2004-2009 Partners at the Simsbury Bridge Club Part 1

Posted on December 3, 2021 by Mike

Partners at Eno Hall. Continue reading →

I vividly remember my first night at the Simsbury Bridge Club. Paul Pearson had given me contact information for the director of the club, Paula Beauchamp (pronounced BOW shahmp). I told her that I would like to play on the following Wednesday, which was, I think, May 19 or perhaps May 12, 2004. She told me that the games were held at Eno Hall, located on the main street in Simsbury (Hopmeadow Street better know as Route 10/202). Parking was in the back, and the game, which was in the basement, could easily be reached from the parking lot via a handicap ramp. She told me to arrive a few minutes before the 6:30 starting time, and she would pair me up with someone.

I consulted MapQuest to try to figure out the best way to get there. I think that I may have driven on Route 20 all the way to the intersection with Route 202. There are three or four better routes, but I allowed plenty of time.

I located Paula, and she assigned me to play with Roz Sternberg. I had only played a few hands of bridge in the previous twenty-four years, and I remembered very little. I had relearned Stayman and Blackwood, and the course that Paul had taught at Fermi had familiarized me with five-card major openings, transfers, and negative doubles. Roz was accustomed to playing with rookies. She told me that jumps were weak, and everything else was mostly natural.

I also did not know how to keep score on the travelers. So, Roz had to sit North. We were assigned to table #3, which was right in front of the air conditioner that blasted away all evening. My South seat was directly before the fans. Cold air blew on my neck all evening as I sat there shivering. The opponents at the first table had to show me how to use the bidding box. I remember nothing about the hands; I was concentrating all my attention on following suit and bidding or leading only when it was my turn. I was proud that I had successfully avoided any director calls. I was unable to turn up a copy of the results, but I seem to remember that Roz reported that we finished about in the middle.

After that I played with Roz a few times and against her countless times. I don’t have any great stories about her play. For some reason she never came to Eno with a partner. That was a little strange because after she retired she mostly played at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) with a few steady partners.

Roz was employed as the IT director for the New Britain Public School System, which had one or two AS/400’s. Nobody there really knew too much about them. Several years after our initial game she found out that I had a lot of experience with AS/400’s. She asked me to come to her data center to see if I could help her with a problem. I can’t remember exactly what it entailed, but it was something rather tricky that I had previously encountered. Furthermore, I had documented my work-around. So, I went there, implemented the fix, and explained what I had done.

Roz then had me look at a few connectivity issues. I was less certain of my abilities in these areas, but when I left, everything seemed to be working the way that they wanted it. I considered this just a favor for a friend, but she insisted that TSI send her an invoice for my time. So, we did. It was for $100 or maybe $150. She probably had a budget for this sort of thing.

I was afraid that Roz would start calling me for technical support whenever they encountered a problem, but, in fact, she never asked again. My recollection is that within a year after my visit the school system replace the AS/400’s with a different system.

Peg Corbett¹ also never came to Eno with a partner. On the second or third Wednesday that I attended at the SBC I played with Peg, and we actually won a fraction of a masterpoint from the ACBL. Here is the published scoresheet:

Open Pairs Wednesday Eve Session May 26, 2004
 Scores after 24 boards  Average:   48.0      Section  A  North-South
 Pair    Pct   Score  Rank   MPs     
   4   57.81   55.50   1    0.60     Jean Seale - Sonja Smith
   3   56.77   54.50   2    0.42     Peg Corbett - Mike Wavada
   1   49.48   47.50                 Ellen Tabell - Tony Tabell
   2   46.88   45.00                 Don Verchick - Nancy Campbell
   5   39.06   37.50                 Carl Suhre - Dorothy Suhre
 Open Pairs Wednesday Eve Session May 26, 2004
 Scores after 24 boards  Average:   48.0      Section  A  East-West
 Pair    Pct   Score  Rank   MPs     
   2   55.00   52.80  1/2   0.51     Claire Tanzer - Alice Rowland
   5   55.00   52.80  1/2   0.51     Dorothy Clark - Roz Sternberg
   1   51.25   49.20                 Jerry Hirsch - Mel Hirsch
   4   50.63   48.60                 Maureen Denges - Pat Matthew
   6   50.63   48.60                 Marylou Pech - Russell Elmore
   3   37.50   36.00                 Louise Alvord - Carol Schaper

I am pretty sure that I played with Peg a handful of times. Most of them were not memorable, but on one occasion she seemed to be on another planet. She explained to me that she had taken her prescription allergy medication, and it made her a little loopy. Both her bidding and her play of the cards were abominable. We finished last.

Winning points with Peg was exciting. However, it was nothing compared to the thrill that I ever felt came a month or so later after I had been assigned by Paula to play with Russ Elmore a couple of times. He asked me to be his regular partner!

My first game with Russ was a unique experience. He handed me a one-page typed sheet—not a convention card—and informed me that this is what we would be playing. It was close to Standard American, the system popularized by Charles Goren, but there were a few significant differences. I remember that we did not open 1NT if we had a worthless doubleton in one of the suits.

I did not complain about the eccentricities. Russ had played much more bridge experience than I had. Maybe his approach was outdated, but at least we would agree on what we were doing. Besides, Russ was cool. He was much older than my fifty-six years, but he often came to the bridge games on his motorcycle!

I realized that the primary motive for Russ wanting me as a regular partner was to avoid being assigned to play with Roz or Peg, who would argue with him about using his sheet of paper as the basis for bidding and playing agreements. Ordinarily these are negotiated with both sides willing to give in on some things. Even so, I was ecstatic that someone actually agreed to play with me on a regular basis.

At the Christmas party in December of 2004 or 2005 Russ confided to me that he intended to open every hand with a bid of 1♠. Yes, this was a party, but no one was drunk. I, for one, still took the games at the SBC very seriously. Those Wednesday evening games were the only time that I got to play all week, and I was very conscious of how many masterpoints I had accumulated. So, I asked Russ to just bid his hand as usual, and he respected my request.

When I played with Russ I got in the habit of analyzing every hand afterwards. Since we did not have hand records (sheets of paper that shows the location of all fifty-two cards on deal), I could only go by how well we did when I played a hand vs. when Russ was declarer. We did much better when Russ played. I told this to Russ, and he laughed.

I bought a book called How to Play a Bridge Hand by William S. Root. It had hundreds of examples with quizzes at the end of each chapter. I converted these quiz question into 4×6″ cards—problem on the front and answer on the back—that I could study during lunch breaks at work. It did help; I got a little better.

I later made an interactive web page that included all of these problems for declarer play and included other interesting ones that I encountered over the years. I posted a link to it on the web site that I designed for the SBC. The problem page is located here.

If an odd number of people showed up on a Wednesday, Paula Beauchamp³ played with one of the players who came without a partner. Since she was a very skilled and experienced player, everyone who came without a partner—usually three to five of us—hoped to get to play with her. She had many chances to play with me, but she only picked me once.

