2002-10-08 - 11:22 p.m.

Research Trip

I'm such an obsessive monkey. Once I get a bee in my bonnet, I have to chase it around for a while. Now I'm hunting down chess news in old newspapers! When will the madness end??

A couple years ago, when I was researching the New York State Championship of 1941, I visited the Onondaga Public Library to check the local newspapers for mentions of the tournament. I was pleased to discover that there was a very nice chess column in one of the local newspapers, the Syracuse Herald-Journal, that was written by a man named Paul Giers. He was one of the officers of the New York State Chess Association, and around 1950 became the president of the U.S. Chess Federation. It's always been in the back of my mind to go there and check it out more thoroughly, so I figured, why not now?

Actually, I was debating between going to Syracuse and going to the Brooklyn Public Library. In the Brooklyn archives there is another paper with a chess column, a much more serious one that goes from the 1890s into the 1950s, if I remember correctly. Its author was Hermann Helms, who was known as the Dean of American Chess, probably one of the most important American chess journalists ever. I was planning on using his old columns from 1900-1905 to fill in some gaps in the list of New York State Champions.

However, Brooklyn is a good deal farther away than Syracuse, and getting there is more involved: you either have to circumnavigate Manhattan or go through it. Last night I had a terrible time getting to sleep (AGAIN!) so I thought it was a much better idea to hit relatively nearby Syracuse rather than attempt to navigate my way through the Big Bad City on only two hours sleep.

In spite of my lack of sleep the day went rather well, but I think I still made the right choice. I was pleased to notice that traveling was much more pleasant with my diabetes symptoms under control - it's annoying to have to stop every hour or so to go to the bathroom.

I was pretty familiar with Syracuse, since I used to visit it a lot when I was in college. Of course, that was twenty years ago, and it looked like the city had changed a bit since those days, and not for the better. Syracuse is a lot bigger than Frown Town, it looks much more like a real city. It rather reminds me of Albany - except dirtier and meaner. Everything seemed kind of grungy and downtown seemed to be filled with unfriendly-looking street people who looked like they'd as soon cut your throat as look at you. The economy in this part of the world has not been good for a while, and Syracuse is just another post-industrial city being hollowed out while all the folks with money flee to the suburbs.

I found the Onondaga Country library fairly easily. I'd been there before, and I was helped by a map I'd printed off the internet. Damn, I love me some internet.

Anyway, this library was kind of unusual in that it was in the middle of a downtown shopping mall. The mall wasn't very big, in fact it looked like it wasn't doing very well.

I got to the library shortly after it opened at 9 a.m. By the way, I've deliberately chosen Tuesday for this little junket because the library was open later on Tuesdays, to 9 p.m. Why waste a trip, after all?

The library was multi-storey, and the place I wanted was on the top floor - the local history section. It was there that the old local newspapers were along with the old censuses and so on.

When I was there last they didn't have any microfilm readers that made hard copies, which was really annoying. I had to take down all the information longhand - including the chess games. However, since then they'd picked up a couple of more modern microfilm readers. I made sure of the fact by giving them a phone call in advance.

I really had no idea of how much work I'd be able to do. They only had two microfilm readers that made paper copies, and there was a one hour limit to how long you could use them. However, Tuesday is not a high traffic day so I was able to use the machine uninterrupted just about the whole day.

I had no idea how long the chess column in the Herald-Journal ran, but I was under the impression that it had run quite a long time. So I decided to start in June, 1941 and work my way backward. If I hit the beginning, I'd start again at July 1941 and progress forward.

The chess column ran in the Sunday paper, in the Sports section. That seems like an odd place for a chess column, but where else are you going to put it? I've seen chess columns on the "Women's Pages" and in the local news section.

As I was reading these pre-WW II newspapers, I was again struck with how much war news there was, and how much patriotic trumpeting there was. Once again, anyone who thought that the United States was actually going to stay out of the war was deluding themselves. In fact, a lot of it reminded me of how everyone was sounding after 9/11 and - GULP! - right now.

