Poet
Because I flunked the second grade (I refused to read Dick and Jane) somebody gave me a narrative version of The Iliad, and that was wonderful. Then I read The Iliad in poetry form, and that was even more beautiful. This sparked a life-long love of poetry. Growing up, I read English and American poetry of the 19th and 20th century: the Romantics and the Transcendentalists. Some of my favorite poets, like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, came out of World War I. My first book of poetry, Nuclear Winter (1991), was written out of grief for the death of my stepson, Walter. I didn’t write any poetry after that until I met Pandora 30 years later. The bulk of the poems that grace this site span the period of Pandora to the present. If someone asked me to describe my poetry, I would say they are often like stories that teach. They sometimes have a moral lesson, like Lincoln’s jokes or the stories of Jesus. My poems are blatantly open in their message with no ulterior motive. They openly seek to reveal a truth with a smile and sometimes a shake of the head.
Game Designer
My love of tactical games comes from childhood. I was exposed to Tactics One by the RAND Corporation because my father worked with them on teaching tools, and he would try out those tools on us kids. One of them was just a brief glimpse of a game to teach lieutenants how to command a platoon or higher formations. Avalon Hill published it in Baltimore as Tactics Two, a board game. I played that game with friends, and then Avalon Hill came out with all sorts of campaign games and operational games. I read a lot of military history books growing up and I would buy these games just to have the maps and pieces on the table so I could see what they were talking about in the books. In the 80s, I became friends with Tom Dalgliesh, part owner and manager at Columbia Games. He helped bring my first game, Texas Revolution (1981), to the public. Carl Wilner, who worked in the Justice Department, helped me with my next game, Texas Glory (2009), which is a revision of Texas Revolution. I’m currently working on Mountain Men, a game about hunting in the Rocky Mountains in the 1820s. My goal in designing a game is to make a simple, playable game that you can sit down and in a few hours people are laughing and talking. The whole point of playing board games is to talk with your opponents.
Speaker
Lecturer
I was always a Mr. Smarty Pants so teaching and speaking always came naturally to me. My expertise is in American and European history, as well as physical and cultural world geography, but I am willing to speak about almost anything. I’ve lectured to small and large groups. I don’t have any age preferences when speaking to a group, just as long as they’re breathing. It’s hard to get a laugh in a morgue. What I like most about lecturing and speaking is meeting new people. Especially if they’re curious. Every class or audience has a few really good students and they understand what “getting real” means. They look beyond their shell of comfort; they continue to search, to read, to write. Those really good students, and occasionally, someone in an audience, will spark and come up afterwards to talk.