I made few obvious mistakes, maybe even none. No, that was not likely. Let’s just say that I did not notice any errors. If Paula did, she did not mention it. We finished first with a very good score, and after I played one hand she said, “You played that like a surgeon!” My buttons were busting.

I once was surprised to see Paula in the terminal at Bradley International Airport. She had apparently just returned from a vacation, and I was on my way to visit a client. I don’t remember the date, and it is hard for me to place the time, too. I generally left very early in the morning, before any flights had arrived. I do remember that she was wearing a pair of those rubbery shoes with holes in them, Crocs.

Paula’s favorite movie was Life is Beautiful (La Vita è Bella) with Roberto Begnini. I had also seen this film. I sometimes called Paula Principessa, the term of endearment used by Begnini’s character for his wife. She liked the way that I pronounced it.

I persuaded my friend Tom Corcoran to play with me at the SBC five or six times. He worked in Simsbury at the time, and so it was not much of an inconvenience for him. He had not played at all since he graduated from Brown in 1972.

I was surprised to find when researching this entry that we actually finished first at least twice. However, those occasions are not the ones that stand out in my memory. Once Tom opened 2♣, which showed a very powerful hand with more than half of the aces and face cards. In contrast, an opening bid at the two-level in any of the other suits show a weak hand with six cards in the bid suit. Tom had intended to show a weak hand with clubs. Unfortunately, I had a pretty good hand, and I did not give up on the possibility of bidding a slam (committing to win twelve or thirteen tricks) until he passed my 5NT bid. We ended up five or six tricks short for a big penalty.

Tom, who was only two years younger than I, stopped playing after a few months. The only remark he made was “Those people are sure old.”

When Russ moved away I had to find a new partner. I had noticed that in 2015 two guys, Roger Holmes and Dick Benedict, began playing and did pretty well. After a month or two Roger seemed to stop attending, and Dick played much less frequently and with different partners. I sent Dick an email that explained my situation and asked him if he would consider playing with me. I told him that I knew all of the conventions on the Yellow Card⁴, and I was willing to learn new ones. He responded enthusiastically.

June 9, 1953 could have been Dick’s last day.

Dick and I played together for several years at the SBC, at the HBC whenever I got a chance on a weekday, and at tournaments that were within driving distance. We got to be pretty close. I learned about his two ex-wives, one dead and one divorced, his two daughters, and the father with whom he had played cribbage. I learned a lot about the tornado in Worcester from which Dick’s father rescued him. I also learned from Dick that New Hampshire was the best place to buy liquor. Dick stocked up on The Famous Grouse whenever we drove up to Nashua for a tournament.

Dick and I played on many teams together. In team games⁵ four people form a team. One pair plays East-West and the other plays North-South. You play a match against another team. Your East-West pair plays a set of hands against their North-South pair and your North-South plays the same hands against their East-West. Two types of team games were bracketed. Between eight and sixteen teams with similar masterpoint totals played against one another in either a knockout or Swiss format. Our foursome concentrated on these bracketed games so that we did not encounter the really good players.

Usually Dick and I played together. He was good at convincing people to play with us at tournaments. Our best results came when playing with Robert Klopp⁶, who lived at the Duncan Hotel in New Haven, and Brenda Harvey⁷ from Orange, CT. I remember sending email to my dad in Kansas City from the Panera Bread in Nashua, NH, when we had won two knockouts in a row. I think that Robert Klopp may have already been a Life Master when we started, but both Dick and Brenda Harvey achieved that rank at tournaments in which our foursome played as a team.

Some of our results were spectacular. I remember that in one Bracketed Swiss at a regional tournament we won our first six rounds by such lopsided margins that we had built up an insuperable margin. We actually could have gone home without playing the final round, which we also won. However, we did not always do so well. At an Open Swiss at a sectional in Auburn, MA, we finished dead last out of twenty-five or thirty teams. Neither Robert nor Brenda played with us on either of these occasions.

Dick was not sitting across from me when I made Life Master. At the time the requirement for that rank was 300 total masterpoints that had to include some number of silver and gold points that could only be won at tournaments. In late December of 2009 I had enough silver and gold, but I was a small fraction of a point short of 300. I informed Helen Pawlowski (pahv LOFF skee), the director of the SBC game at the time, about my status before the game on December 23. She immediately declared the game a “club championship”, which meant that extra points would be rewarded.

Unfortunately, both Dick and I played poorly; he was bad, but I was worse. I made a really stupid bid when playing against Claire Tanzer, who never said a bad word about anyone. She remarked that if I played like that I did not deserve to make Life Master. She was right.

However, deservedly or not, I was awarded the necessary points at the last Saturday game in December at the HBC after playing with Tom Gerchman. In those days it took the director a few minutes to enter all the scores in the computer. Everyone else had already left by the time the results were posted, and it was confirmed that Tom and I had scored well enough to earn the needed points. There was no one to celebrate with.

There was a game scheduled for that Sunday at the HBC, and, because I had set a goal of making Life Master before the end of the year, I was scheduled to play. However, the Sunday game got snowed out. So, I achieved my goal at the last possible game of the year.

Dick was, however, my partner for my Life Master parties at both the SBC and the HBC. At the SBC he gave a little speech in which he announced that I had called him up and told him something—I don’t remember what. I Immediately denounced that as a damnable lie, and asked the group whether I had ever called any of them on the phone. No one spoke up. Of course, I probably did say whatever it was that he claimed that I had said, but I never talked with Dick on a telephone. Dick and I corresponded only by email and in person. In fact, I have almost never called anyone about bridge.

My LM party at the HBC was a unique occasion for at least three reasons. In the first place it was held on a Friday evening in March 2010. I know of no other Friday evening game ever held there. Although I sat North across from Dick in the “throne” reserved for the honoree, he was only there for three hands. The format used that night involved individual scoring. Everyone played with seven or eight different partners. Only the Norths stayed at the same table. I know of no other occasion in which that format was used at the HBC.

There was one other odd thing about it. I won! Well, officially I tied with Cecilia Vasel, but I discovered later that on one hand I had made a mistake in scoring⁸ in the opponents’ favor. The honoree almost never does well in this game; there are too many distractions. Perhaps on that evening everyone was distracted by the weird format.

Dick and I stopped playing together later in 2010. I made a sarcastic comment when he passed what was—-to my way of thinking—clearly a control-showing cue bid. He took offense, which was not unreasonable. There was no great rancor. In fact, we did play together occasionally after that. He moved to Bradenton, FL, at some point in the teens. When he came back to Connecticut to visit we usually paired up at least once.

Dick introduced me to tournament bridge. Four of us went to the District 3 tournament in Danbury, CT. I played with Dick, and Inge Schuele played with Virginia Labbadia. The team that we played in the first round had more than ten times as many points as we did. The guys we played against used the Mini-Roman convention. I had never heard of it, but using the 2♦ opening bid to describe a hand with three four-card suits and 11-15 points seemed to me like a great idea at the time. In fact, however, it is one of the few well-known conventions that I have never played.

