Full transcript:

As my father lay dying, I picked up his name.

This is Venthuffer, a reverie of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick.

We arrive at episode 12, and the end of season 2. Before I take another break, I want to tell you about the name I use to produce this audio zine. I have used “Halstrick” as a general gaming handle since the purchase and setup of my first Steam Deck in late 2022. Since then—in fact, within the last few days of my recording this episode—I have learned so much more about the name. But before I get into that, I can share my personal history with it.

Halstrick was my father’s middle name. Growing up, I never thought about it much. I started thinking about it more in 2013, a year I spent largely in Maine, suddenly put in charge of both my parents’ end-of-life affairs, the details of which I shall spare you. This meant a lot of time alone in hotels, and I passed this time by getting into Guild Wars 2, an online fantasy epic. I rolled up two characters, a man and a woman, a guardian and a warrior. My mind being where it was, I gave them my parents’ middle names. I wasn’t trying for any kind of serious act of memorial; I suppose I just liked the nudge afforded by having the names always in-sight while I played, reminding me of my larger purpose, away from home.

Years later, I relocated from New England to New York, just weeks before the COVID-19 lockdowns, all of which felt like a definitive life chapter-break. After that, when I needed to choose a name for my online identity somewhere, I remembered that time in Maine, and I began to experiment with calling myself Halstrick. This included games with a more prominent social aspect, where other players address you by the name you present. And I found I liked being called by this name, one that sounds novel but not fictional, that has a pleasantly obvious shortened form, and with which I have a defensible real-world connection. So when the Steam Deck came, I took the plunge, and renamed my accounts on Steam and Playstation, and then Discord. Every platform or project concerned with gaming now sees me presenting myself as Halstrick—including the zine you are now listening to.

Before I launched Venthuffer, I did ask my older brother, who carries my father’s name in its entirety, for his permission to represent myself online using something that he holds the literal birthright to. He granted this permission, generously and easily. And in doing this, he reminded me that the unusual name wasn’t just made up at our father’s christening. My brother has memory of being told, as a very young child, about a man named Joe Halstrick, a Civil War veteran. My brother was encouraged by older family, all long gone now, to think of this man as “Uncle Joe”. But other than a single sepia-toned photograph that he’s kept safe all his life—depicting a middle-aged man with bright eyes and a period-appropriate mustache—my brother knows nothing else about him, or his connection to our family, or why our father was given his name.

Well, Uncle Joe did exist, but dad’s name didn’t come from him, at least not directly. I spent several days scouring the web, contacting more distant family members, and spending a long afternoon in the Milstein Division research room at the New York Public Library. Here’s what I learned.

Joseph Halstrick, Jr. was born in 1841 in Boston. As far as I can tell, he never spent any significant time away from Boston other than an eventful year or two in the U.S. Army, where he served in Company C of the 13th regiment of Massachusetts volunteer riflemen, joining at age 19. You can find a photograph of him standing among his company, in a small clearing by a tent in a forest. He stands in dead center, brimming with swagger, one hand on his hip and the other resting over the business end of his long rifle, which he’s planted into the dirt like a walking stick. He stares down the camera lens with what is unmistakably the same eyes from the photo my brother has, daring you to call him out on his questionable muzzle discipline.

Halstrick was wounded in action at the battle of Bull Run, and mustered out after spending the subsequent winter in the hospital, returning to Boston and resuming his work at his father’s silversmithing business. This trade would remain his central occupation for another 20 years or more.

But Joe Halstrick was not one to settle down early. Sometime around 1867, in his mid-20s, Halstrick joined Hose Company 5 of the city’s firefighters. According to the 1889 book A Complete History of the Boston Fire Department, he was very soon “badly burned in an explosion of hot air” while on-duty. I’m not sure whether or for how long he remained a firefighter after that; the book mentions him no further among company rolls. What I do know is that, exactly ten years later, Halstrick was awarded U.S. patent number 190,431. This described an adjustable attachment one could install on the era’s ubiquitous gas lamps, “producing greater illuminating properties with a lesser consumption of the gas”.

And some ten years after that, while in his mid-to-late forties, Halstrick changed careers, joining the Boston Police Department as a full-time inspector, specializing in factories. It seems strange today to think of a middle-aged rookie policeman, but I understand police departments around that time as undergoing a transition from citizen-watchmen groups into an organized, professionalized force. It’s not at all far-fetched that an experienced and decorated veteran, tradesman, and inventor—with a such a history of courage and resilience—would be welcomed as senior specialist in the new Boston Police.

