Duke Siefried

To Duke

By Todd Fisher

I was talking to Hal the other day when he told me of the tribute that Was to be held for Duke Seifried. I have known Duke for many years now, and I can not think of a member of this hobby that more deserves to have his accomplishments brought out into the light.

Duke had a knack of making what he did seem as if all the groundwork had been done, and all he had to do was "turn the key". Of course this is part of a professional presentation, but Duke was so good at it that it seemed effortless. When Duke went about hawking the products of DER KRIEGSPIELERS, HERITAGE, or TSR, it was with an eye toward bringing new people into the hobby. His "dog and pony shows did much more to bring in new people than much of the lip service that you see so freely bandied about today. Sure it's pure Hollywood, but what better way to capture the imagination of the uninitiated. And all the time this was going on, I heard plenty of people sneer at Duke fooling around with kids. Well, those kids grew up and one of them just might be gaming with you.

Duke has always given freely of his time to put on games for me. And what games I I Twice he has won "Best of Show". These are not games that have a little felt: a::d lychen thrown on a table; they are spectaculars with thousands of figures and magnificent custom buildings and terrain. LITTLE WARS would never be the same should he be unable to attend. For those judges out there, you can imagine the type of project it is just transporting a game of that size. Well, to give you an idea just how generous this man is, I will give you an example of how Duke many times works behind the scenes. This year at GENOON/ORIGINS we had several last minute problems crop up. The first was the last minute pull-out of Peter Gilder. This occurred after the programs had been printed, and the games had been booked. This left us in quite a lurch. I got a call from Duke in which he said that having heard of the problem that Gilder had left us in, he would cancel previous plans and run one of his big games to fill in. He d?d this as a friend with no thought of public praise. And if this tribute had not been organized, he would have gotten none.

The second problem that we had was we were unable to get the figures that we had counted on for Donald Featherstone's demonstrations. Again, Duke volunteered the use of his troops. These were his favorite figures, and it was with not a little trepidation that he gave them to the tender mercies of game re he did not know. But the alternative to bis way of thinking would have been worse.

Finally Duke was kind enough to realize that I was almost completely spent by the time the Donald Featherstone Dinner arrived. So after I had made a few groggy opening remarks, Duke rode to the rescue and kept a lively conversation going with Don, which allowed us a chance to get to know this wonderful man. "Again, he makes it look so effortless, that one would scarcely notice, yet I suspect that if it had been left up to me, the conversation would never have flowed so well)

If there is a fair criticism of Duke it is that he sometimes was over ambitious, and as a result sometimes things fell through. But this is the fault of a man who dared to dream big. The dreaming rubbed off on others; and as these things work out, sometimes he got and sometimes they got the brass ring. May we always have those that dream so that the romance and spectacle never go out of our hobby.

Duke Siefried MWAN Honoree of 1989

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© Copyright 1989 Hal Thinglum
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