Nostalgia

Occasionally I like to take a look at some of my early games. Sometimes I cringe at the moves and other times I’m surprised to find that I actually came up with some pretty good ones. The following game was pretty typical of my play in the old days.

I was only about a year out of the US military and was attending school in Toledo, Ohio. I remember having a tiny one room apartment and having to share the bathroom with the guy in the next apartment. It wouldn’t have been so bad except he had a nasty habit of forgetting to flush the toilet. Fortunately he was not there long and an Army sergeant who was taking classes at the University of Toledo moved in and he was, as we used to say in the military, “squared away” and we became friends.

I remember my opponent as an older gentleman who lived, I think, in Kansas or Nebraska. I believe we were both rated as “Class A” players in Al Horowitz’ postal chess organization. There were some really good players who played in the Golden Knight events: guys like Hans Berliner, Robert H. Steinmeyer, Arthur Feuerstein, all of whom had played in the US Championship at one time or another as well as a couple of others who were very strong in both OTB and CC play.