Amusements and miscellaneous
Section 1. War gaming
My brother Ned and I have always been keen on playing war games and studying military history. World War II was our first focus, but later our interests expanded into other eras, especially that of the Napoleonic Wars. We used to watch all the war movies and TV shows we could (heck, even McHale’s Navy), although our absolute favorite was ABC’s Combat! Our gaming probably started with the 3” tall green plastic WWII toy soldiers like those in the movie Toy Story. But we’d also play war in our back yard, using guns my Dad fashioned out of a piece of 1×4” piece of wood, roughly in the shape of a rifle. At the front end of the “barrel”, he’d place a finish nail that stuck out ½”, and then nail a wooden spring clothespin about 2/3 the way down the top of the gun. Our ammo was elongated rubber bands made by looping together six to eight “rings” cut from an old bike tire. We’d load the gun by looping one end of the band to the nail, and held the other end in the jaw of the closed clothespin. When we wanted to fire, we’d simply press down on the free handle of the clothespin, releasing the rubber band, which could travel many yards. Very ingenious and way safer than BB guns or any other projectile we might have tried.
Dad brought home a lot of excess material from work, and used those to erect a couple of structures in our back yard, in and on which we used in play. In one case, he dug a trench and piled some cement cinder blocks to the front, leaving one or two gaps for firing out of: voila, an instant bunker. But even better was the “fort” my Dad built (Fig. 7.1.1). It was about 12’ wide, 8’ deep and 6’ high. There was a hinged door and two permanently open windows in front, as well as a window on the right side with a closeable, hinged panel. A series of two foot long 2x4s nailed into the interior back wall provided a ladder up to the flat roof through a hinged trap door. The front of the roof had a 2×12” barrier, while the back and left side had plywood barriers about 3’ high. The right side of the roof had no barrier, so we could easily get to the roof by climbing up the neighboring black walnut tree.
One of the games we played was “sniper and sniper hunter”. The sniper hid somewhere in our backyard (which was quite extensive and offered a wide variety of hiding spaces – we could even climb up the outside of a chimney to hide on the roof of our house), while the other counted to 100 in the front yard and then carefully ventured into the backyard, looking for the other. In the summer we’d even play at night, substituting flashlights for our rubber band guns.
Starting when I was in junior high (and continuing into and well beyond high school), we began playing board games, and my brother and I were regularly joined by Doug Berger (LGHS class of 1969), Randy Elder (1970) and Kurt Teubner (class of 1970, although he attended Bellarmine) – all of whom lived within a block of each other on the other side of the San Jose-Los Gatos Road from us. Once in a while, we were also joined by Jim Hill and I think Mike Rennie (both 1970) and Malcolm Gordon (1969).
Our first foray into board games were those put out by American Heritage/Milton Bradley (Dogfight [Fig. 7.1.2], Civil War, Broadside), and Ideal (Combat! – “Based on the ABC television network show!” [Fig. 7.1.3]), but these were all simplified games with minimal historic realism. A more cerebral game was Diplomacy, published by Games Research: this was set in 1901 Europe, and designed for five to seven players, who represented the countries of Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austro-Hungary, Turkey and Russia. The thing that set this game apart was that military actions were a minor part of the game – instead the main focus was to have players talk and deal with one another (usually in secret), making alliances and such. But there was no rule that kept one from breaking those deals – one could double cross one’s ally at any time, if they got a better deal from another player. In one game, a couple of us forged a fake deal between two other players, describing how they intended to turn on a third player, their ally. We made sure that third player found the forgery, and sure enough he double crossed them first, which is what we were looking for. What a delicious game!
But the bulk of our recreational time was initially devoted to those board games put out by Avalon Hill. Military units were represented by cardboard pieces that could be moved on a hexagonal grid overlaying a map. Titles in this series included Tactics II, Africa Corps, Battle of the Bulge, U-boat, Waterloo and Jutland (Fig. 7.1.4), as well as some non-military games as well, like Verdict II (one person plays the prosecutor, the other the defense lawyer), Shakespeare (points awarded by recognizing which quotes belonged to which plays) and Le Mans (a racing game for Formula One cars).