I thought that Dick and I had performed reasonably well against the guys, but we lost the match by a lot. So, we needed either to drive back home or find another event for the afternoon session.

On the schedule we found a 199er game in the afternoon. Inge and I qualified to play in it, but Dick and Virginia had too many points. They played together in some kind of unlimited game.

Things went very well for Inge and me. We ended up in first place, and it was not even close. Our photos were printed in the tournament’s Daily Bulletin, and we each got a small trophy, the first bridge trophy that I ever won, and the only one that they let me keep.

I have a couple of other very vivid memory of playing with Dick. I remember that I earned my final gold points in one of the first Gold Rush Pairs events ever held in New England. In the afternoon session we bid and made 7NT on the first hand and held on to win our section.

The other memory is literally painful. We were playing in a pairs game in Danbury, and something was wrong with my neck. Every five or ten minutes I would—without any warning—experience a sharp pang there. I took some Advil for it, but it did not seem to help much. I found it very difficult to concentrate. We finished the event, but we did not do well.

The plan had been for me to stay overnight at Dick’s house in Avon and ride back with him to Danbury for another event on Sunday. I told him that I did not want to play again until the neck pain ceased. He agreed that that was a good idea. I rested the next day, and the pain disappeared, never to return.

Folded traveler in board and traveler with scores.

Over the years I have often told people that the most important thing that I learned from playing with Dick Benedict was the preferred method of folding the “travelers”, the score sheets that traveled with the boards that contained the cards from one table to the next. The only really important thing was for the board numbers (and almost nothing else) to be visible, but Dick’s method was definitely the easiest, most reliable, and most esthetically pleasing.

In 2009 I teamed up with a young guy named Steve Smith. I knew his mother Sonja, who was a fine tournament player and the best regular player at the SBC. Steve worked at Mass Mutual as an actuary. He was an FSA, but his main interest was finance, not insurance. Steve and I were a good match. I learned that he had been a successful debater in high school, but he did not participate in the rigorous type of policy debate that I did.

Steve lived in the area just north and west of the park.

Steve owned a house in the Forest Park section of Springfield. He rented out two of the bedrooms to other guys. It was not quite the Animal House, but I never knew what to expect when I picked him up to go to a tournament. He often forgot to bring cash, which was the only form of payment most tournaments accepted.

Playing with Steve was nothing like playing with Dick. Dick was the model of stability; Steve was up for anything.

Steve and I played together on a regular basis at the SBC and also in tournaments quite a few times. Considering how little experience we had, we had an extraordinary record . The highlight was the afternoon-evening of Saturday October 10 at the Sturbridge Host Hotel in Sturbridge, MA. Steve and I were playing in the qualifying tournament for Flight C of the North American Pairs, a national championship with three separate divisions, called “flights”. Three teams would qualify from our C Flight to represent New England in the national finals in Reno in March of 2010.

We played fairly well in the first session. I think that our score was a little above 50 percent. We ate supper at the Oxhead Tavern, which is adjacent to the hotel, with Steve’s mother Sonja, her partner David Rock, and two guys from New Hampshire, Bruce Downing and Mark Conner. Sonja, David, and the NH guys were playing in the B or A flight.

We needed to make up quite a bit of ground in the evening session to have any chance of qualifying. Fortunately, we caught fire in the second session. We actually turned in the best score of any pair.

In those days the directors still tabulated the results from scores recorded on pieces of paper. Therefore, it took them a fairly long time to enter and check the results. When they finally posted them, we had finished third. We were qualified for the North American Bridge Championships (NABC) in Reno!

Actually there was still one hurdle. Mark Aquino, who was the district’s NAP/GNT coordinator, called me and asked if Steve had qualified at a club game. I told him that he had done so at the HBC; I even provided him with the date and time. He said that it did not appear that Steve had won any points. I agreed that he had not, but he did earn a “Q” on the results page. I knew where to find it on the Internet and sent Mark a copy.

As it turned, out the team with the best score in our flight in Sturbridge—a couple of guys whom I had never seen at a tournament—participated even though they had not qualified at a club game. They were disqualified, and we moved up to second place. As I recall, the district paid us $100 each to play in the tournament in Reno.

Steve and I both were still working. In fact, he had been in college at the University of South Carolina just a few years earlier. So, we could only play one or two sessions per week to try to get better by the time that we played in Reno. I thought that it would be a good idea if we played a system that was somewhat different from what most people played. I bought two books on playing systems based on weak 1NT opening bids. We settled on an approach outlined in one of them. In those days my memory still worked, and Steve, as I mentioned, was very adaptable.

Steve and I had a great time in Reno. On Wednesday March 17 we boarded our Southwest flight to Las Vegas and changed planes. On the last leg—the short flight from Las Vegas to Reno—-I sat in the window seat and studied (or at least pretended to study) my Russian flash cards⁹, and Steve sat on the aisle. The middle seat was not occupied until the plane was almost ready to take off. A woman of about Steve’s age (or even younger) with enormous gazoingies settled there. Steve chatted her up a bit. I must admit that I listened; her answers to most of his queries were completely off the chart. Steve was remarkably adept at keeping a straight face during the interview.

The tournament was at a resort hotel/casino a few miles south of downtown Reno. We planned to play in three events—the NAP and Red Ribbon Pairs, both of which were scheduled for afternoon-evenings, and a compact knockout that was scheduled for two mornings. The Red Ribbon Pairs were held on Thursday and Friday March 18-19. The NAP was on Saturday and Sunday. Here are a few of my most vivid memories of the tournament:

