared either anything ported in Hong Kong or an Aegis Cruiser, of which there were only two at that time: CG-47, at sea, and CG-48, which I believe was in the shipyard, recently fully crewed and gearing up for sea trials before commissioning. Then we found out the orders for our two classes were being cut at the same time as the two classes ahead of us, bringing the total to 160 men. As it turned out, I still had the top score among the 160.

I was assigned to the USS Ticonderoga (CG-47), “First Aegis Cruiser” (AKA Tico), which later was important because whenever we were in a unit with even our future sister ships, we were the senior, most advanced unit in the Navy (and on the face of the Earth), which meant our roles in the Combat Information Center (CIC) rose to command over the entire regional force. So, for instance, of all the units linking data together, we were responsible for the data’s accuracy, coordination, and frequencies —the whole link, the “Big Picture.”

Before leaving OS “A” school, the command met with the three of us scoring highest and offered us “accelerated advancement”: for extending our enlistments by one year, we’d get guaranteed advancement to Third Class Petty Officer (E-4) on time. It was easy to say yes, given I’d just gotten the Tico, literally the most powerful weapon on the face of the Earth. And at 5 years, it would only be 6 months until I'd hit E-6, the fastest possible.

Recall, my goals were to score high, place well, and make rank as rapidly as possible. I’d just hit all three.

Next, I was off to Moorestown, New Jersey, for 5 weeks of Aegis training with officers and even a new division Senior Chief. I don't recall my score, but it was the top score, so I distinguished myself as a Seaman among several senior personnel I'd work with for years. 

Why I Chose Navy Over TSR

As the Blume-Gygax war heated up, my relationship eventually headed for rough waters. Over years, I’d figured out my boyfriend was about 30% gay and 70% straight. We had been close friends who grew as close as you can be. But he came from a large, religious family. I was always wondering why nobody had noticed that such a good-looking guy wasn’t dating women, but the prejudice at the time protected us straight-acting guys, no questions asked.

I wanted to live an openly gay life. And I thought about fighting for my love, but every scenario I ran felt like I’d be creating a pure hell for him. I loved him so much; I couldn’t do that to him. So I tried to distance myself from him gradually, which is very hard in such a small town. I’d merely turned our relationship into sexual encounters instead of spending quality time basking in each other’s presence.

Leaving my lover to a better life than we'd forge together was the deciding factor.

Before choosing the Navy, I thought about college on my GED. I wrote an essay for entry into St. John’s in Santa Fe, toured the college, and discovered the program was a perfect fit. And I learned I could fund it at 30,000+ per year in 1983 dollars. Other students assured me my essay was strong enough to get in, but there was no realistic way to afford it, and I didn’t want a debt the size of a house at 25. That debt would determine what jobs I’d be forced to take. College was out for now.

I grew up a wargamer. I wanted to make sure I saw the world in my youth, not bet I’d be healthy enough to do so at 67, and I wanted a steady paycheck with solid workplace rules and training. And I’d been thinking about the Navy since I won my case to drop out of school before the legal age. A story I’ll later tell in full.

Truth is, growing up as a hippy kid, post-Vietnam, the military was considered an ignorant choice in which you become cannon fodder. So I talked to every Navy veteran I could find. I decided to count on scoring high, placing high, earning rank quickly, and staying in the closet tightly for 4 years, after which I would be an out gay veteran. And that was my Navy experience in a nutshell. I had a very positive experience and bucked the typical intellectual nightmare military story. I had an amazing adventure that was better than I ever imagined.

—-

First of all, the Navy pays more than any other branch and promotes faster than any other branch. So I refused my ex-Marine father’s insistence that I look at the Marines. So I went to the Navy MEPS station in Milwaukee for the entrance exam, interview, and physical.

