Gary Gygax

Biography

Gary Gygax was born in Chicago, the son of Almina Emelie "Posey" (Burdick) and Swiss immigrant and former Chicago Symphony Orchestra violinist Ernst Gygax. He was named Ernest after his father, but he was commonly known as Gary, the middle name given to him by his mother after the actor Gary Cooper.[8]:16 The family lived on Kenmore Avenue, close enough to Wrigley Field[9] that he could hear the roar of the crowds watching the Chicago Cubs play.[8]:15 At age 7, he became a member of a small group of friends who called themselves the "Kenmore Pirates". In 1946, after the Kenmore Pirates were involved in a fracas with another gang of boys,[10] his father decided to move the family to Posey's family home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin,where Posey's family had settled in the early 19th century, and where Gary's grandparents still lived. In this new setting, Gygax soon made friends with several of his peers, including Don Kaye and tomboy Mary Jo Powell. During his childhood and teen years, he developed a love of games and an appreciation for fantasy and science fiction literature. When he was five, he played card games such as pinochle and then board games such as chess. At the age of ten, he and his friends played the sort of make-believe games that eventually came to be called "live action role-playing games" with one of them acting as a referee. His father introduced him to science fiction and fantasy through pulp novels. His interest in games, combined with an appreciation of history, eventually led Gygax to begin playing miniature war games in 1953 with his best friend Don Kaye.[15] As teenagers Gygax and Kaye designed their own miniatures rules for toy soldiers with a large collection of 54 mm and 70 mm figures, where they used "ladyfingers" (small firecrackers) to simulate explosions. By the time he reached his teens, Gygax had a voracious appetite for pulp fiction authors such as Robert Howard, Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, H. P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Burroughs.Gygax was a mediocre student, and in 1956, a few months after his father died, he dropped out of high school in his junior year.[8]:43 He briefly joined the Marines, but after being diagnosed with walking pneumonia, he was given a medical discharge and moved back home with his mother.[8]:49 From there, he commuted to a job as shipping clerk with Kemper Insurance Co. in Chicago. Shortly after his return, a friend introduced him to Avalon Hill's new wargame Gettysburg, and Gygax was soon obsessed with the game, often playing marathon sessions once a week or more.[18] It was also from Avalon Hill that he ordered the first blank hexagon mapping sheets that were available, which he then employed to design his own games. At about the same time that he discovered Gettysburg, his mother re-introduced him to Mary Jo Powell, who had left Lake Geneva as a child and had just returned. Gygax was smitten with the beautiful young woman, and after a short courtship, persuaded her to marry him, despite the fact that he was only 19. This caused some friction with his best friend Don Kaye, who had also been wooing Mary Jo, to the point where Kaye refused to attend Gygax's wedding(Kaye and Gygax reconciled after the wedding.) The young couple moved to Chicago where Gygax continued as a shipping clerk at Kemper Insurance, and also found Mary Jo a job there too. (The company laid her off when she became pregnant with their first child.) [8]:53 At Mary Jo's insistence, he also attended night classes in junior college to earn his high school diploma, and this time he excelled at his studies and made the college's Dean's List.[13] He also took anthropology classes at the University of Chicago.[6][7] Gygax also volunteered as a Republican precinct captain during the 1960 presidential election, and observed many infractions by his Democratic counterpart. When he threatened to report these, he was offered a full scholarship to the University of Chicago if he kept silent. Although Gygax ultimately did not report the infractions, since he felt nothing would be done, he also did not accept the scholarship. Despite his commitments to his job, raising a family, school, and his political volunteerism, Gygax continued to play wargames. It reached the point that Mary Jo, pregnant with their second child, believed he was having an affair and confronted him in a friend's basement only to discover him and his friends sitting around a map-covered table. In 1962, Gygax got a job as an insurance underwriter at Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. His family continued to grow, and after his third child was born, he decided to move his family back to Lake Geneva.Except for a few months he would spend in Clinton, Wisconsin,[20] following his divorce, and his time in Hollywood while he was the head of TSR's entertainment division, Lake Geneva would be his home for the rest of his life. By 1966, Gygax was active in the wargame hobby world and was writing many magazine articles on the subject. Gygax learned about H. G. Wells' Little Wars book for play of military miniatures wargames and Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame book. Gygax later looked for innovative ways to generate random numbers, and he used not only common, six-sided dice, but dice of all five Platonic solid shapes, which he discovered in a school supply catalog.

Research Interest

Business