Kuntz
When I was 13, I did an extra-credit science project on ant behavior. I spent a lot of time watching the sidewalk ant mounds around our apartment and eventually met Rob on his porch in the apartment in front. ... After that, Rob nicknamed me "lurker." I spent days studying the ants.
I quickly joined Rob's gaming group and took my first adventures in Greyhawk, Boot Hill, Tractics, naval miniatures, Diplomacy, and a host of other games, including Rob's Tolkien campaign, where I played Gothmog, the second Nazgûl, and stupidly sent armored orcs into... what's the Elven forest? Lothlorien maybe? I no longer recall, but I had no idea what I was doing at first. The Goodfellow brothers and Kuntz had a huge laugh ragging me on about it... I think even Joe "Fish" Fischer (creator of the Ranger class) razzed me for it.
Our group included some of the highest academic achievers in our high school: Jimmy Goodfellow and Tom Christenson, as well as older gamers from town like Tom Champney (RIP) and visiting game designers like Mark Ratner of (ICE's) Space Opera fame. But I spent the Summer in Tucson, and when I returned, the group had disbanded.
When I turned 15, my friend Tim Jiardini told me Rob had moved across the school park to live above Brian Blume (of TSR VP and Boot Hill fame). We started gaming with Rob again. Eventually, Jimmy Goodfellow joined us whenever he was on leave from whichever Ivy League school he was excelling at. I believe he went from Yale to Oxford.
--- A little backstory---
Another development in between: I was taken to court to be taken away from my mother for truancy (I attended less than half of my Freshman year school days). I was bored, tired of correcting my teachers, who taught from textbooks that were 5 years old the day they were printed, while I read many more current periodicals and books. I lived in the public library, so for every new topic, I researched beyond our textbooks. I also researched the Wisconsin Statutes on my truancy case.
When the Juvi DA told me to sign the consent decree and swear I would attend, I remarked that in a binding contract, both parties must benefit. He replied, "I'm getting an education." I replied, "I'm not." He had to fill in that I was due an appropriate education—I don't recall the exact wording. But I then found a psychotherapist who gave me an IQ test to prove I was a gifted student. And then I got lucky. The presiding juvi court judge died of a heart attack, and the regular judge filling in hated the Juvi DA.
So the juvi DA presented me as a juvenile delinquent, but I had no such record. This did reduce my mother to tears, though. He sounded absolutely threatening and absolutely sure of himself. Next, my lawyer had me present my architectural drafting to the judge as an example of my work, during which the JDA went over to my mother and apologized.
The judge quickly determined that the closest alternative education option for a gifted student was too far away and granted me the right to drop out of high school at 14. The JDA had also questioned whether it was responsible for a single mother to be studying art, so upon granting my freedom, the judge told a story. He'd sent a guy to prison who rehabilitated through an art program and sent the judge a piece that was now worth $20,000 since the guy became in demand in the Chicago art scene.
One man's fatal heart attack is another man's luck.
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So I had all the free time I wasn't giving to my boyfriend from 15-21, or to work, to game and party with Kuntz, who was living off royalties from Dieties and Demigods. We traded adventures continuously. I have no idea how many thousands of hours I've gamed with Kuntz over the years, but it was much more play than many of us ever accumulate.
I was also a night owl, so when Rob and half of Jane's Bar came to the after-bar-hours party at his house, I'd come over. I'd been partying since 13, which wasn't atypical in our ultra-rich resort town in the 70s. A lot of us were hippies at our core. So nobody from Jane's ever said, "Wait! What's this kid doing here?" So when I turned 17, they all thought I'd turned 18, the legal drinking age at that time. That let me become a regular at Jane's Bar at 17. Yes, I was breaking the law and kept my mouth shut. But I was never carded in a WI bar until I was in Madison post-Navy, and the drinking age had been upped to 21.
Apart from gaming, my friendship with Kuntz was founded upon mutual respect. We both loved to party and play pool. We could both hold our liquor and had sharp wits; I could talk my way out of fights, with a very strong track record (I have failed twice, but those are other stories), and Rob's dexterity was shockingly fast. He could end a fight quickly, if not suddenly. Between us, we could play pool all night at a rough bar and feel entirely safe.
An example of the type of game Rob and I would play at his house parties: We'd bump into each other in the hallway where you could clearly hear people conversing in the kitchen, front room, and living room, and then we'd have a conversation with each other composed of and incorporating the subjects of and tidbits from all these conversations. I was used to multitasking in the Navy, but Rob always took a humorous approach, which enthused me to get quite clever, and we'd go for quite some time before devolving into laughter.
Rob was also a master tactician. As kids, he and his brother, Terry, would frequently defeat armies of adult Napoleonic players. That's why Gary respected Rob's gaming/combat prowess. He was masterful at tactics, among other things, like never mapping yet finding his way back out of a deep Greyhawk Castle level from memory.
As for Rob's well-known habit of occasionally lying, my father was a much better liar than Rob, and I got along with him by learning to ignore his bullshit. As a result, I'm both pretty good at detecting lies while also being inured to them. And frankly, growing up, it became clear that lying among humans is a social sport. Hell, I could get half my high school teachers and administrators to lie to me within minutes of an encounter.
That is why I'll invite anyone who doubts my military record to contact my fellow Operations Specialists on my Facebook friends list to verify my claims. (Loren Miller, Bill Kunz, and Michael Giglio would all happily give me a veracity reference, and I'll eventually post my discharge and the evals that escaped the flood a few years back.) I invite this level of scrutiny because I'm going to make some claims about Gary and Rob that will require you to ask yourself whether I'm a credible source. And I want to make it clear that I am committed to accuracy and open to correction.
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I'm going to recount some of my 33 years of close friendship with Rob, with occasional interruptions from stories about Gary, the Navy, IT work, bipolar disorder, and so on. My best suggestion is to use the subject tags on the right to navigate.
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But let's step back to Rob living above Brian Blume... We spent an entire summer having raucous after-bar-hour parties, and Brian never complained once! Rob told me he believed his royalties were being significantly boosted, and Blume was quiet because "they" didn't want him to testify in the lawsuit crediting D&D to Arneson and/or Gygax. So Rob has written positively about Arneson now, but he was certainly in the Gygax camp circa the Greyhawk Project (1978-1983) and didn't come to Arneson's aid.
Second, why couldn't Arneson's team subpoena him if they had chosen to? So Rob's suspicions were unfounded, except to show where he was positioning himself.
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Also, I've been told Rob is now a bigot by a couple of sources, but I'd like to be clear: had he ever acted as such in front of me, he would've never gotten away with it. So if this is now true, he either hid it well for 33 years, or something about his mental state has shifted. And believe me, growing up with a mother who co-founded our county's National Organization for Women (where she met Rose Estes, IIRC), and being gay, I pick up on even subtle bigotry quite well.