The night before, I got tremendously drunk, heard “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” by Culture Club for the first time, and took my next morning exam either hungover or still drunk, depending on how you measure. I obtained 97 out of 99 possible points on my ASVAB entry exam, which decides what ratings (jobs) you’re eligible for. I had decided that I was going to be an Operations Specialist (OS) who works in the ship’s brain, the Combat Information Center, advising officers, tracking all contact and intelligence information, releasing weapons, and controlling aircraft. In fact, a typical civilian job an OS might be a shoo-in for would be an Air Traffic Controller. I was in a high-tension rating requiring technical perfection.

Once in boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Station, I was sitting on the deck (floor) waiting for my turn on the indoor track, watching our Company Commander Daniels yelling at a passed-out Seaman to get up off the track and run, when a guy next to me marveled at how high my ASVAB score was on my “hard card” record I had laid on the deck. My fellow Company members started to laugh, and all held up their cards, and they all had perfect 99s. As it turned out, I was one of two OSs in a 40-man boot camp company full of guys going into the Navy's nuclear program. Hell, every night during free time, my bunkmate taught me about complexity theory (AKA chaos theory or fractals) during our 8 weeks, which later got me an A in an honors college class on that topic.

I almost didn't make it out of boot camp. I couldn't make the last running test, which would have been bad for our Company. Even though it was obvious they had banded all of us high-scoring nerds together, knowing our lack of physical progress would put us last in any such competition, there were specific benchmarks a full company had to pass. Navy boot camp is all about not making a small mistake that'll get all of your shipmates killed, and team building, because it takes a crew to keep so much metal afloat. So I took one for the team.

The night before, I had the Company rifleman on watch hit my ankle with a rifle-butt until I was pretty sure it was damaged, and then reported to the base doc the next morning with a chipped bone that gave me enough time to get up to speed and pass. When I reported back to the Company, our Commander told me that, "If all recruits were like you, Shook, we wouldn't need boot camps." High praise indeed.

Of note, before we left boot camp, our sister company lost a member to suicide. Even Navy boot camp is not easy. But for anyone wondering, it's almost all mental fuckery.

---

Next, 16 weeks of OS "A" School in Dam Neck, VA.

On the bus ride into this unfortunately named location, I was reading the signs. Commander Bitchoff and Lt. Commander Dickover ran the base; Petty Officer Derringer ran the shooting range; and I later learned the Commander's receptionist was Mrs. Callbreath. I shit you not. It was one of those surreal days where you ask, "Really?" (A Mr. Ash handed me my mother's cremated remains decades later.)

One reason I picked OS was that I liked the idea of advising leaders, but I've never wanted to lead in the hot seat. Sadly, that's not how rank works!

By the end of our first week, I had distinguished myself with a 100 on the test, and our Company Commander had been through appointing 3 Masters-at-Arms—the guy who maintains Company discipline, assigns duties, and is responsible for order and cleaning. So after the first three didn't work out, he picked me...

Maps and Exit to Navy with Postscript

 I guess I could have quickly released a Greyhawk module to grab some income, but I was more interested in driving Starstrands to dimensionally create a nexus between game systems, broadening the fantasy. And frankly, this should have been a multi-person job. But Gary put out enough modules to keep me in map money.

So I did the maps for Dungeonlands, Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure, and The Maze of Xaene, which never saw print until Rob sold The Maze of Zayene to Necromancer Games.

Mind you, we were all still trading ideas. For instance, Gary incorporated our ideas into Dungeonlands. I came up with a "Hangman Tree" that flailed PCs with bodies when approaching to loot them; Gary kept the name and gave it his twist, and Rob had a hat with a monster living in it, which most likely inspired the Executioner's Hood. And while uncredited, I wrote the Happy Hunting Ground section of Maze of Xaene/Zayene.

I also explained to Gary that any kid with a transparent sheet of red could photocopy a non-photo blue map. That's why we shifted Mordenkainen's map to a darker, non-non-photo blue. And I changed the grid style to separate it from walls and objects. And while curtains had previously been hand-drawn, I drafted them instead. Effectively, I shifted my maps from hand-drawn to clean lines because maps are a tool best served by clear definition. At least, that was my mindset then.