Halstrick stayed in this role for over 20 years, keeping meticulous records of his inspections. Shortly before he retired in 1907, his service was cited in a journal of American child labor law enforcement, naming him as a member of one of the country’s few police divisions that actively monitored factories for exploitative hiring practices. After retiring, he stayed as busy as his flagging health would allow, showing up often at events around Boston commemorating the war, or the city’s fallen firefighters. Joeseph Halstrick died in 1915, at age 73, and is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Boston.

I am humbled and inspired by the life that Joe led. His demonstrations of heroic self-sacrifice for the sake of both his city and his nation speak of a character I can only hope to emulate in part. His mid-life career shift, after decades doing the job his parents wanted for him, resonates more directly, even uncannily, with the path of my own life. And the narrative implicit in his years-long quest to invent and publish a technology to save others from a terrible injury that he suffered? If I ever demonstrate a fraction of that drive on a personally meaningful project with global benefits, my life will have been worth living.

But none of this explains how my father, born and raised in the small community of Rockland, Maine, 200 miles up the coast from Boston, ended up with Joe’s name fifteen years after his death. And this where the women come in.

My aunt told me about my great great aunt through my father’s mother, named Cora Halstrick. I had found her obituary in the library, the day before, naming her as the widow of Joseph Halstrick of Boston. She had died in my father’s hometown of Rockland Maine in 1939, overlapping with dad’s life by a few years. My aunt recalled my grandmother speaking of Cora with affection and gratitude; she played an active role in helping to care for my infant father, and his brother—and their mother. And so that’s where my father’s name is from. The name is from Cora, a handprint of the love and care she showed my young grandmother’s family, one that my older brother still carries almost a hundred years later.

This is not to eclipse Joe: Cora clearly remained deeply fond of her late husband, carrying several of his treasured affects and mementos with her to Maine. She told her niece about Joe, and many years later her niece told her children about Cora and Joe both, and eventually told her grandchildren too. My brother still has that ancient photograph from these tellings, surviving the clouding of time over memory.

But I must acknowledge how, in accordance with the diminished visibility of women in the public record, the only documentation I found of Cora was of her passing, listing no details of her life or accomplishments other than her marriage to Joe. I couldn’t even find a wedding announcement about them.

I did find another news blurb announcing Joe’s marriage to a woman named Mary Packard in 1868, a year after his injury in the explosion. Did this accident lead to their marriage, somehow? Did Mary encourage Joe to apply his mind to translate his pain into invention? How much of the patent might be co-credited to her, in fact? What happened to her? How much of his life did Joe spend with Mary, and how much with Cora?

I hope to know some day—honestly, I hope to make some field trips about it—but right now, I don’t even have enough information to speculate. The treatment of the Halstrick women in the records I found is so frustratingly curt as to be almost funny. Joe’s obituary in the Boston Globe mentions neither Cora nor Mary; another paper’s note about his passing states only: “He leaves a wife.” In a who’s-who book I found about notable Boston residents dated to the closing years of Joe’s life, there is a listing for “Mr. & Mrs. Joseph Halstrick”.

So here are those who held the name, together: a 19th century Bostonian who led an astoundingly full and meaningful life, his surviving partner who subsequently went to Downeast Maine and directly helped my grandmother’s family flourish, and another woman whose story is rich with potential but painfully obscure. I didn’t know any of this a week ago. What am I to do with it all?

Well, I’m going to keep the name. My father didn’t like to talk about his past, or his family. He never suggested what his middle name meant to him, and he died before I ever thought to ask. My research unearthed not just the life story that I was hoping to find, but a story of people who cared deeply about family, and community, and civic duty.

None of this has much to do with video games. I started using Halstrick just to keep dad in mind. Then I used it because it sounded cool on the internet. Now I want to keep holding the name, specifically because I know more about the basic goodness that it represents.

I have studied and written about video games for my whole life so far, and I’ve come to accept that that’s how the rest of it going to play out. My main lens for examining games these days is less as challenges or passtimes and more as art, as communication, work made by people for other people to comprehend, transferring perspective through play. And I feel so lucky that I have the chance to continue my personal game studies under an already-adopted name that is so weighted with bravery, and ingenuity, and caring.

This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, find links to the things I mentioned on this episode, or subscribe, at Venthuffer dot com. If you enjoy this show, tell your friends. I’m taking a break after this episode, and plan to return with more Venthuffer later in 2025. Be well, stay playful. And you can find me, on Steam, as Halstrick.