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Chessville
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The Kennedy Kids Mary Elizabeth, Jon & Matt
How I Spent My Summer Vacation I visited the Chess Celebrities Hall of Fame. It is in a small building, in an out-of-the-way place where probably nobody much goes. But its treasures are enormous. There is the exact chair that Aaron Nimzovich, the hypermodern master, used to help him climb up onto a table to utter his defiant, wrenching words, after a humiliating loss, “Why must I lose to this Idiot??” Imagine! He apparently also threw his King, but the piece was not recovered, and so is not in the Hall. Nearby is a shot glass used by famous British Champion Joseph Henry Blackburne. It was filled and refilled during a simultaneous exhibition at the London Athaenum in 1881. Mister (or should I say “master”?) Blackburne must have been very thirsty on that day. Or they could have used a larger glass. It didn’t say. Going further, there is the slightly-worn return ship ticket for Paul Morphy’s return to the United States of America after his heroic victories over all comers (I think they meant chessplayers) in Europe. I am sure his opponents would have preferred that he had booked passage on the Titanic. At least coming over. Next to it is a used handkerchief (yuck!), once property of the German Adolf Anderssen. Many people considered him to be the best chess player in the world, until Paul beat him. Of course, Anderssen was sick for part of the match. That’s why the handkerchief. A pile of broken glass commemorates the time when World Champion Wilhelm Steinitz was tossed through a window by J. Blackburne, after an unfortunate dispute. “Defenestrate” is what you call throwing someone through a window, perhaps with the idea of killing him. Blackburne was also known as “The Black Death,” but I don’t think it was because of this incident. Fortunately, there is no blood to observe in the exhibit. There also were a lot of angry letters from Steinitz to a whole lot of guys, but they were in German so I had to take the guide’s word for it. World Champion Dr. Emanuel Lasker was a great reader. There are several bookmarks of his in the Chess Celebrity Hall of Fame to honor that. I think that’s very nice. I did not see a stethoscope or a bottle of pills, so I guess he wasn’t that kind of doctor. There is also a hand-written note to the physicist Albert Einstein, which has marked out equations like “E=mC4” and “E=mC3” but I think Dr. Lasker was having a laugh at the good scientist’s expense. At least that’s what my dad said. There is the all-squeezed-out tube of hair crème used by José Raúl Capablanca, who was apparently good-looking enough to be a movie star. Since he was once World Chess Champion, he was pretty good at chess, too. He was also a diplomat, which is fine use of your good-looking and calculating skills. He was also a bit of a roué, but my mom wouldn’t translate that for me. Well preserved in a plastic baggie are an actual couple of hairballs from one of World Champion Alexander Alekhine’s cats who liked to walk across the chessboard while he was playing a game. No wonder he was so good at playing complicated positions! (Check and Mate I think were their names. The cats, not the hairballs. But we had to hurry on, so I might be remembering wrong.) Max Euwe – another World Champion – is represented by the pencil he used to write down the moves of one of the games in his first match with Alekhine. You can tell he was under a lot of stress, because there are so many teeth marks in the wood. It takes a lot of concentration to win the World Chess Championship! There is another pencil with a whole lot more dents in it, and it’s broken into pieces, too. I think that was from the return World Championship Match that he lost. Mikhail Botvinnik was a representative of the New Soviet Man, and he not only was a calculating World Champion, he was also a computer geek. Wow! Who would have guessed? There are a couple of computer punch cards with his autograph on them. I’m not sure what punch cards are, what they have to do with computers, or why someone would sign them (because of all of the holes that let the ink through so you’re kind of writing on the table) but they must be important or they wouldn’t have been kept for display. Maybe his favorite opening move was R2-D2?? Did you know that chess players could sing? Well, Vassily Smyslov (yes, another World Champion) could sing opera! Still, he liked to play chess, and so he did. You would think he could have made more money and had more fame by singing all around the world, but I’m glad he stuck with chess, even if he wasn’t World Champion for very long. There is a sheet of music to represent him. It’s in Italian, I think, which many operas are. Everybody told World Champion Mikhail Tal to lay off the cigarettes and alcohol, and watch out for all those mind-bending tactics, but he didn’t listen, and now he’s dead. He played some mean wicked chess, maybe because he didn’t like all the nagging, or because people kept saying that he wasn’t “Tal enough” to be the best (that’s mean!), but he’s represented in the Hall of Fame by some cigarette butts and wine bottle corks. He deserved better. World Chess Champion Tigran Petrosian was deaf. Sort of. Anyway, he needed to use hearing aids to hear better, and he would turn them off when he had heard enough, thank you very much! A display has several hearing aid batteries from this sometimes quite confusing player. Remember the 1972 World Chess Championship match in Iceland, where Boris Spassky lost his title? There was a big controversy over maybe the use of spy equipment in the lights and places. The Americans were worried about the KGB, and the Russians were worried about the CIA. Know what they found in the lights? A couple of dead flies! They are in the Hall for all to see. Amazing! (Tests were not run to see if they were American or Russian flies.) Of course, American World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer is represented, too. There are a couple of classic snowballs. Who would have guessed that after winning the United States Chess Championship at the age of 14, he would have gone outside and thrown snowballs at the passing city busses? Unfortunately, that was in 1958, so the snowballs have melted by now. But the people in the Hall of Fame have preserved the water in a drinking glass. Since Anatoly Karpov and Gary Kasparov played so many games against each other, they’re represented by the two comfortable seat cushions that they sat, and sat, and sat on. The chairs must have been very hard! No wonder pictures of the two from that time had them scowling a lot. There’s lot more in the Chess Celebrity Hall of Fame, but I’m already over my two-page limit for this essay so I’ll finish. It’s neat. Go there. You’ll have fun. Index of Fiction at Chessville
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