I'll cover why I chose to join the Navy in another post, but in March of '83 I entered the Navy's delayed entry program with an enlistment date of November 3rd. I moved my mother to Tucson to be with her mothers and sisters. And in the meantime, I took a loan from my father and lived with Jeff Leason in Lake Geneva.

During this time, wanting to encourage Rob and Gary to get started on Greyhawk Castle, I began drafting its maps, which Paul Stormberg's Collector's Trove sold decades later.

Postscript

I'd like to add that I've consciously held back on detailing more about the Blume-Gygax war because it still upsets me strongly, and I just haven't been in a rehashing mood.

Money, God Level Play - Tidbits

 Money, Money, Money

Immediately after Rob and I signed the contract to split royalties with Gary, Gary slapped his quarterly royalties check down on our side of his desk and said, "There's money out there in them thar hills!"

The check was for over 257k in 1982 dollars, equivalent to $889,374 in today's dollars.

Our contracts were generous splits of Gary's very high 10% of cover. As I recall, most royalties are given as a % of net or gross. But TSR stopped paying royalties roughly at the advent of Advanced D&D (1e), except to the authors of the OD&D books. For instance, James Ward and Rob Kuntz received about 4% of the cover on the AD&D volume, Deities and Demigods. Ward greatly expanded the OD&D supplement Gods, Demigods, and Heroes, which he and Rob co-authored. So Ward received around 3/4 of the split, IIRC.

Rob's roughly 1% was around 20k, which may have been quarterly or yearly. But at the time, he lived above Brian Blume (TSR VP, author of Boot Hill, and major early investor in TSR) and his wife, who had endured an entire summer of Jane's Bar after-hours parties at Rob's, above them. And Rob thought he was being overpaid those royalties. In his mind, Blume's tolerance and seemingly excessive pay meant they were keeping him fat, dumb, and happy so he wouldn't come forward to testify in Dave Arneson's case vs TSR for royalties as co-creator of OD&D.

I thought this was unlikely since Arneson's lawyers could call him at any time and he'd be forced to testify. And why didn't they call on him? Was it because Rob was still a kid when witnessing those events? And why didn't Blume ever complain? Those parties were raucous, loud, and attended by everyone from millionaires to bikers, hippies, and Playboy bunnies.

Also of note: Rob had sold his OD&D Greyhawk supplement rights to Gary while still underage; otherwise, he would've had royalties from at least all Greyhawk products and possibly a small piece of AD&D. 

Someone once pointed out to Rob that he could go to court to reclaim those rights because he wasn't yet 18 when he signed them over. Rob took no action. In a sense, it would've been like going after one's father. And the egos of Rob and Gary did frequently clash, but that must have been a step too far. Plus, Rob has never chased more money than he needs to live comfortably. It's the hippy side of him.

---

God Level Play

Early in the Greyhawk project, Gary told us he'd received a lot of mail from players who wanted rules for god-level play. And I don't recall his reasoning, but Gary absolutely hated the idea while I loved it! So imagine my surprise when he said the demand was so high that he wanted to get it done. But it was put on the back burner, after the Castle, City, and Starstrands and more. So we'd cogitate about it now and again down at Jane's Bar, while getting soused. Which is probably why I remember almost none of it.

Years later, circa 1990, when Rob had moved to Tucson, where I was living with my mother post-Navy — we were European on the Nelson side about living with family — I DMed Rob at the god level.

The most interesting thing happened. Rob, perhaps one of the boldest adventurers in the history of at least the early game, and certainly for years in mine, became so cautious that one could say he was being timid. His character sheet read like a wishlist of almighty powers. This indicated, since he was a demigod, that all the other major and some minor gods in his pantheon were even more awesome in power than he. And very accurately, Rob understood the real game was entirely social at that level, and played accordingly. Every god could pretty much nuke another god on some crippling level, or they simply wouldn't be Gods.