The first night that we were there we were invited to a social gathering sponsored by District 25 (New England) and hosted by Helen Pawlowski and Steve’s mom. This was the first time that I ever met Rich and Sandy DeMartino. Rich was the District Director, and Sandy was (maybe not yet in 2010) chairman of the national Goodwill Committee. We told Rich which events we intended to play in. He opined that our schedule might be too difficult for first-timers. We didn’t care.
The Red Ribbon Pairs was the first time that I ever seen a Bridgemate, the hand-held battery-powered electronic scoring device. Tournaments in New England did not use them yet. I sat North and had to figure out how to operate it. It made me very nervous. I feel certain that it affected my play. I should have just switched positions with Steve. He was much more familiar with learning how to use new electronic equipment. We were well below 50 percent in the afternoon session. We did a little better in the evening, but we missed the cut for the second day. We did make friends with a few people in our sections, however. People thought that we were a father-son team.
We played in a compact knockout in morning sessions on Friday and Saturday. Our teammates were a father-daughter pair from Michigan who had only played together online. They lived in the same state, but they decided to go to Nevada to play face-to-face. Our team won both of its matches in the morning. So, we qualified to play the second half on Saturday.
At some point I remember going for a fairly long run in the area. There was not much to see.
I think that on Friday Steve and I ran into Ron Briggs and Andre Wiejacki (vee YAH skee), the other pair representing New England. Ron was a little bristly, but Andre and I became pretty good friends.
We played in a pairs game, I think, on Friday. I seem to remember that a woman criticized me for not explaining one of our conventions properly.
On Saturday morning we easily won the semi-final match of the compact knockout. In the finals we faced a husband-wife team from Texas. I made a serious mistake early in the match, and I was afraid that I had blown it for our teammates. However, we ended up winning by just a few International Match Points. We each won a clear coffee mug with the ACBL logo on one side and the tournament’s logo on the other. I still have mine. In 2021 I drink tea out of it almost every day.
It was really exciting to play in the NAP. The directors made everyone who had a cell phone or other electronic device turn it in before play started. The competition was not as tough as in the Red Ribbon Pairs, and once again we did better in the evening, but we did not make it to the second day of this event either.
We decided to play in the huge B/C/D Swiss on Sunday morning. Our teammates were a pair of guys from the DC area whom we had met in the NAP. Our team got off to a strong start, which is not necessarily a good idea for a team in the lowest strat of a Swiss. Steve and I were very tired. We both made stupid mistakes for which we had to apologize to our teammates. Steve started to set his hand down as dummy twice when he was actually the declarer. My mistakes were more subtle but also more costly.
Helen, who had a rental car, took us into town one evening for supper at an Armenian restaurant. I can’t say that I thought too much of it.

Our flight back also went through Las Vegas. Steve and I sat a couple of rows behind superstars Jeff Meckstroth and Mark Lair. Meckstroth boarded first and sat in the aisle seat looking ferocious. Lair boarded much later and quickly settled into the adjacent seat that Meckstroth had been guarding.

The Crowne Plaza calls it “The Garden Pavilion”.

I remember one other great experience playing with Steve. It was on Sunday at the first tournament held at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick, RI. We were in the big tent playing in the bracketed Swiss with Marcia West and Paula Najarian. In the last round we played against Ron Briggs’ team, which was in first place. We found ourselves in second, but we were within striking distance. On the last hand Steve had bid an impossible 4♥ contract. I was dummy watching Steve futilely play the last five or six cards. I observed that Ron had absentmindedly discarded a club on one of Steve’s hearts and then followed suit on the next round of hearts. The dummy is not allowed to speak until the last card has been played. So, I unobtrusively moved that trick out of alignment by a fraction of an inch. When the hand was over, I drew attention to the revoke, and we ended up winning both the match and the event by the narrowest of margins.

I have not seen Steve since he accepted a job in New York City working for Goldman Sachs. I seem to recall that Sonja said that he got married. He and I follow each other on Twitter, but his account is not very active. I could find no photos of him on the Internet.

Photo of the 2004 Xmas party: Dorothy Clark is on the left; Shirley Schienman is in the seat in which I sat on the first night.

I played with at least five other people in those early years at the SBC. I played exactly once with Bob Nuckols, Dorothy Clark, and Sonja Smith. I don’t remember anything about the games with Bob and Sonja. I remember one hand in which Dorothy and I were on defense. I led a very low card in a suit that I knew that she could ruff. The fact that my card was low should have told her to lead the lower of the two side suits back to me, but she led the other side suit. When I mentioned it to her, she admitted that she was not good at noticing suit-preference signals.

I played several times with Sonja at the HBC and once or twice in tournaments. On one occasion I was scheduled to play with her at the HBC, but I had to cancel because of a severely upset stomach probably due to food poisoning of some sort. By lunch time I felt fine. This was one of the very few times that I missed a game because of illness.

I played two or three times with Paul Pearson. He and his wife came to my Life Master party at the SBC. Much more about my relationship with Paul is detailed here.

Jerry Hirsch started playing at the SBC in 2009 a few weeks before I did. We were partners a few times at the SBC, a few times at the HBC, and also at a few tournaments. I probably played against Jerry more often than any other bridge player. At the SBC Christmas party one year Jerry took a photo of me wearing a gigantic red Christmas bow as a tie. He had the photo blown up to poster size, and he gave it to me as a present. In 2021 it still is prominently displayed in our living room.

Jerry and I played together in at least one qualifier for the NAP and the Grand National Teams (GNT). We never made it to either national event, but one year we finished third in the GNT qualifier, and in the last round of the Swiss we defeated the team that won the event. Our teammates were Dave Landsberg¹⁰ and Dan Koepf.

Jerry kept a small piece of paper in his convention card holder with one word written on it: “FUN!”. I occasionally needed to be reminded of the primary reason for which we all played at such a frustrating game for so many years.

Every holiday season Jerry took on the responsibility of taking up a collection for a gift for the directors. As far as I know, no one asked him to do it.

1. Peg Corbett, who was a regular attendee at the club, stopped playing suddenly. Tom Gerchman, who started each day by reading the obituary page in the Courant, informed me she had died.

2. Russ Elmore and I stopped playing together when he moved to New Hampshire. However, he must have moved back to the Berkshires a few years later. I saw him playing at a sectional tournament in Great Barrington, MA. This really surprised me because Russ never showed any interest in tournaments while I was playing with him. I approached him and reintroduced myself. He said that he remembered me, but at the time he did not seem to.

3. At some point Paula Beauchamp and Larry Wallowitz, a teacher and director at the HBC, moved to Bradenton, FL. I think that this occurred in the early teens. This raised a lot of eyebrows at the HBC. Most people, myself included, did not even know that they were “an item”. Larry died after they had been there a few years. I did not have many dealings with Larry, but I remember attending a talk that he gave to novices about opening leads. One thing that he said really hit home: “It’s OK to finesse your partner, but it is not OK to finesse yourself.” For example, if you have a king of a suit, and you suspect that the declarer (on your right) has the queen, it is a terrible idea to lead that suit. Paula remained in Florida, but she returned to Connecticut and played at the HBC a few times.

4. The Yellow Card is a piece of paper that was designed by the ACBL to provide a set of conventions that could be used in casual partnerships, new partnerships, or specific events such as individual tournaments. It is also used by a fairly large number of pairs who just do not like to memorize conventions.

5. Details about the mechanics of team games have been explained here.

6. Robert Klopp died in, I think 2014, not too long after the four of us stopped playing together at tournaments. He did not drive a car, and he brought his own food to tournaments to save money.

7. I played with Brenda Harvey at a sectional tournament in Connecticut at least once. She moved to Saint Augustine, FL. She remains an active bridge player in 2021.

8. In duplicate bridge North traditionally keeps score. Tradition at the HBC insisted that the new LM sat North at table #1. At the time I had almost never sat North.

9. In August of 2010 Sue and I accompanied Tom and Patti Corcoran on a river cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow. It is described in some detail here. I studied the language pretty diligently for several months, but I was seldom able to communicate with Russians outside of the tourist industry, and all of them spoke—and preferred—English.