For this last game, we had four players (Ned, Kurt, Randy and I) each managing a team of four drivers, thus giving us 16 contestants per each race. We stopped playing as a group in the 1970’s or 80’s, but Ned discovered a set of solitaire rules in 2008, which allowed him to run additional seasons later, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown, when he included myself and Allen Rudolph (also class of 1969 and a retired LGHS teacher), to provide additional drivers. We began with just the two race tracks provided in the original game (Fig. 7.1.5), but later Ned added other tracks from the Grand Prix circuit, Monza in Italy, Brands Hatch in England, Watkins Glen in USA, Hermanos Rodriguez (Fig. 7.1.6) in Mexico, to name a few; Ned also constructed additional race cars out of toothpicks (Fig. 7.1.7). Ultimately he would run up to 16 races per season, culminating with a season champion. During a race, if a car crashed or was involved in a collision, the driver might get injured or killed (determined by a roll of the dice). If that happened, then the team would hire on a new driver, so we would always had the same number of drivers at the beginning of a race. As I write this, 33 seasons have been run, with over 150 drivers.
In my opinion, this game wasn’t inherently as interesting as the others we played. HOWEVER, for me the fun was making up names, both for our racing teams as well as our stable of drivers (bear in mind that we started this while in high school, so some of the names were undoubtedly a bit sophomoric). Kurt named his squad the “Koenigsburg Underground Racing Team”, while Randy opted for the TTPC (Tijuana Taxi [something beginning with a “P”] Company). Ned’s team was the Podunk Motoring Company, Allen’s was the Rudolph Racing Corporation, while I chose Blascke Bums – “Blascke” being a name Mr. McCloskey (my LGHS civics teacher) used when referring to some random person. Our inspiration for choosing names for our drivers drew upon a wide variety of sources. A few names had direct reference to cars, driving or racing: on my team I had Joe Cerrito (a local mobster who owned a car dealership in Los Gatos) and that master TV car salesman, Ralph Williams, while Hans Brinker, Stu DeBacquerre and Scotty McMacmac (originally the mechanic for the PMC) were also on the circuit, as well as Manny Fold, Ray Diayteur, and Moe Tormont. There were a smattering of names of real folks, including Jacques Cousteau, Tokyo Rose, Kenji Sibuya (a “bad guy” TV wrestler from the 1960s), the body builder Vic Tanney [sic, as I later discovered the proper spelling has no “e”], Harry von Zell (from the Burns & Allen show) and Ish Kabibble. One of my first drivers was Papa Joe Greasadick (a phonetic spelling of a name I heard on a TV beer ad – turns out the name was actually spelt “Griesedieck”). Other drivers we drafted derived from the world of advertisements, like Chef Boyardee, Nicholas H. Janopoporopolus (United California Bank), and Prince Matchabelli. There were also two non-celebrity real names: once when Randy was stumped for a name, he resorted to picking one at random from the Los Gatos white pages – hence Leonard Van Zant’s appearance. And for some reason I never was able to fathom, Ned added to his stable of drivers the name of a neighborhood kid, Tim Tkach. A number of drivers arose from geographic and other word play, including Sidney Australia, Mason Dixon, Al Hambra (the hometown of Ned’s wife), Jerry Mander, Pete Moss, Chick Magnet, and a couple of my favorites: Norman Conquest and Cal Vinism. But the bulk of our drivers’ names were derived from fictional characters. Thus, Ned’s team included Moe (Mente), Larry (LaFong), and Curley (Calhoun), while I employed the Katzenjammer twins; Allen took on Juan Dunbar, a character from a 1960’s Spanish language textbook, El Camino Real. The influence of a now well known British sketch group can be seen (Bolton Notlob, Harry “Snapper” Organs, Monty Python), while other TV shows supplied even more names, including Beaver Cleaver & Eddie Haskell (Leave it to Beaver), Dobie Gillis & Maynard G. Krebs (The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis), Furd Burfle & some of the Farkles (Laugh In), Duane Doberman, Dino Paparelli, and many others from The Phil Silvers Show, while Jay Ward characters were especially well represented (including Babyface Braunschweiger, Ponsonby Britt, Gidney N. Cloyd, Capt. E. Eddie Edwards, C. Shakey Maxwell, Candlestick Parker & even Jay Ward himself). The complete list of drivers names are listed in Appendix G.