Gary's First Assignment for Me

The Greyhawk Project - Module #1

In our first meeting between Gary, Rob, and me at his Sheridan Springs Road office, I pointed out that a recent module had all the interior art placed in the top half of the module for no functional reason. As the conversation evolved, Gary pointed out that it took 6-9 months to get a module from writing to print.

Frankly, at that rate, how long would it take to publish 100 levels of Greyhawk Castle and Greyhawk City--also a large endeavor... Gary then asked me to effectively project-manage our first project through the process. We didn't even know what project management was at the time. But had I known, I would have credited myself as such during layout.

Rob approved of Gary's use of Robert's Tharizdun... I don't recall Rob's spelling, but I believe it was different. And Gary wrote The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun (WG4) over the weekend (Sat/Sun). In fact, I would suggest the module's writing gained much of its coldness from the stimulants required for that form of imaginative jaunt.

Gary gave me the manuscript to edit. I apparently was changing too much, so we had his secretary, Andrea Olson-Barnas, "edit" it. Of course, now we all know Gary was famous for refusing to be more than proofread. At the time, I had no reason to suspect that. Friendship delivers much different messages than working together.

Having read the manuscript. I suggested we use my mother for all the art so we could place an impassive, psychologically insidious scene on the cover, skipping the tradition of putting an action scene on it. Gary liked the idea. So Gary, my mother (Karen Ann Nelson), and I met to discuss the design and agreed that the quickest approach would be watercolor; then we picked the cover color.

Some people online have said the color we chose was "haunting," "sickly," or "uneasy," and they're absolutely right. That's exactly what we were going for.

Gary was happy to both play with and push the boundaries of D&D. I think he enjoyed once again being directly part of what is essentially the product's wrapping, matching the look to the feel.

We took about an hour picking the color, going through hundreds of color swatches until we found the one that worked. And how did it? As a form of purple, it's related to royalty. It's a cool color; it is somewhat impassive, sickly, of course. We later matched it to the cover's void-faced, stone statuary and somewhat ambiguous background. More uncertainty. How else should one begin the entropic approach to the Ender of Everything? Tell me which fight should have been depicted instead that would do the appropriate work? Ring the right bells?

Fact is, the cover is a tell when you think about it. There's something mysterious about this one. Something different. Search for it. Find it.

My mother was done in a few days. I completed all the maps in a week. Going into a trance state, inking 2'x3' vellum maps always felt good. I was paid $150/page, as shown in the contracts sold at auction by Paul Stormberg's Collector's Trove.

Next stop: pre-press, where I worked directly with Ruth Hodges—my mother's college friend, whom David Sutherland had hired. It was very good that I was down there with her because not everything fit in the 32 pages we were given.

Luckily, I remembered a piece of paper hanging at someone's desk in the Production Department area that listed the pricing for every eight more pages and the price for a second "cover," which would be cheaper and more convenient since we only needed room for 4 pages of maps. So I called Gary at home at about 8 or 9 PM, described the situation, and he authorized the double cover.

That's how we went from writing to ready for printing in 2 weeks, not 6+ months. Proof-of-concept complete. Greyhawk had a green light all the way.

There was one minor problem. Upon printing, the interior art came out dark. Reason? Ruth simply hadn't known to shift the gamma for capturing art done in graphite. But I was just now looking at my pristine copy (probably a knock-off I paid way too much for!), and I find the darkened features of the drawings have a kind of charm that somehow fits the module's darkness.

In any case, Gary remunerated me by forgiving an earlier advance.

A couple of side notes:

- Ruth Hodges later married historical wargamer and maybe the 2nd or 3rd employee of the RPGA, Bill Hoyer.

- In one of those trance states, working on the maps, I stuck the full blade of an Exacto knife horizontally beneath the skin of my left hand's lower left mound, beneath the thumb, and it just hung there, over the work, not bleeding... so it did bleed a little when pulled it out, but after some wound care I went right back to work.  But first I got stoned.

HEY! It was still the 70's until 1983, OK?  Everybody knows how decades actually work.