10. My partnership with Dave Landsberg is described here.

2004 Getting Back into Bridge

Posted on December 1, 2021 by Mike

Paul Pearson led me back tp the world’s greatest card game. Continue reading →

Between 1970—-when I left college—and 2003 the game of bridge was not really part of my life. However, every so often I thought about it and wondered how the game might have evolved. At the same time I was frustrated with my lack of friends locally. In fact, I really only had one, Tom Corcoran, and he was quite busy with his job and family. I wanted the opportunity to be around people with whom I could have intelligent conversations. The people at TSI sort of qualified, but I was the boss; it was difficult to become true friends with the employees.

I had already been taking classes in Italian at Enfield High School. These classes were sponsored by the town’s Continuing Education department. I enjoyed that experience, which is described here.

Twice a year the Enfield school systems mailed to its residents a flyer that described the offerings for the upcoming term. In the one for the classes beginning in January of 2004 I noticed that two bridge classes were being offered—one for beginners and one for those who had already taken the beginning class. Of course, I had not taken the beginning class yet, but I signed up for the latter one anyway. Unlike the Italian classes, this one was at Enfield’s newer and more convenient high school, Enrico Fermi¹, less than a mile from my house and right on my usual jogging route.

I found this old photo of Paul giving the class at Fermi. I don’t recognize the seated lady.

At the first class I met the instructor, Paul Pearson, who at the time was, I seem to remember, a Bronze Life Master. There were six or eight others in the class—all couples. None was as serious as I was at getting back into the game. Paul was surprised to learn that I had played a little duplicate bridge² thirty or so years earlier. I think that I may have played in one team match in the dorm at Michigan, too. The other students in Paul’s class wanted to be able to play with their friends or relatives once or twice a year. One couple even remarked that they did not need to learn how to keep score because their friends always kept score.

Paul used a pamphlet-sized book that explained how to bid using five-card major suits (hearts and spades). When I was learning to play the game people began the process of bidding by selecting their “best” suit, a somewhat amorphous way of combining length (number of cards in the suit), strength (Ace=4; King=3; Queen=2; Jack-1), and shortness (singletons, doubletons, and voids). In the modern approach bidding a major suit guaranteed—with almost no exceptions—at least five of the suit that was named in the opening bid. A-K-Q-J was no good; 6-5-4-3-2 was fine. The strength of the hand was measured separately. Minor suits and notrump had different rules.

In the sixties this rock-crusher might have been opened 2♦. The standard approach in 2021 recommends 2♣.

When I had learned to play bridge back in the sixties two-level bids were reserved for very strong hands. By 2000 most players in North America used all of these bids (except 2♣) to describe hands that were too weak to open at the one-level, but featured six cards in the bid suit.

By the time that I graduated from college in 1970 I had learned a different system, the Big Club promulgated by Howard Schenken. In this system all strong hands were opened with the lowest possible bid, 1♣. I considered this approach vastly superior to what everyone else was playing, and I felt certain that by the twenty-first century everyone would be using something similar. I was wrong. The only major changes to the basic requirements for standard bidding were the two that Paul taught us—five-card majors and weak two bids.

I later came to understand that most of the other holes in the standard bidding system that I had recognized when I was in college had been addressed by specific conventions. Whereas in the sixties most players thrived with only a couple of conventions, in the twenty-first century there were dozens of widely used conventions to choose from and several hundred exotic ones.

I cannot remember too many details of what Paul actually taught us in class. He recognized that it was unrealistic to expect any of us to be competent at the game after only a few hours of lessons. My most vivid memory of the classes occurred once when Paul was not even present in the room. For some reason we had gathered at the Enfield Senior Center that week to play a few hands. My partner was Paul’s wife, Sue, who was also a Life Master. I don’t remember the opponents. Four of us played at card table in a small elegant room that had a functioning fireplace.

Paul had set up a few hands for the class to play that evening. On one of them I was the declarer. I remember exclaiming to anyone who would listen, “There’s an Endplay³ here, and it looks like it will work!” Sure enough, I deliberately allowed one of the opponents to capture a trick and thereby won two in return.

If North opened 1♣, East could use 2NT to show diamonds and hearts.

Paul encouraged us to read the Courant‘s daily bridge column. I recall that one of the answers to a bidding question that I encountered there was a 2NT bid that I did not understand at all. I asked about it in class. Paul explained that it was a convention known as the Unusual Notrump that allowed the player to show two five-card suits with just one bid. I was delighted to learn that there was such a marvelous invention. I remember telling Paul that I did not think that I could stop myself from using it.

I recalled that I had practiced back in the sixties using a contraption called Autobridge, which was endorsed and marketed by Charles Goren himself. I still had it when I took the class. However, it did not age well. The play of the hands was still instructive, but even someone who knew as little as I did could tell that the recommended bidding was not optimal.

Paul knew about Autobridge. He had used it himself back in the sixties. He said that there were now computerized systems that allowed the user to specify which set of conventions were being used—both by the player and his computerized partner and by the robotics opponents.

Several of these computer games were available for purchase. The one that Paul recommended, Bridge Baron, included literally thousands of hands that had been played at actual tournaments. You could compare your performance with that of the rest of the field. What a great idea!

I promptly purchased a copy of Bridge Baron 15 and installed it on my laptop. I used it to improve both my bidding and my play. I played every hand from every tournament—some of them multiple times. I also practiced the use of many new conventions in a special set of programs in BB 15 designed for that purpose. The best part was that I could use it in in the otherwise wasted hours that I spent in airports and on airplanes.

After classes I usually stayed around to talk with Paul for a few minutes. After our very last session I informed him that I felt that I needed to play some hands on a regular basis. He asked me if I just “wanted to pitch cards”? If so, there was a weekly game at the Senior Center. I said that I really wanted to play in a serious duplicate game even though I knew that I would be overmatched at first.

Paul said that the best games were at the Hartford Bridge Club, but that might not be a feasible option until I had a regular partner. He recommended the weekly Wednesday evening game in Simsbury, CT, which was about a thirty minute drive from Enfield. He said that the club’s director, Paula Beauchamp, guaranteed a partner for everyone who attended. If an odd number of people showed up, she would participate as partner of one of the attendees. Paul provided me with contact information for her.

He also informed me that most of the best players in the Hartford area were either actuaries or computer programmers. I told him that I had worked as an actuary for two years, and I had been a software developer for more than twenty. He told me that he had been a programmer, too, but he had learned to program using Assembler, which, as I understood it, was only one step above programming with a soldering iron.

I eagerly got in touch with Paula via email. I told her that I would like to play in her game at the SBC, but I needed a partner. I also noted that I was at that time taking Italian classes on Wednesday evenings. That spurred her curiosity. My last class would be in early May, a few weeks away. She sent me directions to Eno Hall and advice about where to park. A description of my experience that first night is posted here.

