Ernest E. Gygax

From "Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons", by Michael Witwer:

https://books.google.pl/books?id=NoccCgAAQBAJ&pg=PP30&lpg=PP30&dq=E...

Gary's father, Ernest Gygax, was a Swiss immigrant and talented violinist who had allegedly played with the world-renowned Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In fact, it was rumored that he had been second chair but quit because he could not be the concertmaster. Other hard-luck stories circulated about Ernest. As a young man, he had been offered a chance to buy a quarter interest in a soda-water venture that later morphed into the Coca-Cola Company. Later, as the story goes, he had refused the advice of his stockbroker to sell his stock portfolio the day before the crash of 1929.[5] Whatever the case, Ernest finally settled into a job as a suit salesman at Rothschild & Co. to make ends meet. (His son) Gary himself would later understand the tenuous balance between passion, artistry, and work.

Gary's mother, Almina "Posey" Burdick Gygax, was a housewife now on her second marriage. She came from a prominent Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, family and had two children from her previous marriage, Nancy and Hugh, 11 and 9 years older than Gary, respectively. Even from his earliest days, Posey held a special affection for Gary and spent ample time with the young boy reading him tales, myths, and folklore. it wasn't long before Gary and Posey were competing against each other in Reader's Digest's "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" tests, "and I hate to lose," [6] Gary would recall. Gary quickly developed language skills well beyond his years and education level - a quality that would no doubt prove essential when articulating new and complex gaming concepts.

Gary, as the only biological child of the complex and at times melancholy Ernest Gygax, was truly the apple of his father's eye. Unsurprisingly, Gary's given first name was also Ernest. Gary's middle name was the name he commonly went by; this name was given not after a relative but after the great American film actor Gary Cooper. Gary's mother, Posey, had been a huge fan of the actor, and Ernest, being a middle-aged man of considerable pragmatism and wit, had given in to the middle name under the condition that Posey would never have an affair with anyone other than himself or Mr. Cooper. [7]

Perhaps most interesting, though, was Gary's unusual family name. Gygax was a derivative of a Greek word meaning "giant." Family tradition held that they were descendants of the biblical Philistine champion Goliath. These Philistines had supposedly relocated to Greece during biblical times and finally settled in Switzerland during the Middle Ages. Young Gary loved to daydream about his giant ancestors wandering in a world long past, a world of swords and sorcery. At the time, however, he could scarcely imagine the part he would later play in these same worlds of fantasy.