As I worked, I heard a small voice behind me whispering my last name over and over, "Shook... Shook.." With a shrill quiver running up my back, I spun around, and from my slightly opened bedroom door, two little red eyes stared out at me. I stepped backward into my table, then froze in utter fear before realizing the two red eyes were the "ON" and "FM" indicators on my radio, and the "Shook... Shook" was the "shock... shock.." Peter Gabriel sings in "Shock the Monkey, which was charting that year, in 1982.

Question: Why was I using an Exacto blade?

To key the locations on the maps alphanumerically, back then I needed Pre-press to print them all out, then apply beeswax to the back of the sheets so I could cut out the letters, level them, and stick them to the vellum.

An Introduction to my TSR Experience - Roaming Around Stories Yet to Be Fleshed Out

During my teen years, when I wasn't trading adventures with Kuntz and others, I hung out at the Dungeon Hobby Shop. A couple of my childhood friends worked there, namely Tim Jiardini, Neal Christensen, and Jeff Leason. At night, I bussed tables at the Playboy Club, where I raked in the tips.

Much later, fast-forwarding to the Greyhawk Project, after Rob suggested I'd be a good addition to the team, Gary and his bodyguard, Jim Johnson(?), had brunch in the Playboy Club Living Room with me as a formality. All the bunnies kept coming over to say hi to me and chat a bit. All the bunnies liked me. I was gay, so I was even made privy to all their "girl talk," and I'd also been a faultless busser for all of them at one time or another. Gary loved being introduced to them all. And then, at after-bar-hours parties, some would come through he hadn't met yet, and a couple, being so close to Chicago, had been in spreads in the magazine.

That all the bunnies liked me, and knowing me to be judgment-free on the issues of sex and love, welded me to Gary as someone he could tell about his experiences in his second childhood. But it is at this point that I say nothing more on that topic, as it was all clearly spoken of in utter confidence.

I really knew two Garys: the famous game designer, and my neighbor whose divorce from Mary I've secretly never approved of. But I will finish on this topic by stating unequivocably that Gary's second childhood was a great success and that nobody was ever damaged by it if we ignore the divorce.

I'll come back to my gaming days with Kuntz in future posts, as I knew Rob like a brother and I naturally have a lot to say about him. But for now I should paint his status at TSR.

Gary was like the father Rob never had, and there was father-son ego-driven strife between them. Rob's player character in Greyhawk had been the solo adventuring, lawful-evil Robilar, and this matched how most at TSR would characterize him: as a rogue to be wary of! Of note: most nerds and geeks at TSR would consider themselves lawful good, and for the record, I'm a pragmatic realist, so I tend toward lawful neutral.

Rob was an unparalleled and unconventional tactician and strategist in nearly any wargame. As a teen, he and his brother, Terry, routinely crushed adult opponents from all the major Midwest cities in Napoleonic wargames. Rob could venture down 10 dungeon levels and come right back out, never mapping. And, of course, Rob had been Gary's co-DM of Greyhawk. Gary clearly admired Rob's intellect.

The Production Department did not like him. Period. Also, Gary bringing me in was kind of an insult to them, since I was a high school dropout. (I'll explain this escapade in a future post.) In their eyes, I was so unqualified that I reminded them of my friend, Jean Wells. Gary had liked her ideas and hired her. She should have been further trained or groomed, but TSR lacked the capacity to train anyone. Worse still, our contract split royalties with Gary, a highly coveted position to be in.

My first Greyhawk assignment was to turn Stephen Marsh's 6-page description of Starstrands into a semi-plane resource book. I suggested we use its web structure to dimensionally connect its radial strands to all the other TSR RPG system worlds, and a few other places. Boot Hill gating in from one, instituting a kingdom derived from its values, Gamma World from another, Nazis from Earth on another, and so on.

Gary loved the idea, but it was going to take some doing, so Gary came up with the idea of hiring me at TSR, half-time in the Hobby Shop Shipping department, half-time in the RPGA.

But there were two factions at TSR: The Gygax faction and the nepotistic Blume faction. Everyone in the company knew of and was forcibly part of this growing division that would push Gary out long after I grew frustrated and entered the Navy.

