The Games My Grandfather Found by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
The Games My Grandfather Found Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. 25 September 2026 In the introduction to E. O. Harbin’s 1954 Games of Many Nations, I found my grandfather. Harbin thanks the Rev. Asa W. Mellinger of Chicopee, Massachusetts, “a minister who follows anthropology as a hobby,” and credits him with six games. I knew Asa as the gentle pastor of the parsonage at 302 Chicopee Street. I had not known that his interest in games had entered print. Asa Wright Mellinger was born in 1897 in Washingtonville, Ohio, into a Pennsylvania Dutch–speaking Mennonite family. At Mount Union College he met Edith Marion Ford. He studied theology at Boston University and Harvard, earning a Master of Sacred Theology in 1925. His thesis was a play about the Apostle Paul, A Thorn in the Flesh; he also read several ancient languages. Asa and Edith had tw...