For several years I wrote to Paul whenever I encountered a puzzling bridge situation. That often happened when I began playing in the much tougher Tuesday evening games at the HBC and even more often when I began attending tournaments. Paul always answered my emails, and he always gave me good advice. He also warned me about some players at the HBC whose advice should definitely not be heeded.

Paul told me about a few approaches to bidding that I did not know from my earlier encounters with the game. He introduced me to the difficult (but absolutely critical) concept of the LAW of total tricks⁴. I later dug up the details on my own. I also learned that the Rule of 20 had more or less supplanted simple point counts for evaluating hands for the purpose of opening the bidding.

Over the years I played a few times with Paul Pearson both at the SBC and at tournaments. I remember that we played together in a Swiss at a Connecticut Sectional. Our teammates were Michele Raviele and Joan Brault.

The last time that I played with Paul was—by far—the best. We played together in the Open Pairs game at the Fiesta Regional in Warwick, RI, on Friday, September 4, 2015. The event had three strats, labeled A, B, and C. We were a C team, which meant that our total masterpoints placed us roughly in the bottom third of the participants. Fifty-eight teams participated. We finished fifth overall and ahead of all of the players in both the B strat and the C strat. The pairs that finished ahead of us had at least ten times as many masterpoints as we did.

We earned 13.39 masterpoints for one day’s work! I remember only two of the hands. They were against very good players who had doubled our contract. I had to declare both of them, and I made the bid both times. I can’t say that I made any brilliant or heroic plays, but I did not choke either.

My wife Sue took this photo of Paul and me after our epic game.

Paul invited me to play with him in the equivalent pairs game in 2016, but I had already committed to play in a team event on the same day. Paul died later that year. His obituary is here. My wife Sue and I attended his funeral at the Congregational Church at the corner of South Road and Route 5 in Enfield.

While I was still taking Paul’s classes or shortly thereafter I went to Barnes and Noble looking for books to help me try to catch up. The selection wasn’t great, which surprised me. The first three books that I bought were 100 Winning Duplicate Tips by Ron Klinger, an expert from Australia and two books by William S. Root—one on bidding conventions and the other on declarer play. I bought many more books over the years. The ones that I liked the best are listed here.

A few years after Paul died I received a telephone call from Sue Pearson. She told me that she wanted to donate Paul’s collection of bridge books. She said that someone at the HBC claimed that they did not have any room for more books. I assured her that I would find a good home for them.

I drove over to Sue’s house and picked up a duffel bag full of books. Ones that interested me that I had not read I put in my own library. A few I gave to my wife. The books that I already had in my own collection I brought to the HBC and placed on the shelves without asking permission. There was plenty of room for them.

1. In 2010 Enfield decided to consolidate its two high schools into one. This may have saved the town money. However, what never made sense to me was why the surviving school was Enfield High. Fermi was much newer, much nicer, and much more centrally located.It also had plenty of land available for expansion. Enfield High, on the other hand, was right next to the river, rather dumpy, and very close to the worst part of town. The explanation may be contained in a report of toxic chemicals found on the land surrounding the building, as is detailed here.

2. There are many varieties of bridge. The form that swept the world in the twentieth century and caused many people to flunk out of college was rubber bridge. The North-South pair plays against the East-West pair. The cards are shuffled, dealt, and played. The same deck is used for many hands. Usually, two decks are used so that one can be shuffled (“made” in bridge lingo) while the other is dealt. The details are described here. Duplicate bridge attempts to remove as much of the chance elements. The North-South team’s results are compared with other North-South teams playing the same cards. More details can be read here.

3. The Endplay derives its name from the fact that it usually occurs near the end of the hand. A better name is Throw-in Play. The Wikipedia write-up of the technique is here.

4. A man named Jean-René Vernes determined by researching a large number of hands that when both sides have approximately equal strength the total number of tricks available when each side plays in its longest suit is roughly equal to the number of trumps in those two suits. So, if one side’s longest suit contains eight hearts, and the opposing side’s longest suit has nine spades, the LAW predicts that there are seventeen tricks in the hand. If the first side can make nine tricks with hearts as trump, the other side can expect to take eight tricks with spades as trump.

Of course the law does not always work. Larry Cohen’s seminal work, To Bid or Not to Bid, lists three negative adjustments and three positive adjustments that encompass most exceptions.

A commonly used corollary to the LAW asserts that in a competitive auction each side should bid to the combined number of trumps held by both partners. So, if North-South suspect that they have eight spades, they should bid to at least 2♠ as quickly as possible. Many people thing that the corollary is the LAW. However, unlike the LAW, the corollary is an artifact of the way that duplicate bridge is scored. It is much more successful when the side using it is not vulnerable.

1962-1966 Miscellaneous Part 2: Outside of School

Posted on August 15, 2020 by Mike

Other events Continue reading →

From the front the house looks pretty much the same as in 1962. — From the front 8800 Fairway looks pretty much the same as in 1962, but two bedrooms and a bathroom were added to the back. My parents paid $35,000 in 1962. It is now worth $894,000.

We moved from Prairie Village to Leawood at some point during the summer of 1962. This allowed me to walk to and from Rockhurst High School. My sister Jamie went to first grade at Curé of Ars¹ school, a brand new parish and school that was about 1.3 miles southwest of our house.

Boy Scouts: I was still in my original troop (#295) during the summer of 1962. I went to Camp Nash with that troop during the summer. By the end of the summer I needed only one merit badge to attain the rank of eagle.

I learned from the weekly bulletin at church that a new troop would be forming at Curé of Ars, #395. I signed up as one of the founding members. Most of the fathers running the new troop were former members of St. Ann’s parish in Prairie Village.

One scout in particular, Rob Runnels, was very disappointed to learn that he would not be the first eagle scout in the new troop. He was at least a year behind me.

I finished the requirements at some point in my freshman year. I needed only to go before a Board of Review of three officials from other troops. I don’t know why, but they did not like my attitude. They dressed me down for being, I guess, too flippant. Eventually they approved me after I promised to help someone else achieve the rank. Many guys quit immediately after becoming eagles, but that was never my intention.

I went to Camp Nash in 1963 with Troop 395. I was either Senior Patrol Leader or Junior Assistant Scoutmaster. Rob was the other one.

The neighborhood: Our new house was (and still is) in a very nice neighborhood. All the bedrooms were a little larger than those of our previous dwelling, and we also had a family room, a dining room, a fireplace, a double garage, a basement, a patio, central air conditioning, a patio, and a huge backyard. Oh, yes, it also had an attic fan that my dad insisted on running instead of the air conditioner all night all summer.

My sister quickly made friends with a girl her age name Trudy Shirley, who lived a block south of us. For some reason when Fairway crossed 89th St., the name of the road changed to Meadow Lane, which is the street that Trudy lived on.

Two boys who were one year my junior lived on Fairway. Sal Dasta was, I think, the nephew of Vincent Dasta, who had a construction company in KC and donated a lot of money to Rockhurst High School. He donated so much money that the football stadium was named after him.