About the time Ned started college at San Jose State, our board games were superseded by miniature figures, and eventually our sights coalesced upon the Napoleonic era. We were always hungry for historical data with which to improve our games. This of course was years before the internet was established. I remember what a revelation it was when Ned told me about the reference collection at the library at San Jose State: I spend a lot of time in the stacks there trying to track down historical sources (back then “research” wasn’t just spending two minutes scanning Wikipedia).
We also learned about Fred Vietmeyer from the Midwest. He wrote Column, Line & Square, which was a great introductory rule set for Napoleonic era war gaming, and he put out a little pamphlet diagramming how each of the five major powers (France, Britain, Prussia, Austro-Hungary and Russia) of the era organized their infantry and cavalry units. This proved a godsend to us, as we finally had a decent set of rules plus a practical system to use to organize our forces. Using this knowledge, we’d mount our figures on balsa wood bases (Fig. 7.1.8), using one base per company, with 4-10 companies per battalion, depending upon the nation, with a ratio of 1 figure = 20 historical men. On the bottom of the bases of my units, I noted the unit and company, allowing me to properly keep the units together (Fig. 7.1.9). In battle, battalions would adopt one of three formations: a column (for general marching or charging a position), a line (for maximum fire power), or a square (for defense against cavalry charges) (Fig. 7.1.10) – which we could represent by rearranging the companies on their individual bases (in college, a fellow student once chastised me for using balsa wood for our bases, complaining that the practice drove up the cost of balsa wood, affecting people like him who used it for making RC aircraft). Ned also subscribed to a mess of war gaming newsletters, Wargamer’s Newsletter, The Avalon Hill General, Strategy & Tactics, Potomac Wargamers’ Review, The Nugget, The Courier, The Armchair General, Midwest Wargamers Association Newsletter, and Empire, Eagles & Lions, and he corresponded with many of the luminaries of war gaming back then (including Paddy Griffith, George Jeffrey and Dick Bryant) which helped us to further improve our play. Eventually, he even developed his own set of Napoleonic era rules, published as Vive L’Empereur (Fig. 7.1.11). I too tried to develop a game, based on the WWII naval action of the British hunting for the German surface raider Admiral Graf Spee, but it never amounted to anything.
In our games, movement was largely based on terrain and the type of unit involved (infantry, cavalry, artillery), while combat and morale results were determined by the throw of dice. We started with regular 6-sided dice, which worked OK. But then Ned found some 20-sided dice in a mathematic educational supply store, which turned out fantastic, since using a pair of them allowed us to determine results from 1% to 100% at 1% increments, allowing us to fine tune our odds tables much better.
