A facebook group I frequent auctions numerous gaming items, sometimes common and sometimes very rare. Several of the members are known gaming industry talents, and others are just collectors like myself. At the end of November, Garrett Ratini put up an item that was a rare gem from his collection. It wasn’t a game book, but books containing a surprisingly rare set of photos that made up a part of gaming history. And how the auction ended is where the real surprise happened.

The items auctioned were the 1953 and 1954 years of the Geneva Log, the Lake Geneva High School yearbook. It was during these years that Gary Gygax, Don Kaye and Mary Powell were all in attendance. A treasure for the gamer who wants to own a piece of history, but especially for the rarity of the photos inside. To appreciate just how rare, you have to know a little something about the history of these three individuals.

Gary Gygax, for one, did not finish high school, though did finish his degree years later. A few months after his father passed, he dropped out of high school in his junior year. These volumes then contained rare pictures of him as a student.

Secondly, Don Kaye is depicted in the book as well. Don Kaye, a close childhood friend of Gygax from age 6, co-founded Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) with Gygax and made one of the first Dungeons & Dragons characters, the infamous Murlynd. While the depiction of these two legends in one book might not appear to be noteworthy in itself, it is one of the few rare pictures of Don Kaye.

TSR was founded in 1973 by Gygax and Kaye. Later, Brian Blume bought in and supplied the capital to allow the publication of Dungeons and Dragons. However, Kaye suffered from a heart condition and needed surgery. He never disclosed this to his partners, and died of a heart attack before the scheduled surgery could take place, dying at age 36 just as Dungeons and Dragons was beginning to gain momentum. As a result, few public pictures of Don Kaye exist.

Mary Jo Powell was a friend of Kaye and Gygax, and was wooed by Kaye for some time. However, Gygax was also smitten, and proposed marriage at 19 years old. Kaye was upset enough to not attend the wedding, though they later reconciled. Ernie Gygax recently posted a picture of Mary Jo the day after the proposal, shown below:

Mary Jo once suspected Gary of having an affair while she was pregnant with her second child, but going to confront him in a friend’s basement, found him sitting with friends around a map covered table. She may have been the first of what my wife calls “Gaming Widows” (being spouses left by the wayside for the husband that games too much).

Garrett Ratini put these items up for auction, and the true collectors of gaming history began to come out to bid. The buyout price for the books was $1,200.00 and likely that number would have been met, I suspect, knowing the habits of this community of bidders. But an unexpected bidder placed a bid at somewhere around the $400 mark, and that was Luke Gygax himself, founder of Gary Con and Gary Gygax’s son.

With the permission of all involved, Garrett terminated the auction and gifted the books to Luke. Now, these books and images of his mother and father are with him, where they truly belong.

Pre-digital history like this is easily lost, and is not on the radar of many historians, with the exception of Michael Witwer and Shannon Appelcline. Hopefully books like this will make it into the archives like the one held at GenCon 50 this past year. Fortunately, I believe we can anticipate these books being treasured by the Gygax family, both for themselves and for posterity.