The Machinery Wars

When you hear people talk about the group, you generally think of it as King and Bucher against the romantic Henrietta, and the dissipate Walker, with Marsden as a sort of long suffering leader. And you think of him as being Walker's friend and defender. It's almost inevitable that you picture Marsden as kind of the peacemaker and leader, because his later work was so important. But anything Marsden did during the original runs was background. He was friends with Walker, but remember it was Henrietta who brought Marsden in. They were married for two years, later on. But he was the "boy." He was much younger than the rest of them, which meant that he lived longer, and so our views of them are shaped by what he said. He recognized Walker's genius, but Walker was never a consistent writer like Marsden. Remember they fired Marsden after the first run. Can you imagine that, firing, the man who would eventually run On Common Ground. A six time Golden Penguin winner, one of the first three members of the LARP Hall of Fame in Cambridge - and at that, Marsden should have been put before Mikhail Jung and Dawn Roz, because he was running LARP when Jung was still running from the Orchana. And they fired him. Because he didn't, in King's words "contribute enough to the electricity of the group."

If King and Bucher could have gotten along, we might not have LARP today. Together, I genuinely believe they may have run the genre into the ground before it got good and started. Fortunately for history and the art, while they were friends of a sort - as much as either of them ever had a friend - they didn't actually get along at all.

One of the things I remember most vividly was their fighting over the office equipment. I got lectured on it quite a bit, while being put through the humiliating routine of working as "Office Boy" for both of them to "make myself useful."

Bucher had a Hectograph in his Office at the Consulate, or Hektograph as he spelt it. This was a gelatin duplicator, like ones they used in Germany, though this one was made by J. R. Holcomb & Co.'s and was called a "Transfer Tablet." Hektograph was a generic name, unlike mimeograph, anybody could make a Hektograph Machine.. Now when we think of duplication, we tend to think of Spirit copiers...what you call "ditto" machines today, but those weren't around until several years after the war and were made by Ditto, Inc. This was a flatbed copier. It was ancient even then, I think they'd been around since the 1870s, when the Germans developed analine dyes. The things were still moderately common, but the better ones were the Simplex Printer made by Lawton & Co., and the Heyer machines. There was a nice new Hektograph from Heyer that had just come out around the time Clarence was first run that used a roll of paper coated with gelatin, glue, and glycerin instead of a gelatin pad. But we didn't have that.

You made a copy with a special ink, then transferred it to a pad which was made from a mixture of gelatin, glycerine and glue. Now there were some really nice things about this system. The ink came in eight different colors, though you typically used purple for high contrast, just like we do now. But it came as ink for pens, pencils, carbon paper, and typewriter ribbon. So you could type up very nice copy then duplicate it. The typewriter at the German Embassy was dreamlike...it was a brand new Blickensderfer Electric.

Now the problem was that you could only make up to fifty copies, and about the last five were pretty iffy. However, Bucher said this didn't matter, because there were only twenty four characters and five GMs - and even if they gave everyone a copy of something, they'd never need more than twenty nine copies. I certainly didn't rate a copy of the characters - I was expected to read off Thad's copy. Even at the time King had grandiose schemes for running the game multiple times. Bucher simply planned to have me retype the entire game every run.

By `03 it was rather hard to find supplies for the Holcomb machine, especially in all the colors Bucher wanted for his battle diagrams. I was able to order the stuff through Brewood Engravers and Printers over near the Executive Office Building, and it was rather expensive. Bucher wouldn't consent to using any supplies which had been paid for by the "German Crown" of course.

King hated the Hectograph. He had a Rotary Neostyle machine at his office on K Street. This worked very much like the mimeograph that had been introduced by A.B. Dick about fifteen years beforehand, and was pretty much the standard copier up until we got Ditto machines. We called it a "mimeograph" even though the treadle-powered drum machine was made by Neostyle Co. The mimeograph was wonderful because it used ordinary ink, and there was none of the mess that you had to deal with in using the Hectograph. And you could make a lot of copies, I don't know how many but it was advertised that it could make two thousand or so, and I never saw it run out. It was an altogether neater machine. And by the time we ran Clarence you could use it with a Typewriter. There was a special type of typewriter made by Edison, I suppose that was introduced about ten years before we ran Clarence, though that still wasn't something you saw in every office. But King had one. So really it was in all ways superior to the Hectograph, except you didn't have color. I could type up a stencil and crank out a hundred copies just as quick as you pleased, with no mess. King and Bucher had fierce arguments about the relative merits of the Hectograph and the Mimeograph.

