On Chess: Game offers refuge from the streets
Saturday February 11, 2012 10:22 AM
My uncle, Harry Lyman, used to recall that in the throes of the Great Depression, during a painful period of unemployment, the game offered him a desperately needed haven.
He later became a New England chess champion, a beloved mentor of many excellent players and an early advocate of chess programs for children.
Chess continues to fulfill its function as a refuge.
Ask the many homeless and unemployed people who gather to play the game at the corner of 16th and Arapahoe streets in Denver and many other locations nationwide.
Homeless player Alex Maxwell told KUSA-TV in Denver that the game gives people a break from their daily woes.
The absorption in chess, Maxwell said, “shows how intellectual a lot of people are.”
Steve Kelly, who is unemployed, offers an analogy: “If life is like a game of chess, then many of the people playing down here are like pawns already taken off the game board.”
The solution, he said, is to get people back to work — or, in chess terms, “back on the board.”
In the meantime, as psychiatrist and grandmaster Ariel Mengarini told Time magazine in 1972: “Chess offers a readily available stage in which our hidden and unrealized selves can assume a palpable form.”
Source: http://www.dispatch.com
Ariel Mengarini, I don’t think he should be mentioned as having the grandmaster title.