The Blumes issued a new rule: employees could no longer wear beards. Frank Mentzer looked funny without one. But their next rule, issued while Gary was in Hollywood working on the D&D cartoon, was that any work created off-hours by any TSR employee would belong to TSR.

I was the fifth RPGA employee, but this basically eliminated me. For several weeks, I started taking long lunches at Jane's Bar. I immediately held back at least 3/4s of my ideas going into Eye of the Bog, and never finished it.

Then Rob and I were asked to a meeting with Harold Johnson, where Rob mentioned our plans for Starstrands, and when Harold asked how we planned to pull that off, I quickly said no work had taken place yet, divorcing TSR from any claim to owning Starstrands.

I did happen to stay after hours and rearrange all of shipping, setting it up the way the girls had always wanted. But a manager took credit for it right in front of my face.

So there's the outline of my challenges working with TSR, setting the stage for how I would do things.

Oh! And my mother's college friend who graduated top of her class but had spent 3 months trying to get employed but couldn't get hired- I brought her in to show Dave Sutherland her portfolio, and he hired her on the spot. This proved fortuitous for me in the future war.

From here on out, I'll be fleshing out all the specifics.

A Gary Gygax Story

Sometime in 82, I had come into the corporate office of TSR on Silver Springs during the Greyhawk Project, but I'd made a bet that my soles were tough enough to walk Lake Geneva without shoes the whole summer, including through our bar alleys (big resort town) covered with bottle glass shards. So I was barefoot at the receptionist, who refused to let me in for that reason, so I asked her to call Gary and waited while I watched a sad exchange between her, two concerned parents, and a young D&D fan.

This boy's parents had driven 300 miles off their summer vacation route so Jr. could meet Gary. But Gary had "important" meetings scheduled and couldn't come out. They stood there, saddened, discussing in hushed tones what to do while the receptionist ushered me in (sans shoes, corporate? Pffffft!)

Luckily, Gary's office had a private, windowed parking-lot entrance, so when I entered his office, I could point out the downtrodden family walking slowly to their car.

Gary, surprised, leaped out of his chair and ran out there, finger up, "Ho there!"

I will never forget all the emotions. The relief on the parents' faces, their sudden upright postures, and the kid, stunned by Gary's presence, beaming from side to side!

Every time I tell this story, I tear up just a little.

It was beautiful, and it said everything about Gary as just a guy.

He would do anything for a fan. These were his people, and he was grateful for having them, and he understood who he would be without them.

Years later, at the brokerage, I gained top honors in customer service because just watching Gary's kindness that day told me everything I needed to know about real, lasting customer service. Service to one's fellow beings who could just as well be you. I went on to teach customer service using this story to open every class, and because of that, I was promoted to sole tech trainer for the entire 2800-person firm.

How many of us gamers owe our jobs and careers to Gary's impetus? 

I thanked Gary at a Lake Geneva convention hosted by Troll Lords somewhat before he passed, and the last time I conversed with him.

Our/Kuntz's Gaming Group

In the summer before 7th grade, in '76, my mother and I moved from 1003 Main, across the street from Library Park, to 1008 Wisconsin St., kitty-corner from the Jr. High. [Of note: Library Park is where the masterful hand of Paul Stormberg is overseeing the installation of the Gary Gygax memorial granite gaming table at the moment.]

On the Madison Street side of the building at 1003 Wisconsin, Rob Kuntz lived with his mother. One afternoon, I was out studying the ant mounds in the cracks of our sidewalk for a science project, and Robert, from his front porch, invited me up to game. But because of how we met, for a long time I was nicknamed "The Lurker." LOL (It was better than my next nickname, "Princer," but that's another story, and embarrassing, but, hey, I was only 13.)

Rob was still DMing Greyhawk, and I recall initially playing a very incompetent thief who was hanged for killing a nobleman. I also played Gothmog, the second Nazgul in Rob's Tokein campaign. We played everything from Tractics (Gary Gygax's pre-D&D tank/miniatures rules) to Napoleonic miniatures, chainmail battles, and naval miniatures.