At his office King had the Edison Typewriter for the Mimeograph (which wasn't made by Edison at all of course) The thing was fairly new, but it was a travesty. The type were on the tops of vertical type-bars (three of which are identified by blue highlights in the photograph to the right). To select a letter, you rotated a disk with letters on it located on the bottom of the machine. This caused a vertical rod (identified by the red dot) to rotate, and this in turn caused the circle of type-bars to rotate so that the correct type-bar came into position. You then pressed a lever (yellow dot) to activate a hammer (green dot) that struck the lower end of the type-bar with the selected letter. The plunger-like type-bar moved up and the type struck the underside of the platen. The typewriter was therefore a blind-writer; you had to lift the hinged carriage in order to see her work. I was an old hand at it, having learned on an old Sholes & Gliddens upstrike, which was constructed so you couldn't see what you were typing. It had the QUERTY keyboard, thank goodness.

Henrietta of course bucked both of them. She favored the Cyclostyle machine. These were made by Gestetner which as a British Company. This worked a lot like the mimeograph, except one couldn't use a typewriter. There was a little perforating pen, and as one wrote with it, a wheel broke the stencil.

Thaddeus tried adapting the stencils I had for home, but they didn't work well. At the time of the game I owned a secondhand National Upstrike at home, which was about fourteen years old. I could put stencil paper in it to make a Mimeograph. To cut a stencil with a typewriter, one covered the stencil with a fine "perforating silk" cloth and typed without a ribbon. Henrietta had one at the office at the Ladies Literary Society on which they produced their newsletter. So she used this, and of course it meant that all of her characters were hand written rather than typed. This made King and Bucher both furious, though Henrietta had a nice copperplate hand, and really what she wrote was legible enough. But they could always be counted on to pronounce what a piece of junk the Cyclostet was.

I was the only one that could type of course. King was frantic that Marsden should learn to type as he was "young and flexible" and even tried to buy him a typewriter so he could make copies of his characters with a carbon. Instead he had an old Black's Autocopyist which wasn't less than fifteen years old. It was secondhand of course, and you needed lithographic ink for it, which at least didn't cost so much. It was rather good for copying drawings, but not so fine for other things. You wrote with a grease pen, then it used parchment to make a lithographic transfer.

Thaddeus of course differed from everyone. He had gotten hold of an old Trypograph, which hadn't even been sold in three years. This wasn't too different from Henrietta's Cyclostet, except it used an alternative method for producing stencils. A wax-covered stencil was placed on a metal plate with a file-like surface with thousands of perforating points. When a metal stylus was used to write on the stencil, the stencil was perforated from below by the file. I think poor Thaddeus must have been the last person in the world to get one, as I'm certain I never saw one on sale after 1900, though I recall you could get them before then.
The thing you wanted of course was a Gammeter Multigraph, from the American Multigraph Co. but there were brand new. They'd only been introduced the year before Clarence, and sold for outrageous sums...the cheapest were around $200, and the most expensive around $800. From time to time Thaddeus had plans for getting the use of one that was owned by an advertising house, and we wasted some time in the belief that he could actually successfully do this. I don't know how much print time we wasted because Thaddeus breezily said "I have a friend of a friend who works at this place...we'll just go in one evening and multigraph it." Not that any of us were trained multigraph operators. They supposed I should be able to do it of course, because I had learnt typing.

The first run went fairly well although I didn't sleep for about forty hours and wandered around drunk on the fumes from the analine inks, occasionally calling out "Schnell!" at the top of my lungs. A patrolman found me wandering around Woodward and Lothrop (the old building at 10th and F streets NW, which they moved from in 1910) calling out "Schnell" at the clerks. I was probably only minutes from a hasty deportation when Thaddeus found me and dragged me off to the Hotel.

The real trouble came when we went to Baltimore. Poor Marsden was gone by then, and with him the only portable duplicator other than Henrietta's (Thaddeus' machine gave up the ghost, the little perforators becoming dull, possibly because of something he did to it with a carving knife)

So there we were onsite. I was the typist, but Henrietta's machine didn't take typed paper. Thaddeus had a new experiment which proved messy and disastrous and left my nails black with cyclostet ink. That left writing things by hand and there was of course only one cyclostet pen. Henrietta's writing was rather slow, and of course I was a faster copyist, but Henrietta felt it her duty to lean over my shoulder and make grammatical objections...some of them rather obscure.

- Cooke, Dolores, My Life and Times - A Struggle and a March, Fortress Books, 1937