The passing of legends

We often hear of the graying of the wargaming hobby. Ancillary to its graying is its dying. I know, I know. I'm bordering on the morbid again. Most of my friends and acquaintances in the hobby whom I've lost were still pretty much in their prime. Occasionally, one of the legendary warhorses goes the distance.

I heard from my friend Rick today that an old friend from our San Jose, CA days had passed last week. Al Tilley was almost 88 when his heart gave out (today would have been his birthday). He'd suffered from ill-health for a number of years mostly due to the effects of his being a lifelong chain smoker. (Kids, don't smoke.) I was saddened by the news. I've generally had a happy life, so it's hard to experience the loss of people and things that contributed to that happiness. Memories are no substitute for the friendships of which they're the remnant.

I met Al way back in 1977 through Rick, who was part of a group that met in Al's garage every Wednesday night to play Judge Fernandez' Square Ancients. He pulled me into the group where I played occasionally for the next few years. Square Ancients was probably my first prolonged experience of miniature wargaming. From there, Rick and I went on to playing Al Margolis' Legion rules, which for me were the gateway drug to WRG 5th edition Ancients.

Still, the old, formalized Square Ancients game we played with single-mounted minis on a 1.5" square grid remained a fond memory. I still have a mimeographed—yes, mimeographed—copy of the rules that Al wrote out in his meticulous engineer's hand on some old Lockheed graph sheets. That's old school.

Al loved the regularity of a square grid game. Measuring with rulers was a bit too fudgey for him. I remember him giving his impression of playing Legion with Rick and me. He told me he liked the rules except for—and then he picked up a ruler and shook it making a face at it, his wordless disapprobation of Legion's means of spatial calculation. He also disdained dice, preferring a precision random number generator he'd put together from electronic bits he bought at Radio Shack. You couldn't put some English on the random number pull like you could a dice throw, but it didn't make the results more palatable. I can still hear Bob Turner, one of the Wednesday night stalwarts, crying out, "I can't believe these pulls!" whenever a undesirable number came up.

I had a project not too long ago where I started painting some figures for a Square Ancients revival. I used Al's hand-scribed pages as my starting point and fleshed out a bit of the lacunae that had always just been filled in by memory and tribal custom. I also adopted his experiment in using a hex grid instead of squares.

I managed to complete only a few pieces: 8 single-mounted peltasts and a 6-figure phalanx block. Apart from phalanxes, all the figures for Square Ancients were single mounted. I also have the rules I drafted in Adobe InDesign—except I used fonts that I lost in the Great Hard Drive Crash™ earlier this year, so it's kind of a mess until I can find a way to restore them or buy new copies.

A phalanx and a peltast—with a busted spear

I last saw Al on a trip I made to San Jose in 2012. I hadn't seen him in a very long time before that. We had a good chat and caught up on the intervening years. Al's mind was always sharp and he was always interesting to talk to. Talking to Al always left me wanting to talk more.

Apart from wargaming, Al and I shared some other things in common. Al was a cat person and cared for the local ferals as well as his own. He was also a Korean War vet, serving aboard USS Henderson (DD 785) at Wonsan Harbor. My dad was also a Wonsan vet, serving aboard USS Blue (DD 744).

There are a handful of adults from my youth (Al was 30 years older than me) who stand out as highly memorable. Al is part of that crowd. You don't realize at the time how much someone you look up to subtly influences you with the things they say, the way they say them, how they express their interests, etc. I haven't inventoried the memories or anything, but I can think of a few a few brain-seeds that Al planted that matured to become part of my own thinking. Al thought a lot about Winston Churchill's Life of Marlborough, the big, sprawling, four-volume version. I made it my quest in my 20s to find a set, which was no easy task before the Internet. I still have the set I found. It's as good a read as Al said it was. Al was a sci-fi fan and I picked up some of my interest in H. Beam Piper from him.

I'm sorry I didn't manage one more get-together with Al before his death. But I can still relive those Wednesday night trips to Orange Blossom Drive long ago: The anticipation of well-planned game played on a 4' x 4' square grid (marked on a board painted chalkboard green) with the terrain carefully drawn in with colored chalk, a fridge stocked with every variety of soft drink, an inexhaustible bowl of candy, and setting up a perfect attack only to be foiled by the random number generator spitting out 01. (I can't believe these pulls!)

Ave atque vale, Al. You had a positive effect on those who knew you and you'll be remembered by them as long as they live.