Quiz

[James Pratt]

1 Who met Philidor in Paris in 1766?
2 Which GM lived at 3 Hagsdell Road, Hertford?
3 Who was born in London 13th February, 1937, was a former Economist at Sussex University and became an IM Comp in 1976?
4 Who died in Jersey City, NJ, in 1944?
5 Which Hungarian won a tournament at Paris in 1867?
6 With splendid dates of 1542-1587, who was known as 'The Boy' ?


James

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

1. Maybe Louis XV ?
3. Michael Lipton (the thread announcing his death has just been moved to the top of most recently updated ones).
4. Frank Marshall ?
5: Ignatz von Kolisch.
6: Giovanni Leonardo di Bona da Cutri (or possible Mary, Queen of Scots).

2 is a tricky one. All my searches come back with H (Hugh?) Martin-Leake, but he doesn't seem to have been a chess player. Apparently Jonathan Penrose lived in Hertfordshire in the years before his death, so I'll go for him.

[James Pratt]

Yes Jon. All correct except No.1. Anybody else like to try? [It still pleases me to think that the infant Reshevsky met Charlie Chaplin. Here, a not dissimilar union. Maybe.]

[MSoszynski]

It still pleases me to think that the infant Reshevsky met Charlie Chaplin.

Yes, Reshevsky really did meet Chaplin in the early 1920s. Around that time he also met the fist (!) of the child film star Jackie Coogan (who later played Uncle Fester in The Addams Family TV series of the mid-1960s).

These meetings were mentioned in contemporary newspaper articles that I transcribed for my book, The Great Reshevsky (Forward Chess 2018).

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

https://forwardchess.com/product/the-great-reshevsky

May I ask what year you decided Reshevsky was born, Marek? The date of 26th November is shared with Tina Turner, Charles Schulz and me!

Here is a link to the picture of Jackie Coogan vs Samuel Reshevsky in what is possibly the first instance of a chess boxing bout:
https://www.sz-photo.de
(search for coogan boxing)

[John Townsend]

Question 1: I'll try a longshot: Mozart?

[MSoszynski]

https://forwardchess.com/product/the-great-reshevsky

May I ask what year you decided Reshevsky was born, Marek? The date of 26th November is shared with Tina Turner, Charles Schulz and me!

[...]

Reshevsky was such a small boy that his parents (who lived off his earnings) could advertise him as younger than he was both to make his performances all the more astonishing but also perhaps to prolong his career. My book shows hard evidence for his birth year being brought forward by two (from 1909 to 1911), but not necessarily for his birthday being November 26th I have to say.

[John Townsend]

In his petition for U.S. naturalization, Reshevsky declared that he was born in "Ozonkow" (= Ozorków), Poland, on 26 November 1911. Why should he have been telling a lie in such an important document?

What kind of "hard evidence"? Do you mean the information from Stewart Reuben, which you referred to in your book?

[James Pratt]

Yes, Mozart

[MSoszynski]

In his petition for U.S. naturalization, Reshevsky declared that he was born in "Ozonkow" (= Ozórkow), Poland, on 26 November 1911. Why should he have been telling a lie in such an important document?

What kind of "hard evidence"? Do you mean the information from Stewart Reuben, which you referred to in your book?

I am certainly not referring to hearsay evidence (of which Reuben's was not the only instance) but to an obscure old Polish record. Why should the adult Reshevsky lie? Because his family had been deceitful so long already. Not the kind of thing to resurrect when applying for citizenship or when your life was already on a certain, settled track.

It's in the book, though in fact I don't labour the point there.

[John Townsend]

I could have added that in the 1950 census, Reshevsky gave his age as 38, which is consistent with the information in the petition. That makes two official documents which support the 1911 date of birth.

Could you give us a page number reference to the "hard evidence"?

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

Certainly every single official document I found on ancestry.com gives 1911 as the year of birth for Reshevsky. However I can't quite believe that a 9 year old could have gone on a simultaneous display in the USA, playing 1500 games and losing only 8. Was the standard of chess among adult players in 1920 USA so bad? If he was really 11 years old then it becomes a little more believable. Or perhaps his parents were careful about the people who were allowed to play in the simuls.

Yesterday I filled in some of the details of Samuel Reshevky's family tree on the Family Search website. Someone else had added his wife and his three children and marked them all as being deceased (entries for living people do not appear except to the person who created the entry). However I think this is incorrect, as far as I can tell all three of his children are still alive and I believe his widow, Norma, is also still living. If so she'll turn 100 in July (I found a record which gave 28th July, 1923 as her date of birth).

I could find very little about the Reshevsky family on the internet. There was a court case in 2007 that I couldn't make head or tail of, but apart from that, nothing. I don't think any of his children married and the whole family seem to still live in the same house in Spring Valley, New York, that Samuel Reshevsky bought in the 1950s.

[MSoszynski]

I could have added that in the 1950 census, Reshevsky gave his age as 38, which is consistent with the information in the petition. That makes two official documents which support the 1911 date of birth.

Could you give us a page number reference to the "hard evidence"?

It's in the Postscript to The Great Reshevsky (Forward Chess, 2018).

For research since then I would refer you to Taylor Kingston.

[Leonard Barden]

I could have added that in the 1950 census, Reshevsky gave his age as 38, which is consistent with the information in the petition. That makes two official documents which support the 1911 date of birth.

Could you give us a page number reference to the "hard evidence"?

It's in the Postscript to The Great Reshevsky (Forward Chess, 2018).

For research since then I would refer you to Taylor Kingston.

I don't have the book, and can't find anything on Google with Taylor Kingston's views on the matter. Could you kindly summarise what is known and conjectured? I heard the rumours many years ago and was told that Reshevsky had admitted 1909, but retracted it a while later. The subject interests me, as I knew several of England's talents when they were very young. Reshevsky is an outlier compared with other prodigies.

[John Townsend]

Essential reading includes pages 202-203 of Edward Winter's Kings, Commoners and Knaves, which can be read on-line in the feature article Testing Reshevsky: https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/ex ... evsky.html

A footnote In Ks, Cs and Ks added that in an interview with Hanon Russell in August 1991 Reshevsky insisted that he had indeed been born in 1911.