Our first miniature figures (1/72 scale, about an inch tall) were inexpensive plastic sets made by Airfix. I remember buying some from a drug store in the shopping center where the Whole Foods Market on Los Gatos Boulevard is now. We even began to paint them according to the historical period involved, but unfortunately paint doesn’t stick to (flexible) plastic figures very long, even after we tried soaking them in vinegar first (I’ll always remember the smell – phew!). But then we transitioned to lead figures. Several companies made them – we bought some from Minifigs, but most of our stuff came from another company whose name now escapes me. Figures were available in several sizes, including 54mm, but we opted for ones about 28mm (measured from the base of the foot to the top of the headgear). These weren’t readily available at drugstores or toy stores – we got ours from the San Antonio Hobby shop in Mountain View. Lead figures were expensive though – I think you could get three infantrymen or one cavalry man (plus horse, Fig. 7.1.12) for about a buck, and so back in the early 70’s, building a Napoleonic army of 30,000-40,000 men (1500 to 2000 figures) was prohibitedly expensive for us. But by now, Ned had met a guy named Dion Osika who was with a gaming group in Mountain View, and Dion taught us how to manufacture our own forces. We would buy a few figures as models and pour a rubber/latex material called RTV around them. Once the mold had set, we’d cut it in half and remove the original figure, adding some access holes. Then we’d hold the two halves of the mold together with a couple pieces of wood with 4 screws and nuts, and melt a mixture of plumbers lead and tin (60:40? 40:60? – I can no longer remember the exact ratio) in an iron ladle and casting pot on top of our stove (trusting the stovetop fan would carry away any toxic fumes) and pour it into the molds. The resulting figurines were never as clean as the originals, but we didn’t care about exact detail – we just wanted to build up massive forces. However, pieces like artillery cannon and caissons (Fig. 7.1.13), supply wagons, and individual generals (Fig. 7.1.14) were always store bought.
The figures were an unattractive silver, so before we could use them, we’d prime and paint them (spending many an hour using 5-0 brushes), again relying upon whatever historical data we could find about uniforms of the era. For example, in the British army, the coats of most of the infantry were red, but the rifle battalions had green coats, while the artillery and cavalry sported blue ones. Furthermore, each individual infantry or cavalry regiment had its own “facing” colors on their collars and cuffs. The “colors” (flags) of each regiment posed a problem. We couldn’t make them in our molds, so instead we made them out of toothpaste tubes (this was back when tubes were made of metal, not plastic). We’d use up all the toothpaste, cut the tube open, clean it out, cut them into appropriate-sized squares, paint them and then glue them to a thin wire attached to the figure of a standard bearer (Fig. 7.1.15). Sometime later, a company produced pre-printed decals of colors, which you’d simply wrap around a flagstaff – much easier than painting them ourselves. Ned found some portable metal 9-drawer storage cases (originally meant for holding hardware), in which we could safely store and transport our infantrymen – cavalry were mostly too large to fit in them, but we got some plastic tubs that worked fine for them (Fig. 7.1.16).
Our games eventually became too massive to play on tabletops – we needed a ton of space, and so spread our armies out on the floor to play. Luckily my Dad had enclosed an outside porch at our house to convert into an extra room, and that space turned out to be a great play room. In 1975, we experimented with constructing terrain: low hills made out of Hydrocal (a type of plaster). But that didn’t go too well, and we gave up on that. But Dion had an elevated gaming table in his garage (a pair of ping pong tables pushed together), so we’d go up there for some of our games – it was great not to have to sit on the floor for the several hours a battle took.
For his army, Ned opted for French units, while I followed my Anglophile leanings and went with the British army. I adopted the goal of recreating the Duke of Wellington’s Anglo-Allied Army that faced Napoleon at the Battle of Quatre Bras during the Waterloo campaign in 1815 (afterwards I added more units, and eventually my collection tallied 2,099 figures) (Fig. 7.1.17). In that campaign, Wellington’s army was only about one third British – the rest were composed of troops from Hanover, Brunswick, the Duchy of Nassau, and Dutch-Belgians (the Netherlands and Belgium having been forced into a union neither of them sought after Napoleon’s first abdication). This added quite a variety to my task when it came to painting their uniforms.
