2002-10-26 - 11:48 p.m.

What's Up In The Attic?

As I've mentioned earlier, I've been an obsessed little monkey digging up information about chess history. I feel that I'm working on a deadline, and not just because I'm going to be leaving the country soon. I feel that, day by day this information is slipping away. Information is lost, people forget, people die.

I know that in the past I've been as guilty as anyone else of letting the information about the past slip away. When my predecessor on the chess column died, his widow gave me a lot of his old books and magazines. These just sort of sat around for years until I got interested in them and decided to look what was inside. Now I'm kicking myself that I didn't ask to look through his personal papers too - I bet he had all his games from championships stretching back 40 years or more. I really wish I had that information now.

Another time I remember, years ago, an older fellow stopping by the chess club, mentioning that he had information on local chess news of the past, but at the time he was there I was caught up in a tournament and really didn't pay attention. I never followed up on it, and now that I'm going through the old club papers that man's name is cropping up all the time. He's long dead now - too bad I didn't take the time to talk to him while he was around.

So maybe guilt is fueling this, a little bit.

Because I'm going to be out of the country for a couple weeks, I have to get several column ahead, and they can't be time-sensitive. So, I figured, why not do a couple of columns on local chess history? That's stuff that can never go out of date.

Ironically, I've discovered that the best source for information was right under my nose, or to be more precise, right over my head. There are some boxes of old Frown Town club records up in my attic, and I just assumed that it was mostly junk - old financial records, pointless correspondence, and so on. I'd gone through the boxes some years before, looking for old games and I remember being amazed at how the chess club could produce so much paperwork, and yet so little of it was actual games. I found maybe ten whole games in the four boxes of stuff. Oh well.

Well, I DID find a copy of an old New York State Chess Association bulletin, and managed to turn the games in there into an article that won me a national chess journalism award. So maybe the stuff in the boxes wasn't TOTALLY useless.

Recently, however, I've been taking a closer look at the stuff that was up in the attic, and discovering that it wasn't as useless as I thought.

Most interesting were a couple of scrapbooks I found that had chess columns from one of the local papers from about 1938 to 1946. It sort of blows my mind that Frown Town actually had TWO papers in those days, a morning and an evening paper.

This chess column of sixty years ago is much more modest than mine, in fact it's SO modest that at no time do they ever mention who's writing it! The heading just reads "Frown Town Chess Club News" with no by line. I think I know who the author is, but it's pretty impressive that he wrote the column off and on for nine years with not a single personal mention. That's much more self-effacing than I could ever be! In fat, the only reason why I think I know who the writer is because someone was cited as the "Chess Editor" in an unrelated photograph that was also in the scrapbook.

The level of play also seemed to be a lot lower as well, but I think this was just a reflection if the author, who was not a very strong player. Also very irritating is that fact that when discussing local games he nearly always includes game fragments, not whole games. Still there are maybe a dozen full games, in all the columns I went through.

There are two things I've always wanted to do, as far as local chess history goes: find out when the Frown Town Chess Club was founded, and get a complete list of club champions. It's generally thought that the chess club may have been started in the late 1800s, and there is a semi-complete list of champions going back to 1938.

Well, using the stuff in the attic, I've been able to fill in the missing years in the list, and even push it back a bit - I now know who was club champion during World War I, and I've traced the club origins back to 1912 or 1909. I'm sure the information is out there, I just have to find it.

Speaking of finding stuff, while I was going through the boxes in the attic I found some MORE boxes of chess magazines. What kept me from looking at them too closely was the fact that they were all in plastic binders, and the plastic in them is starting to deteriorate. They are sticky. However, large chunks of things I thought were missing were right up there all along. There are none so blind...

I know this all sounds dry and boring, and a waste of time. I really find myself hard pressed to defend my recent intense interest in the subject, how I can tell you this, what I've found out can be turned into chess columns and articles, and those I get paid for. Money! That's something anyone can understand!