From Jude Acers/New
FOR ALL TIME The two donors wish to remember 1968-1978 ...THE SAN FRANCISCO LEGENDS..."Motorcycle Max" Burkett’s Kings Bishop Gambit (where it all begins)... Fritz the poet “you should come to San Francisco”...Francis Ford (The Godfather). Eleanor Coppola ,Warren Hinckle (“take lemons and make lemonade”) and Cathleen Black ( City of San Francisco Magazine chess columns)...Pulitzer prize winner Herb Caen’s San Francisco Chronicle column replete with chess blurbs to boot...tragic author Richard “Trout Fishing” Brautigan in Vesuvio’s...and the red headed artist The Marcia who found the body deep the woods....THE GREAT BENDIT inventor, chess patron...cigar in hand waving like a torch for emphasis...standing on a Mechanics' Institute chair, pontificating the rules of the electrifying Fischer chess exhibition (April 13,1964 )... “Do not play the same moves as your next board neighbor in which case Mr. Fischer will have the pleasure of beating you both with the same moves ”...then watched “in sheer awe, my my”...as THE BURGERMEISTER won a thrilling theoretical masterpiece in 12 moves, securing instant immortality...far, far from madding crowd mad men advertising world Robert E.Burger knew... The Rolling Stones at Altamont speedway...astonishing coffee, babes everywhere...the homeless chessplayer in Café Trieste who died of hypothermia in the middle of a summer nighttime wet fog, quiet, alone, forgotten in an abandoned schoolyard...The sea, huge waves...that took 6 festive thrill seeking, disbelieving people off San Francisco cliffs to their deaths...one by one, each year forgotten by another...off San Francisco coasts...white marker crosses silently witness to the past... It can’t happen to me...this can’t be real...it was...the “Great Radaiken” moving a knight like a bishop (CHECK!), roaring 50 miles down the highway with first prize cash plus trophy on the car seat...goodness gracious. How did that happen? ...the No Name Bar, Alcatraz one boat away... The Clement street Mixer rock bar...featuring a visiting policeman with the superman t-shirt beneath his police uniform... FERLINGHETTI AND SHIG aside their City Lights bookstore cash register...telling Berkeley Barb publishing colossus Max Sheer “this is Jude...his chess games are in books downstairs”... Sheer whispering the horrifying memory...traumatized man pops into the office, an eyewitness account of the first Manson murder on Haight street three blocks from Burkett’s place...witness almost incoherent with fear...put up in hotel overnight...more details in the morning... the Berkeley Barb will publish it...gone at dawn.
On behalf of two anonymous donors please find enclosed THE 2015 MR. HENRY GROSS "SAN FRANCISCO
LEGENDS”
tourney
first
prize
award...it
is given to especially honor MR. JOHN DONALDSON, DEAN EMERITUS OF AMERICAN
CHESS...in the truly grand tradition of Hermann Helms (1870-1963)
Isaac Kashdan (l905-1985) and I. A.Horowitz (1907-1973)...Mr.
Donaldson met the myriad sometimes heavy blows of life in truly
magnificent gentlemanly fashion...emerging promotionally triumphant
for decades...now widely viewed the greatest Mechanics' Institute (57 Post
Street -fourth floor, San Francisco) Chess Director ever seen...a world renown International
Chess Master and International arbiter of the highest standard...Mr.
Donaldson’s prize decisions are final...
The donors wish
to briefly mention THE SAN FRANCISCO LEGENDS (1968-1978),
a truly epic, indeed sometimes unbelievable era raging night and
day...often within blocks the Mechanics' Institute building...
The Legends
are...A STREETCAR like no other,
hang outside, hang on naturally...at the bottom of
the hill...fishing boats where Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio
snuck away...the cable car guy saw them...clang clang clang...Reading Jack
London’s eyewitness fearsome clock...the
earthquake, minute by minute...incredulous London being invited
in FOR A DRINK by a
magnificent mansion owner, both men well knowing in 15
minutes flat it will all be gone...that
must have been some drink as they watched silently and
totally alone...mansions pop in thunderous fire explosion one by
one toward you until SHOWTIME...
Beginning precisely at the Mechanics' Institute location....
THE WATER MAN...the chess ”irritators”
who somehow managed to defeat everyone now and then...Blohm, “Thorn
Thornally”, Spencer, Kane, historian Benson...Raymond,
Grey... EPIC MEMORIES BROWNE AND RAQUEL, world junior champion JULIO KAPLAN AND SUE... The problem endgame chess wizards C. BILL JONES...(with Verne
pouring the tea in
BLACKSTONE...Mary “Pawn
Endgames” Lasher... Fischer, Buff and
Biyiasis playing baseball in Golden Gate park...Buff’s chess
class at Enrico’s on Broadway...the entire Coffee Gallery wild child crew
especially Janis and the atomic waitress Sunshine (the only survivor)... Ralph and Sue, memorable Coffee Gallery musicians who shoot up heroin,
needles. rubber bands on the arm in their kitchen and
invite a bewildered Louisiana boy to partake...life and death on the
line...slip out courteously...no but thank you... Gone... In another kitchen a
man with a machete, angry at losing two chess games
cuts CHESS OPENINGS Theory and Practice by Euwe and
Horowitz almost in half...
The Rincon annex