At first we played individual, independent battles on any given weekend day, but later we got creative and conducted entire campaigns. In these games, each side would begin with their forces scattered, and we’d move our various units using a strategic map of the area. When opposing forces met, we’d play that out as a battle between just those units. After it concluded, we’d get back into “strategic” mode and continue moving our disparate forces (taking into account the losses from the previous battle). Eventually, everyone would have their units combined, and when THOSE forces met, the resulting battle would decide the game, and thus the campaign. At first we invented these strategic maps, but when I was in college, I found a 1774 map of the Austrian Netherlands (ie: much of present day Belgium) produced by an Austrian general named de Ferraris (which was the map used by the combatants in the 1815 Waterloo campaign) in the Doe Library at UC Berkeley. The entire map is massive (275 sections), with each section measuring about 30”x 19” (Fig. 7.1.18). I had the library make copies of the nine sections that encompassed the area involved in the Waterloo campaign, and mounted them onto cardboard. These were actually copies from negatives, so what was black on the original was white on my copy, and what was white originally became black (Fig. 7.1.19). Ned later took these to a blueprint place that basically re-reversed the colors, and used them in a strategically war game he umpired in the mid to late ‘70s.
But with people in our area moving away for (or after) college, war gaming with these huge armies became problematic. In 1974, the well-known role playing game “Dungeons & Dragons” was published. BUT a couple of years earlier, a guy named Michael Korns (who lived in the Mountain View area) developed his own role playing game called “SUTC” (small unit tactical combat), which allowed players to lead a small unit (like a squad or a single tank) in a WWII scenario. Unlike traditional games, where a player could see the whole field of battle and move all his units as precisely as he wished (the “God” perspective), in SUTC the players sat in a separate room and passed their orders to the umpire, who would then move the forces around and determine the result of any combats. He’d report back to the players at various intervals, thus helping to better recreate the “fog of war” that was so basic to battles (well, at least before the drone age).
After that point, my war gaming participation dropped off drastically; largely due to my rising interest in a number of other interests, like Scottish dancing, hang gliding and entomology. But occasionally I joined Ned in a couple of “game by mail” scenarios, where (quite similar to the SUTC games) a game master set up a scenario, and sent off maps and situations to players (who could be in different cities or countries). We would consider whatever information we received and send back our orders; the game master would then move the forces as per our orders and resolve any conflicts when contacts occurred. My other gaming experience was when computer games came out. I didn’t own a computer at that time, but Ned did, and in 1982 he bought the game Guadalcanal (published by Strategic Simulations). This was a megagame by any standards, spanning the six months of the conflict around Guadalcanal in 1942-43. Ned and I played it together a couple of times, but there was also a solitaire version (the human commanded the USN forces, and the computer the Imperial Japanese Naval forces) that I really got addicted to, spending a LOT of time driving between Berkeley and Los Gatos, and playing the game all night long and well into the wee hours of the morning, even after Ned had retired to bed.
At some point, Ned sold off his set of 28mm Napoleonic figures (using the funds to buy a piano) and replaced them with 15 mm figures, which could he used to represent even more massive forces. He later sold those (using that money to buy a personal computer) and shifted to 5 mm figures. I on the other hand resisted selling my figures, and simply boxed up my army and stored it away. And proceeded to forget about them. Until 2022, when I realized that I will never use them again, and it was time to figure out how to dispose of them. Through the South Bay Gaming Club in Saratoga, I met Alex Fabros, a Vietnam vet whose group provided scholarships to JROTC programs. He would deliver the collection to the Duncan Polytechnic High School Junior ROTC program (in Fresno) to help them learn Command and Control. The vast majority of my miniatures (the infantry and cavalry stored in closed-top containers) were still in good shape, except for the odd broken off bayonet and such. But I discovered I had suffered one catastrophic incident. I had kept the bulky stuff (artillery limbers & caissons, and the supply train) in an open topped cardboard box. One of our cats (whose middle name is “Trouble”), had the run of the basement for awhile, and for some strange reason thought that this box was a great place in which to urinate. The carnage was terrible (Fig. 7.1.20) – reminding me of what Capt. Cavalie Mercer’s battery must have looked like at the end of the battle of Waterloo, when allied Prussian artillery forces coming upon them in the dusk mistook them for the French, and virtually destroyed the unit.
