Set the Controls for the Back Wall of Waldenbooks (Hobby Origins, Continued...)

 Alternate Title: The TSR Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog: A Gaming Rosetta Stone

As related last post, even as a primary schooler I rarely was without a book in my hand. Despite the plethora of free books available from the school and public libraries, Waldenbooks was my favorite mall store.

Similar to their feelings regarding the local public library, my parents must've considered Waldenbooks a fairly safe space, because I recall browsing alone while my dad looked for the latest Louis L'Amour novel in another part of the store.  While dad perused the cheesy Westerns, eight- to ten-year-old me navigated to the back wall of Waldenbooks.  I'm not sure if the upper management standardized the layout of all their stores, but the back wall, the back right specifically, of our particular Waldenbooks held all the RPGs.

Wait a second?!  RPGs?  The timeline of my last post saw me as a middle-schooler, still reading Choose Your Own Adventure and Endless Quest books and yet to fully grasp roleplaying or wargames.  True, but all those comic book ads I mentioned inserted, if subconsciously, the images of boxed games into my awareness.  I knew if I saw a box, wrapped in plastic and illustrated with lovely, glossy paintings, then I beheld one of the "real" games the big-kids played.  One seminal moment crystallized this association, so I'll detour from the mall back to the school playground briefly.

Sometime during fourth or fifth grade, a classmate who recognized my nerdiness offered me the Summer/Fall 1986 version of TSR's The Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog, handed down to him from an older sibling.  I'm not sure exactly when TSR released this, but I assume it was actually in late spring, and I was still in fourth grade.  Funny how I've forgotten entire semesters of college classes, yet I can remember exactly where (but not when) I was, just outside the art building at recess, when this catalog entered my grasp.

Regardless of the vagaries of memory, this catalog showed me that the mythical "D&D" that we'd heard about in hushed tones (the Satanic Panic was in full swing), and that my first grade friend had futilely tried to show us years before, was far more than Endless Quest books.  Pictures filled the TSR catalog, showing the "real deal" Dungeons & Dragons boxed sets, and introducing me to the slew of competitor publishers.  I saw familiar, and by that time already beloved, properties such as Star Wars and Star Trek, as well as unpronounceable strangeness like the baffling but awesome looking "Call of Cthulhu".  The miniatures at the back of the catalog, especially those weird Grenadier sculpts for CoC, captured my imagination over everything else.  That however, is a tale for another day.

I poured over that catalog, dreaming about buying (or asking for Christmas) nearly everything in there.  Most of the games and accessories were unfamiliar, but a few I recognized not only from the aforementioned comic book ads but from the mall bookstore. 

The Rosetta Stone that was The Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog transformed my Waldenbooks visits.  Previously, I had traveled to the right-side back wall of my local to search for Endless Quest and similar game books, as well as genre-specific guidebooks, such as Rovin's The Encyclopedia of Super-Villains.  The boxed sets in shrink-wrap and orange-spined AD&D manuals now became my focus, finally recognized for what they were.

The sensationalized accounts of D&D leading young kids astray influenced my parents, and although we were not a particularly religious household, I could always sense their apprehension when they came to gather me from the Waldenbooks back wall.      

Luckily, I set my heart not on the red-boxed D&D Basic Set, but the purple-pink box next to it that said "Star Frontiers Knight Hawks" on the side.  Although I recognized the Star Frontiers logo from my comics, it was the front cover illustration of battling spaceships that sucked me in.  My beloved Terran Trade Authority books disappeared from the local library a few years prior; now, here in Waldenbooks was something that not only featured TTA-adjacent art on the cover, but offered repeated fun beyond reading in the form of a game.  I had to have it. 

Initially, my folks thought otherwise.  "Too expensive" they said.  I had a plan however (and this is how I can isolate this purchase to the Summer of '86).  Our annual family summer vacation was approaching, and I knew that mom and dad's spending became a little more liberal on holiday.  Somehow (maybe I suggested it?) during our roadtrip through California we ended up at a mall and lucky for me that mall had a Waldenbooks. Even luckier, that Waldenbooks had a copy of Star Frontiers Knight Hawks and with a little strategically placed pressure (whining), I convinced my folks to buy it. 

I had no idea that Knight Hawks was actually an expansion to the original Star Frontiers boxed set; I didn't even understand the concept of RPGs, let alone that they could be expanded.  The multi-hour drive back to our home state gave me ample time to digest the box contents.  I puzzled over the "Campaign Book Expansion Rules", lacking the frame of reference from the base RPG.  The box back indicated that the smaller, gray-colored manual contained rules for a game that could "be played as a beginning or advanced game when played separately", and that's what I wanted to do.

It took little to convince my middle-school best friend, a fellow nerd who shared my love of comic books and M.U.S.C.L.E. figures, to try Knight Hawks.  Our young age meant we probably got a lot of the rules wrong, and I remember the cardboard tokens fought a losing battle against the Atari 2600.

We enjoyed Knight Hawks though, which I can definitively say was my first "proper" non-gamebook game, and first wargame.  All thanks to Waldenbooks.        

Last two pics courtesy of RPGGeek.