Sal did not go to Rockkhurst. He went to Bishop Miege, the same school that my sister attended seven years later. The Dasta family moved at some point while I was in high school. I never spent much time with Sal.

The Cipollas lived in the house on the far right. They also owned the lot that now has a big house with large trees on it.

I spent a lot of time at John Cipolla’s house for all four years that I was in high school. His parents owned the house on the east side of the street on the corner of 89th St. They also owned the vacant lot next door. They had a daughter who was a year or two older (and a decade or two more mature) than I was. Everyone called her Sugar; I don’t know if that was her name or a term of endearment. Here are some of the reasons that I spent a lot of time at John’s house, and he spent virtually none at mine:

A regulation basketball goal on a large driveway with a powerful set of spotlights.
A swimming pool.
An entire vacant lot large enough to play touch football or softball on. It included a backstop.
High-quality balls of all kinds.
An arcade-quality pinball machine.
A set of weights and barbells.
Tumbling mats.

A 9′ perfectly balanced pool table with leather pockets, overhead lighting, a set of excellent cues, and enough room on all sides. It supposedly came from a pool hall.
A half bath in the basement with a sign that said “We don’t swim in your toilet; please don’t pee in our pool.”
A sister with huge gazoingies, but she was seldom around.
A subscription to Playboy. I might have forgotten to mention this one to my parents.

There was also a beautiful set of golf clubs in the garage. They were there the first time that I visited him, and they had not moved a millimeter by my last visit.

John was adopted (and he knew it), but his parents treated him like the Dauphin. He had had polio as a child, but it did not affect him much when I knew him. He was not a great athlete, but he was OK at pretty much everything except sprinting. His parents had put in the swimming pool to help his therapy, and he was a good swimmer.

John's was very similar to the one featured her. — John’s was very similar to the one featured here. He did not play by sense of smell, but he was unbeatable.

Guys were always gathered at the Cipolla house. In bad weather we usually shot pool or played pinball. John was quite good at both of these activities. A guy whose last name was Joyce lived on 89th St. He was the first non-adult I had met who smoked. He was a pretty good shot at pool, almost as good as John. I was not nearly as accurate as they were, but I taught myself how to control the cue ball. I was competitive in everything except nine-ball, and I was quite good at a game that we called “table billiards” that was played with a cue ball and three colored balls.

One of my proudest moments was when some guys whom John knew from school showed up to play touch football. I was one of the last guys chosen, but I scored several touchdowns because I was much better than I looked. As usual, no one guarded me when I went out for a pass.

John and I occasionally went to the mall together. I remember that once he deliberately cut himself on the hand. He then walked into the Christian Science Reading Room and asked the lady at the desk for some MercuroChrome. I don’t know what she said, but he was giggling when he returned.

On another occasion we were going up an escalator together. On his left was another escalator going down—like an X. At the crossing point he reached over to a unsuspecting lady on the down escalator and mussed up her hair. I could not believe he did that. I don’t deny that I probably laughed. There was not much she could do.

John’s dad’s name was Frank “Chips” Cipolla. The family pronounced the last name sih POE lah.I later learned that cipolla means onion in Italian, and it is pronounced chee POE lah. Chips owned Monarch Electric Co. My dad told me that his business was sketchy. Actually, he did not use the word “sketchy”, but I don’t want a severed horse’s head to appear in my bed.

While I was away at college I learned that John had put a loaded shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I had never seen that shotgun. I wonder what other goodies he had that I never learned about.

During the last year or two of high school another guy my age moved in next door. He went to the other major prep school in the KC area, Pembroke Country Day. Their students were called the Daisies by guys at Rockhurst. I don’t remember the fellow’s name, but he was allergic to grass, and so he stayed inside almost all the time. He was an avid chess player, and he subscribed to chess magazines. Whenever I was around he cajoled me into playing chess with him. He was not very good. Any of the guys in Rockhurst’s chess club would have destroyed him.

Music: I began to become interested in popular music around the eighth grade. By the time that the Beatles arrived in 1964 I had become somewhat obsessed. Like most of my classmates, I listened to Don Armstrong (“DA the DJ”) on WHB nearly every evening.

Unlike my classmates I created my own list, which I called WAVE’s Prime 29, every week. I typed it out and saved them all for years. It was good typing practice, and it paid off any time anyone played “Name it and claim it” and a few decades later when Trivial Pursuit became the rage.

At some point my parents bought me a pool table for Christmas. It was not in the same league as John Cipolla’s. It was only a six-footer, and the top was warped in one corner. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time in the basement shooting pool and listening to my records. I must have listened to Highway 61 Revisited at least one hundred times.

I listened to some of my mother’s records, too. I liked the French music and the Russian music, but I had no use for her Broadway show tunes. My dad, by the way, had no records. He was tone deaf. The only music he liked was monks chanting.

Sports: I followed all sports. My favorite was football, but it was obvious that my two touchdowns in the eighth grade would probably be the apex of my football career. My parents bought me a backboard and basketball hoop. My granddad helped mount it on the roof over the garage. It wasn’t quite high enough, and the rim broke fairly soon. So, practicing on it was probably counterproductive.

I spent a lot of time in the backyard trying to improve my golf swing. my dad had a copy of Ben Hogan’s book, and I modeled my swing on his. I did not follow his advice on the waggle, which had fallen out of fashion since he retired. I still have the book fifty-five years later.

I never got to be very good at golf. My swing was pretty good, but with my puny build I had to swing very hard to get reasonable distance. Moreover, my pitching and putting were not reliable, to say the least.

For a handful of years I spent a week during the summer at my uncle’s house in Kelly, KS. Those adventures, including some golf outings on a rather unique course, are described in Part 3.

Vacations: My dad liked to spend his allotted vacation time in, of all places, Cass Lake, MN. I am not sure why. We went there three or four times, and we always stayed in a cabin at the same place. The name of the place was Journey’s End or something like that. We had access to the lake, but we seldom used it. We rented a boat a couple of times, but my dad was not a fisherman, and he did not know how to swim.

Maybe the idea was to escape the heat of Kansas City. My recollection is that the weather was quite good on these trips. Nevertheless, I remember that in Iowa we once stayed in a motel that did not have air conditioning. The manager brought a tiny fan into the room. It did not help. The heat did not bother me; it seldom does. However, the rest of the family suffered.

Instead of water sports my dad and I played golf almost every day. The local course had sand greens like the one in Seneca, KS, that we played on when we visited Fr. Joe in Kelly. We played there a few times, but mostly we drove to other places in the area that had traditional courses.

Perhaps I should mention that my dad was not a good golfer. For one thing he was left handed, but he played golf right-handed, the opposite of Phil Mickelson. He had no power, and his ball always sliced. He was not a bit scientific. It annoyed me when he asked me what he was doing wrong. I wanted to say, “Well, your grip keeps you from snapping your wrist properly. Your stance prevents you from twisting your hips, and you always swing outside-in. You should fix all of those things first.” Instead, I just mumbled “I don’t know.”

