Check mates: Teacher, student keep the game alive after months of playing ‘prison chess’
Teacher, student keep the game alive after months of playing ‘prison chess’
By MARC CABRERA
Herald Staff Writer
Posted: 02/24/2009 01:36:07 AM PST
The worn sheet of paper is decorated with carefully traced squares that look like a calendar, with numbers in each corner. Every other square is shaded to look like a chess board.
In assorted squares are smaller, taped squares with letters like KN, P, and B, some bold, some not, scattered throughout. The Ks rest evenly on opposite squares, across from one another.
The sheet marks a year and a half of Paul Karrer’s interaction with his former student “Rojelio” (not his real name), as the pair exchanged letters playing “prison chess” through the mail. The game began sometime in 2007, when Rojelio was serving time in Corcoran State Penitentiary.
Really, the game began about 15 years earlier, when Karrer was a fifth-grade teacher at Castroville Elementary School and his young charge Rojelio took a keen interest in the game. Karrer had taught all of his students, but Rojelio was especially drawn to it.
“He’d show up at my door at the end of the day, with his board and ask if we could play,” remembered Karrer, sitting in a restaurant with Rojelio, a chess board set up between them. “Mind you, I was younger with a wife expecting our first child, and he would come up to me and it was just the cutest thing.”
Those were more innocent days, before the gang lifestyle and the bad decisions and the hard times all caught up with Rojelio.
Here is the full article.
Very touching.