Don Kaye

Don Kaye was born on June 27, 1938. He grew up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where at age 8, he became friends with Gygax, who had moved there from Chicago, Illinois. The two young boys also often played with tomboy Mary Jo Powell, but lost touch with her when she moved away. At age 15, Kaye and Gygax began playing miniature war games, designing their own miniatures rules for their large collection of 54 mm and 70 mm toy soldiers, using "ladyfinger firecrackers" to simulate explosions. When they were 19, Mary Jo Powell, now a young woman, returned to Lake Geneva and the two friends were smitten with her. Although they both courted her, it was Gygax who ultimately persuaded Mary Jo to marry him. This caused a rift in their friendship, and Kaye refused to attend Gygax's wedding. ==Formation of TSR==

In the fall of 1972, Dave Arneson, a wargamer from nearby Minneapolis-St. Paul, demonstrated a new type of role-playing game to the LGTSA. Gygax then created a similar game set in the imaginary Castle Greyhawk, and invited his children, Ernie and Elise, "to create characters and adventure". The next evening, Kaye joined the game along with Gygax's friends Rob Kuntz and Terry Kuntz. Kaye observed as a group eagerly played the prototype Dungeons & Dragons game at Gen Con VI (1973), and brought the idea to Gygax of starting a company so that they could publish the game on their own. which was initially run with business taking place in Kaye's dining room. Their investment of $2000 was not enough to print their new role-playing game, so they instead published Cavaliers and Roundheads, a miniatures game based on the English Civil War, and planned to use its revenue to print and publish D&D. But sales were poor, and they still did not have enough capital to publish Dungeons & Dragons. While developing D&D, Gygax had sent copies of his preliminary rules to other wargaming friends for playtesting. Now worried that someone who had playtested the new type of game would bring a similar product to the market first, the two accepted an offer in December 1973 by playing acquaintance Brian Blume to invest $2000 in TSR to become an equal one-third partner. In January 1974, they printed a thousand copies of the game and hand-assembled them in the basement of Gygax's house. In late 1974, Kaye helped develop some of the rules for a new Western-genre game to be called Boot Hill. ==Death and legacy==

Although only 36 years old at the start of 1975, Kaye needed heart surgery, a fact that he did not disclose to his partners. Neither Gygax nor Blume had the money to formally buy the share owned by Kaye's wife, but Blume persuaded Gygax to allow his father, Melvin Blume, to buy it. The company was re-formed as TSR Hobbies, Inc, with the Blume family owning controlling interest. ---> In 1975, Gygax and Blume published Boot Hill in memory of Kaye. Gygax paid further tribute to Kaye when he used Murlynd's name for two spells (Murlynd's Ogre, Murlynd's Void) and an item (Murlynd's Spoon) in Unearthed Arcana. ==References==