August 13 1990
Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, Massachusetts, Monday, August 13, 1990
A few organizing principles
THE way Bob Bornholz talks about it, it doesn't sound much like a game. I went twice to his small apartment in Clark House to hear him talk about it over a cramped dining table. His hearing's almost shot, but his thoughts about chess are clear.
“Just like in poetry, the vivid pictures you get of reality — they appear on the board in a different form. When you explore it, you find all different activities and forces at work. In the midst of these are possibilities of checkmating your opponent. Very often the impossible is made possible. You can provoke weaknesses in the opponent's position.
“Chess teaches young people to think and to look for beauty. It's part of a greater thing people living together and doing things together. It can be a great vehicle for friendship and overcoming prejudice and discrimination. It's a part of freedom.”
There be more than one man in Amherst who knows this name: Hoit, Rose & Troster. I saw it in one of scrapbooks on a 1931 clipping from the Wall Street Journal that's gone nearly brown with age. The clip told of how he and others had formed a new brokerage two years after the crash. He got to Wall Street from a boyhood in Brooklyn, but didn't stay there long. He'd learned chess at 14 while lying in a hospital bed with a broken leg. Seven years later he beat Frank Marshall — then the US chess champion — in a 1923 match between the Marshall Chess Club and a club at New York University, where Bornholz studied. It happened on the 67th move — pawn to bishop eight takes queen.
Jump ahead here. Bornholz stopped selling stocks and started organizing industrial workers, signing on as an agent of the Congress of Industrial Organizations the CIO of what years later would become AFL-CIO. He admits it seems like a big switch but says he'd always been idealist. Bornholz figures he helped organize thousands of people into unions starting with workers in the money center of New York, people at banks and insurance companies. His style as an organizer was to blend into the crowd helping people find their own ways to determine conditions of their lives. The good organizer helps with ideas, Bornholz says. “Organization is a part of freedom, really. It means participation of the people.”
It was while organizing employees at the Bank of Athens that he met Estelle who shares his small apartment today. This was back in the hard days, says Estelle, the poor days. They were both married at the time to other people and their relationship waited years to begin.
Bornholz spent 20 years roaming industrial disputes. He'd walk into towns cold and for friendship find a place where people were playing chess. Labor relations weren't done by press release then. One day strongmen for the company he'd targeted lashed back. “They broke up our headquarters and attacked. I walked the streets with the horror of it.”
The work took Bornholz regularly to Pittsburgh where he chose to settle down and launch a business repairing and selling industrial sewing machines. He became Pennsylvania state champion at chess and got a reputation for teaching children to play, especially blind children. One old newspaper clip shows him — tall, well-dressed, wearing Adlai Stevenson glasses, taking on a room of opponents. Forty years on, many scrapbooks and moves later, there's still chess. He turned 88 last month.
It's a weekday night back in oatmeal season. People are hunched over chess boards in a basement room at the Bangs Community Center in Amherst. Back along a far wall, head lowered, sits Bornholz. When he got to the area last November — even before he moved to the Clark House in March — he wrote to the US Chess Federation for names of known players hereabouts. The new Amherst Chess Club is the result. Ali Nuernberg, a fellow player, helped set up the fledgling club, and fast became a Bornholz booster. “He's a legend in my book.”
With the club up and running — and taking on comers from across western Massachusetts — Bornholz is now back to tracking an old dream — teaching children who can't see to play chess. Today, from his apartment, this is what he's organizing. He's kept his light touch.
“I want it to be done by people, so it becomes part of their lives. The playing has to be something more than just a room they go into. It must have more meaning. Just to do it myself is nothing.”
Larry Parnass is the region editor of the Gazette.