I ran across an article talking about how free speech was protected by the Bill of Rights but certain people shouldn't be allowed to "abuse the privilege." Of course, they were talking about German Bund people and other Axis supporters, but this was BEFORE Pearl Harbor. Kind of sounds like the noises the government is making right now.

I hadn't been working long before I made a discovery. The games and diagrams in the columns were numbered, and the number was not very big. That meant that the chess column, in 1941, was not very old. Well, that was a surprise. The numbering was also useful for tracking down succeeding columns - sometimes they would skip a week without warning, or move the column to the Monday paper for a week.

While I was working I noticed the differences between the Syracuse paper in 1941 and the Frown Town paper from the same period. Syracuse was a little more off the beaten track and not so much affected by what was happening in New York City. There were a lot of resort communities in the area, which were popular vacation destinations during the summer. There was lots and lots of pictures of people holding fish they had caught in the Sports section. Their copywriter really needed to work on his patter a bit. I'm sure even the people in Syracuse must have been tired of the caption: "THE ONE THAT DIDN'T GET AWAY."

I got to the very first chess column (February 4, 1940) around 2:30, so I figured that it was time to break for lunch. Luckily there was a food court in the mall below the library, so I could get food without even going outside. Even though it was what I would consider the end of the lunch rush the place was practically deserted. Obviously this mall was not doing very well. I got a salad and a smoothie at a "health food" kind of eatery. I was about 60% through the smoothie before I realized that I probably shouldn't be drinking it - it was probably pure carbohydrate. I could taste the sugar in it. Oh well!

I then went back up to the library to continue my research, now moving forward from July 1941. When I got back to the local history section, the microfilm reader was still unoccupied.

I'd kept working until a little before 5 p.m. Then I went outside to check on my car. I was parked in a pay lot, but I had told the guy I was going to be back at 2 p.m. when I went out for lunch. I wanted to make sure that the lot didn't lock up at five. When I got there I couldn't find any parking attendant at all, so I just took my car out and parked it on the street. I put an hour's worth of coinage in the parking meter, and then went back up to the library.

I hadn't been working very long before I got a surprise. The chess column ended abruptly on April 12, 1942. Actually, it didn't end, it just stopped. There was no mention that this was the last column, they just stopped appearing. I spent a little while combing the weeks after that for some sign of it, but there was nothing.

It's kind of sad - it's almost exactly what happened to the column in the Frown Town newspaper. One week it was there, the next - nothing. It was actually a national phenomenon - a lot of people turned to chess during the enforced idleness of the Great Depression but once the war started and the economy started jumping everyone was too busy making money for idle amusements like chess. I even checked the summer of 1943 when the U.S. Open - the premiere U.S. chess tournament - was held in Syracuse. There was nary a mention in the paper.

Just as I was wrapping up, one of the librarians asked if someone else could use the machine I was on because the second reader was acting up, and I said sure. His timing was perfect.

I have to say, even though Syracuse seemed kind of scary and unfriendly, the people in the library seemed nice. The microfilm reader was right near the front desk, so all day I was listening in on the conversations of people working there. They seemed to have amazing patience with the endless (and not very bright) questions of the mainly elderly patrons. In fact, in my travels I've found librarians in general to be very friendly and helpful.

So I was getting out of Syracuse much earlier than I thought I would. I got gas in the car, and headed out a little after 7 p.m. and got home a little after 9. To my surprise, I was able to actually eat dinner at home.

While I'm pleased with how smoothly the trip went, in spite of my lack of sleep, it was a little bit of a disappointment. The Syracuse chess column didn't go on nearly as long as I thought it did, and there really wasn't that much unique information in it as I thought there would be. There were a few local games, but most of the featured games seemed to have been gotten out of the chess magazines of the time, and I have many of those myself.

Still, I was curious, and I got that itch scratched. It's also taught me that trying to dig up local papers from cities where old chess tournaments happened is mainly a waste of time, unless they have a regular chess reporter. Live and learn.

Also, this was a good dry run for the trip down to Brooklyn, which I am planning to do next Tuesday. That should be a bit more of a challenge.