I knew, long and long ago as a CLS II player. Painted some of her Swedes c. 1969, which I'm sure she subsequently brought up to her standard. (It was common practice then to farm out painting to beginning wargamers still in school, and to pay them a casting for each casting painted. From this distance, I can only see it as an act of charity, but at the time I thought I was earning them.) I can't speak for personality. Our relationship was never cordial or intimate, but there was a huge difference in age, experience and attitude. Her peers, I think, liked and respected her.
She was a teacher, but I'm not sure I ever knew her grade or subject. She lived in or around Indianapolis, and was generally acknowledged to be the best painter of her time in the old Midwest Napoleonic Wargaming Confederation, and I suspect the wargaming to some degree leant purpose to the painting, and gave her a chance to show her work. She was one of the senior British players down to the breakup of the "Old Confederation" at the end of Campaign Year 1814--Fall 1970 or thereabouts--and the unquestioned "Queen of Sweden."
Pretty much everyone had a country of which they were the senior player, which helped prevent two of us from bringing the same unique regiment to a game. She'd done some primary research, on the Swedes--no Ospreys in those years--but the fact that she'd consulted with better tacticians than herself about optimum organization for CLS, that she discovered by some amazing coincidence that the Swedes exactly corresponded to that organization, and that she felt no one else should trouble her sources led to certain suspicions. (It didn't help that she tripled the Swedish Army by listing each regiment by its name in Swedish, English and German.) People talk about Old School wargamers and the spirit of the game in the good old days, but a decent percentage of them would cut someone's throat for 3" of charge movement and a +1 melee bonus, and not all of them would have held out for the bonus.
But they weren't always as skilled as they were ruthless, which led to a parting of the ways about fall 1970. The Allies--mostly very senior wargamers of the old school--lost a ton of artillery in a summer game, and artillery captures in "formal" games carried over so the Allied commanders would be staring down the muzzles of those same guns in the big fall game. Just at that time, almost all of the senior Allied players, including her, withdrew from the MNWC and formed a separate group with rules modified to be distinctly more favorable to the Allies. (I don't know what they did for French players.)
Everything after that would be hearsay. I know she lived and gamed for quite a while in the Indy region after my last contact, and is dead now--but then, pretty much everyone present at Leipzig I in 1969 is. I think I counted three survivors of about two dozen of us last time I looked.
Getting maudlin. Better go fight a skirmish battle.
