DARK DAYS IN BALTIMORE
The 1980s were a dark time. The decade began with the Iran Hostage crisis. I was suffering from Epstein Barr virus, which had taken such a toll on me that I couldn’t work and could barely think. In December of 1979, I moved from New York to Baltimore to take a job at Avalon Hill. Unfortunately, though I did not realize it at the time, I was hired to replace Randy Reed (the company scapegoat), who had left the company and the hobby. The wargaming world was in the doldrums. Today, people still remember and play wargames from the 1970s but there are few from the 80s. The 60s and 70s were decades of high creativity, but the 80s were a time of just rehashing existing formulas. In music and movies this was just as true as in the hobby, but we were in our prime and had to live with the hand that fate had dealt us.
I was disillusioned with being a game designer. My last game for OSG in 1979 was Bonaparte in Italy. When this game came out, I was so disappointed in the result; it was such a mess. Every other town on the map was misspelled. There were primary roads that had just disappeared into thin-air. This was because the map was finished after I had left the company; the game was completed by others. I was really ashamed of it, and it turned me off to the hobby. So I decided to go back to school and get a BA in music. By then I had given up on becoming a performing musician but I still harbored the desire to compose. I was using charts and tables to write music, trying to adapt the methods and tools of wargame design. The results were uninspiring. My goal was to develop the skill to somehow realize the glorious instrumental music that constantly resounded in my head. The idea of stochastic music was the best I could come up with since I could never manage to get my ideas down on paper. *
In January, 1981 Ronald Reagan took office as the 40th President. For the first time, in Baltimore, I met people who were self-proclaimed Republicans. Living in New York during the 1970s I had never met a one. I didn’t know what a Republican was or what made them tick. I had no reference point. Personally, I was never a supporter of the Democratic party either. I cast ‘a pox on both their houses,’ and registered as an independent, supporting Eugene McCarthy in 1976 and John Anderson in 1980. I thought that the wave of the future would bring the demise of the two-party system. Many people saw the election of Reagan as “morning again in America,” after the oil shocks, OPEC, and the hostages. But for me, those slogans were empty and meaningless. I had to make-do in a top-down, trickle-down economy—surviving on student loans and freelancing.
There were still lots of artists around, but there was no funding for art projects, so all the artists were struggling to get by. For a time, I worked with a crew of starving artists who had set up a contracting company. For a few months, we worked on the restoration of a church in Baltimore, the First & Franklin Presbyterian, an 1850’s brownstone with a massive spire that had been patched up with asphalt and was leaking badly. We had to climb up the scaffolding around the spire with a bucket of mud and a trowel. The artist who ran that crew committed suicide a few years later. We lived in shabby Baltimore neighborhoods and tried to make things happen without any money at all. Mel Brooks was working on his film, Life Stinks, at the time.
I was casting about for something better. SPI had folded and had gotten ripped-off by a large gaming empire that had posed as a white-knight but then immediately pulled the rug out from under Dunnigan and Simonsen, leaving their large following in the lurch, who had invested in lifetime subscriptions for $300 (equivalent in today’s money to over a thousand bucks). After they took over the company, they were looking for former SPI employees to run the ‘new’ SPI, and I went for an interview to Lake Geneva. I felt rotten about betraying the subscribers, so I thought, if I’m going to sell out, I’m going to go big, asking a hundred grand ($350,000 in today’s deflated currency). That way, I would be able to live well in New York City and pay off my student loan within a year, then quit.
So I flew out to Chicago. The company sent a limo to pick me up at the airport that drove me through 70 miles of cornfields. But when I arrived there was no one there to greet me, so I had to cool my heels until my meeting the next day. They only offered me $70K, arguing that I’d be able to get to $100K in a few years. I refused that and went back to living hand-to-mouth.