The Boston Globe Boston, Massachusetts Sunday, June 29, 1958
Chess Notebook by Lyman Burgess
Walter J. Fried, president of the American Chess Foundation, is fighting a battle in not-yet-loss cause. He is fighting for individuality in sponsorship of art and culture.
He treads a lonely path worn deep through years of weary foot-slogging by his tired predecessors. Morris Kuhns, George Sturgis, Paul Giers, H. M. Phillips and many others have headed similar organizations in the vain quest of public support for public weal.
International chess is top-heavy with subsidized master players who pursue fictitious professions and/or hold down counterfeit jobs, but who nevertheless receive very real money for their wholly imaginary activities. Our homebred heroes must face the cold, hard facts of landlord, tax collector, grocer, doctor, butcher and candlestick-maker costs out of their own lint-lined pockets.
If U.S. chess has fallen behind you know who's chess; it is not for lack of talent. We need point only to Fischer and Lombardy to show chess talent still flourishes here. It is, rather, lack of reward; one hardly runs a lavish establishment on the take home pay of a resident chess master.
The purpose of the American Chess Foundation: “To encourage the playing of chess as a national sport and pastime for young and old; to develop the many possibilities of chess for the intellectual and scientific training on which American prosperity and security depend; and to cultivate a climate of public opinion and a widespread knowledge of the game, out of which there can emerge chess masters, capable as in the past, of providing U.S.A. leadership in the international chess field.”
The purpose of Mr. Fried's current drive is to send an American team to the Chess Olympics this Summer.