His short game was much better than mine, however. So, we kept on playing for years. I don’t know if he enjoyed it. I enjoyed being on a golf course, but I usually ended the round in a bad mood.

Usually we drove up through the center of Iowa to Minnesota, but once we must have taken the western route through Nebraska and South Dakota. At my insistence we stopped at Wall Drug, the biggest tourist trap ever. I wonder what Wall Drug would have done if someone asked a clerk where they kept the aspirin.

We stayed overnight in Rapid City, which I thought was a pretty nice place, mostly because I found a radio station that played rock and roll music. The next day we went to Mount Rushmore. I think that we then drove up to North Dakota before we turned east to my dad’s favorite spot.

More than once we also drove up to Bemidji, where Jamie and I gaped at the huge statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox and the singularly unimpressive source of the Mississippi River. Bemidji also had a rather nice golf course.

For the life of me I cannot remember what else Jamie did on these trips.

They take education seriously in the Shawnee Mission school district.

Driving: During the summer of 1964 I took the drivers’ education course at Shawnee Mission East High School.² I walked to the classes. It was the first time since kindergarten that I attended a public school. The rest of the students all knew one another.

At least one of the instructors was a (football, I think) coach at SME. On our first practice drive I was in a car with him and two girls. One of the girls went first. After driving very slowly and carefully for five or ten minutes she came to an abandoned railroad track and proceeded to cross it. The instructor was in the passenger’s seat in front with the window rolled down and his arm hanging out. As we crossed the track he smashed his fist down on the top of the car and announced “We just got hit by a train.”

The girl driving the car was paralyzed with terror. The other girl had to take over the driving while we were still on the track.

I passed the driving test without too much difficulty, and I received the highest score on the written test. It was fun to listen to the other students asking one another who was Wuh-VAH-duh.

I got my driver’s license on my sixteenth birthday. That fall I had a very minor accident in the parking lot of my dentist’s office. I did not do the right thing, and, for the first time in my life I could have (probably should have) gotten in a lot of trouble. However, by that time I had attended mass a truly incredible number of times and I had amassed a large number of prayers and indulgences. My guardian angel looked after me.

Amusements: At some point I learned how to play bridge. I don’t think that they taught me. Who would have been the fourth? I think that I must have read Charles Goren’s book on bridge that was on the bookshelf in the living room. Then I must have played with three of my high school friends a few time, although I have no memory of the specifics. It would be easy to get a foursome at Dan Waters’ house, and I went there several times.

I remember that once John Williams and I went to Worlds of Fun to hear the Shadows of Knight, the group that scored with Gloria. They were awful.

I went to a few movies with other guys from school. The school showed The Mouse that Roared, which was pretty good. I was very impressed by Peter Sellers, and the board game Diplomacy that the diplomats played in Grand Fenwick intrigued me. I discovered that there was a real Diplomacy game and brought it with me to Ann Arbor.

Twice I went to movies by myself. On the yearly Jesuit holiday one year I walked up to the Ward Parkway Mall to watch West Side Story. That was weird; I was the only person in the theater. The other occasion was to see Dr. Strangelove, my favorite move of all time. For some reason I could not persuade anyone to go with me.

The most memorable time of all of these years was when a bunch of us went to the American Royal auditorium in KC KS to see the greatest wrestling card in the recent history of KC. A few preliminary matches (one with midgets!) preceded the two headliners.

In the second-to-last match the North American Tag-Team Champions Bob Geigel and Bob Brown (two local wrestlers) against Dick the Bruiser, the heel of all heels, and Cowboy Bob Ellis, the all-American good guy complete with white cowboy hat. Heels never paired up with pretty boys, and Geigel and Brown always cheated. So, for one night Dick the Bruiser became the world’s ugliest pretty boy. This may have been the only time ever that the Bruiser and the Cowboy teamed up.

Since it was a title match, it was best two falls out of three. The NATTC was a local belt, and so Geigel and Brown had to win the third fall, which they did through some illegal tactic that I don’t remember. They couldn’t let this belt leave the KC area unless Bruiser and Ellis were scheduled to return soon, which was highly unlikely.

What I vividly remember was that during the second fall Bruiser was lying helpless on his back with his head lifted a few inches off the mat. Brown went over to him and tried to push the head down with one foot. It did not budge. Then—I swear this actually happened!—Brown stood on his forehead for a few seconds while Bruiser used his massive shoulder muscles to keep his head off the canvas. Then, of course, Cowboy Bob came to the rescue.

The final match between WWA World Champion Gene Kiniski and local hero the Mongolian stomper was easily the best wrestling match I have ever scene. Kiniski wiped the floor with the Stomper in the first fall. The second fall started the same way, but then the support of the local crowd revived the Stomper, and he pinned the champ. Nobody got too excited. Everyone knew that each guy would

In the third fall the Stomper again overcame early difficulties to gain control. He had Kiniski in an airplane spin, which was the prelude to his finishing moves. The crowd got very excited, but somehow Kiniski’s boot hooked on the top rope causing the Stomper to fall on his back, and Kiniski landed right across his shoulders.

It was the most beautifully choreographed maneuver that I ever saw. 1-2-3 the match was over. Kiniski won, and the crowd was in an uproar.

Food: My mother was a great cook. Her meals were nutritious and delicious. We had my favorite, fried chicken, nearly every week. Dessert was not always provided, but sometimes my mother would bake apple or cherry pies that were to die for. I also admit to consuming a substantial amount of potato chips and cokes.

We seldom went to restaurants. Instead, my dad decided that we would enjoy steak dinners every Saturday nights. If the weather was decent, he would grill them, and I certainly cannot complain about the results.

My parents really provided a wonderful environment for my sister and me. It met or exceeded the lifestyle of wholesome suburban kids on TV.

1. The curé of Ars is better known as St. John Vianney. Curé just means “parish priest”. It always struck me as very strange that whoever came up with the name of the parish in Kansas used the French word for priest but the English word “of”. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that during the last ten years of his life (which ended in 1859) he heard confessions for sixteen to eighteen hours per day. I doubt that many of the twenty thousand who flocked to Ars every year were dancers. J.V. refused absolution to all who engaged in “paganic dancing.”

2. There is a town named Shawnee and a town named Mission. Shawnee Mission is the name of the postal district and educational district that includes those towns, Overland Park, Prairie Village, Leawood, and others. As of 2018 27,648 students attended classes at the district’s five high schools, five middle schools, thirty-four elementary schools, and six instructional centers. Over 400,000 people now live in the district, more than in Wichita, the largest city in Kansas.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Goren, Charles

2004-2009 Partners at the Simsbury Bridge Club Part 1

2004 Getting Back into Bridge

1962-1966 Miscellaneous Part 2: Outside of School