The cast of characters in the Kuntz gaming group was all patently eccentric.

The Goodfellow brothers, Joe, the older, and James, whom I later also knew from the high school debate club. In fact, James Goodfellow and Skip Williams, co-author of the 3rd edition of D&D, took 3rd in state debate as a team. Jimmy went on to graduate from Cambridge and Yale, where he was on the Law Review, and later practiced law in San Francisco, where he came out as gay. He's since passed. Just imagine a very collegiate, herringbone-attired eccentric waggling his pipe at you, who WILL debate anything, but who also parties quite hard, holding his own easily. I'll likely tell a few Jimmy-Robert stories and post his pic when I find it.

Tom Christensen was in my class and obviously gay, but he went on in life to become the top expert on the Perl programming language and has published several books on the topic. His college professor had something to do with inventing Perl. He was my 7th or 8th-grade science partner, and he began our dissection of a frog by heating the scalpel on the Bunsen burner and then burning the blade into my wrist while my attention was elsewhere. We were competitors since we were both considered the brightest guys from our separate grade schools. But I wasn't about that. Tom was smarter than I was, without a doubt, in science and math. But I had him on social skills, street smarts, breadth of experience, travel — and all the soft skills.

Joe Fisher, AKA "Fiiish," occasionally gamed with us. Joe created the D&D Ranger class. He argued it wasn't just Tolkien's Aragorn he'd taken it from, and to prove it, he had developed several variants drawn from diverse sources long before sub-classes were introduced into the game. Joe was known for wearing a well-worn, wide-rimmed leather hat.

I actually met Terry Kuntz before Rob when he was tending the 1st location of the Dungeon Hobby Shop @ 723 Williams St. (Recently the site of the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum debacle. (More to say on that in a future post or two.) Terry taught me a Roman gladiator miniature battle game, which we played right at the counter. Remarkably, Terry is more eccentric than his brother.

Bob Burman... Always trouble. An eccentric, too. I remember him wearing a caftan like he was a backup musician for Cat Stevens (it was the 70's). He rolled a VW Bug off the highway, got thrown from the car, and it rolled over him in a snowbank, and he walked away unharmed. In a WWII campaign Kuntz ran, Bob "Burmania" Berman sent all his subs into a Japanese port, where being in shallow water eliminated them all. Anyhow, the dumbest among us--I was probably batting for second, but look at the guys in the room with me. (You can just search for "Kuntz and Burmania" and find Rob's numerous online stories about Bob.)

Tom Champney sometimes came by for miniature battles, a later manager of the Dungeon Hobby Shop when it moved to Broad and Main's SE corner. Tom was one of those fellows who would call you over, "Hey. Hey, Shhhh!" (Quietly signaling with his hands) "Come here." And then he'd say something crazy funny in your ear, like, "Don't drink the water; fish fuck in it!" He could make a person chuckle all day long. Unfortunately, Tom took his life when his game company later failed, and I was coincidentally on leave (USN) playing pool in the UW Whitewater student union with Neal Christensen and Rob Kuntz when we found out. That was a hard day.

There was a broader cast of characters coming through, but because I'm recovering from an accidental withdrawal from misordered, prescribed medication, I'm still disoriented and will have failed to mention several other players; I'll just post them later. But one of them who popped in from afar was Mark Ratner, co-author of Space Opera (Fantasy Games Unlimited, also publisher of the influential Chivalry and Sorcery FRPG rules, a fave of mine).

Ratner was a bit more reserved than the rest of us eccentrics but loved visiting. He was more sci-fi when I met him. And while his intellectual, science officer demeanor might fool you, once playing, the eccentricity was apparent.

My point is that our group of eccentrics was somewhat diverse: we had a wonderful, unpredictable energy at the dawn of D&D, and our group included published game authors who gave us industry inroads to influence rulesets. So we were all highly opinionated rules lawyers.