My Beloved Daughter,

The summer after my graduation, your Grandpa Chuck’s disability finally kicked in.  As he had been trying to get it started since my freshman year, he received a large check in back pay.  I would have gotten an additional check for half of what he was getting while I was still in high school, so I got a large check for this full amount in June of that year, as well.

They handed an eighteen-year-old boy a check for $10,704.

I did do some responsible things with it.  I bought a car and my first computer.

The car was a 1985 Chevrolet Cavalier.  It was two shades of tan, with power everything and a sunroof.  I still didn’t have my license, so Grandma Pat drove the car home from the dealership in Poplar Bluff.  The car cost $2,000.

Also, during that same trip to the Bluff, we stopped at a computer store and purchased my computer.  This was what I had been looking forward to since I had first found out about the lump sum that I would be getting, nearly a year before.  Unlike today, where they had the computer ready in a box, you would give them the specifications and they would build the computer for you.  I took a basic package, adding in only a copy of WordPerfect for my writing.

I purchased a computer hutch at Wal-Mart that day, along with a few Super NES games (Star Fox, Street Fighter 2 Turbo, Fatal Fury, and Super Star Wars).  When we got home, we put the hutch together in anticipation of the arrival of the computer.

A week later, it was ready.  It was “state of the art,” with four Megs of RAM, a 256 Meg hard drive, a 3.5” floppy drive, a color CRT monitor, and a dot-matrix printer.

The first thing that we did on it was create character sheets for our D&D campaign.  The internet wasn’t a thing back then, so one would usually buy a packet of character sheets from a hobby shop.  Or make them by hand.

So, now that we could print our own, we were some of the cool geeks.

I also spent three hundred dollars on D&D books, through a mail order company called Wargames West.  This was WAY before Amazon and I had to mail in a form for the books and wait several weeks for the UPS truck to deliver them.  Given that D&D books sold for between fifteen and twenty dollars apiece back then, you can see that I ordered a massive number of books.  We spent that summer putting together a D&D Ravenloft campaign that was truly epic, with several different characters who set up a base of operations from which they would trek to do their part in making the Demiplane of Dread a slightly better place.  We played almost daily back then.  It was a really happy time.

Also, during that summer, I finished the first draft of the first book of the ADVENTURE CHRONICLES.  We’ll discuss this in more detail in the next entry.