Jim West On Chess: Dick Schaap's Postcard to 30 Rock

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Dick Schaap's Postcard to 30 Rock

In clearing out many years of accumulated files, I came across this postcard from Dick Schaap. We worked together for some years at WNBC-TV and often went to dinner between broadcasts. One day Dick dropped by, in my office at Rock Center. Along with him was a tall young man whom Dick introduced. It was Bobby Fischer. A large wooden chess set, on my coffee table, sat with a game underway which I was playing with Jim Hartz, the news anchor. Dick pointed at the game and asked Bobby what he thought of it. Bobby's instant response after a quick glance was: "Nice wooden chess pieces."

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov