Nobody ever gave it a thought, in fact few even knew about it, but there were 900 US military advisers in South Vietnam. The seeds had been planted and in a few years things would change drastically...the impact on Americans would be huge.
Another top international news story was the top Nazi murderer of Jews, Adolf Eichmann, was captured by the Israelis in Argentina executed in Israel in 1962.
Except for the Vietnam thing which was to make such an impact in a few years, as 15-year-old none of that was all that important. I was more interested in the 1960 Cleveland Indians baseball team.
They finished in fourth place with a record of 76 wins and 78 losses, a whopping 21 games behind the New York Yankees. But the big news was this was the season of the infamous trade of the beloved 1959 home run king Rocky Colavito to the Detroit Tigers for the 1959 batting champion Harvey Kuenn. As it turned out, Kuenn wasn’t much help. The Indians finished the 1961 season in fifth with a record of 78–83, 30.5 games behind the New York Yankees.
On television there was a big brouhaha when late night TV talk show host Jack Paar got in a snit because his monologue had been edited the night before in favor of a three-minute news update. At the beginning of the show Parr walked out in front of the audience at the beginning of the show and announced that he was quitting, saying, "There's got to be a better way to make a living.” As it turned out, there wasn’t and after network executives apologized personally, Parr resumed hosting the program a month later.
In a first for US audiences, CBS broadcast the 1960 Winter and Summer Olympics. The popular shows we watched were Westerns: Gunsmoke, Wagon Train and Have Gun Will Travel. The Andy Griffith Show and The Real McCoys, both comedies, rounded out the top five.
I was playing postal chess in Class C (around 1500 Elo) with the Correspondence Chess League of America, and the following year played in my first OTB tournament, the state junior championship, scored +1 -2 =2 and got a rating of 1667.
In the summer of that year for the first and only time, the US won a world team championship ahead of the USSR. This achievement was doubly important because it happened in enemy territory during the Cold War. Also, it was the first time since the 1937 Olympiads that any American team had won a world championship.
Up until that time the USSR dominated top-flight chess and had won every Olympiad since it first participated in 1952. The USSR had also won four of the five world student team championships in which it had participated while the US team had entered a team three times and never finished higher than fifth.
The US team consisted of William Lombardy, Charles Kalme, Raymond Weinstein, Anthony Saidy, Edmar Mednis, and Eliot Hearst. USCF President Jerry Spann was the team captain. Only two years after winning this event Spann died of cancer in January 1968; he was only 55 years old.
Lombardy and Kalme played all 13 matches, Weinstein ten, Saidy and Mednis seven, and Hearst two.
Originally there were 15 teams but the Polish team never showed up. The countries playing were: Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, England, Finland, German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany), Holland, Hungary, Mongolia, Romania, Sweden, USA, USSR and Yugoslavia.
The big match up was, of course, the US vs. Russia. The results were:
Boris Spassky - William Lombardy
0-1, 29 moves
Charles Kalme - Alexander Nikitin
1-0, 75 moves
Yury Nikolaevsky – Raymond Weinstein
1-0, 37 moves
Anthony Saidy - Janis Klovans
Draw, 41 moves
This result meant that even if Russia scored 4-0 in the 14th round (the US team had a bye) that going into the last round the US would be 1.5 points ahead. As it turned out, going into the last round the US team had a 3 point lead over the Russians.
In the last round the US team was doing quite well against the Bulgarians when the Bulgarian team captain offered a draw on all four boards. Acceptance meant that the US would be World Champions so the offer was immediately accepted.
In an interesting turn of events, on board two Kalme and Milan Vukcevich of Yugoslavia shared top honors with 11.5-1.5 scores. Kalme’s only loss in the tournament had been to Vukcevich.
Going into the last round Vukcevich and Kalme were tied for the board prize and when he heard the US had accepted four draws, Vukcevich felt it would be unfair for him to try and win and gain the top board prize. In a gesture of sportsmanship, Vukcevich offered his German opponent a draw on the twelfth move.
In 1963 Vukcevich moved to the United States where he ended up a professor of metallurgy and later a chief engineer at General Electric in Cleveland, Ohio where he was a highly respected member of the Cleveland chess community.
Shortly after winning the team championship, Lombardy announced that he was entering a seminary to become a Catholic priest. Thereafter he played only occasionally, but ended up leaving the priesthood in a dispute over the mission of the church. He eventually got married and had a son, but things did not work out well and he spent his last days a miserable and bitter man...a far cry from the outgoing, friendly fellow I met at the 1975 US Championship.
Charles Kalme gave up chess to get his PhD in mathematics in 1967 and became interested in computers. He took early retirement and returned to Latvia where he died at the age of 62 in 2002. Some sources say the cause of his death is unknown while Eliot Hearst wrote that according to “reliable sources” it may have been the result of a mugging he suffered in Riga.
A few years after this event, around 1963 or 1964, Raymond Weinstein started exhibiting erratic behavior. He was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia and after attacking his psychology professor in Holland got deported. While living in a halfway house, Weinstein murdered his elderly roommate and has been confined to a mental institution ever since.
Anthony Saidy became a medical doctor who specialized in the treatment of tuberculosis patients. He wrote a couple of chess books, had one of the largest collections of chess books in the US and was one of Bobby Fischer’s few friends.
Edmar Mednis finished second to Boris Spassky in the 1955 World Junior Championship. With a degree in chemical engineering, he worked for a while as a stockbroker before becoming a chess professional. He is remembered as the first player to defeat Bobby Fischer in a US Championship. In February of 2002, while recovering from a minor operation, he developed pneumonia and suffered a fatal cardiac arrest at the age of 64. I had the pleasure of meeting Mednis once in the mid-1970s and what I remember most was that he was a very pleasant fellow. I also remember his wife as being a very nice lady. He also had a daughter, maybe ten years old, that kept hanging on her daddy.
Eliot Hearts successfully played in a lot of open tournaments on the East Coast but eventually devoted himself to his professional interests. To that end he gave up chess in 1965 in favor of teaching and doing research in the fields of experimental psychology, neuroscience, and the history of psychology. Hearst was another player whom I had the pleasure of meeting once and he, too, was a genuinely nice guy. Sadly, Hearst passed away in Tucson, Arizona on January 30, 2018, at the age of 85.
The following game is one of Kalme's most amazing games. His positional squeezes were often mixed with stunning tactics as seen in the following game against the 1958 Mongolian champion Suren Momo. Kalme got a decisive attack after black neglected his development.
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