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Friday, November 18, 2016

The Other Horowitz plus a Bonus...access Bobby Fischer's Boys' Life columns.

     Israel Albert Horowitz (Nov. 15, 1907 – Jan. 18, 1973) was the U.S. Open Champion in 1936, 1938, 1943, the New York Times chess columnist for ten years, owner and editor of Chess Review magazine from 1933 until it was bought by the USCF in 1969 and an author.
     Horowitz' wife, Edna, was also active in chess. When Horowitz won the US Open in 1943 his wife also played in the Expert Section where she finished 7th out of 12, scoring +3 -6 =2.
     A few years ago I wrote about Al Horowitz' auto accident in 1940 in which Harold Morton was killed. Four years later Horowitz was involved in another accident. This time it was a train accident. The train carrying Al and Edna crashed near Fresno, California and several passengers were killed and hundreds were injured. The Horowitzes escaped injury. An Internet search of train wrecks in California in 1944 didn't turn up any that happened near Fresno though. Unfortunately, after much Googling, nothing much turned up on Edna either.
     What I did find was that in 2001 when Helen Warren visited the USCF offices (then in New Windsor, New York) she noted the names of many deceased USCF members on the website’s rating list. Among them was Edna Horowitz who was a Life Member. Warren's list gave the date of death for many of the players, but that of Edna Horowitz was unknown. According to Sam Sloan, Mrs. Horowitz had passed away over 20 years before! 
     While substituting for Bobby Fischer (who was playing his match against Petrosian) in a 1970 Boys' Life column, Horowitz explained the Stonewall Attack and presented three games, one of which was Edna's. In the game Horowitz, as he often did, did not name the players, event or date of the games he presented. 
     As a side note, Bobby Fischer began writing a column for Boys' Life magazine in December, 1966 which usually appeared every other month. If Fischer was unavailable because of tournament commitments the columns were usually written by Larry Evans or Al Horowitz. If you want to read Fischer's articles you can go HERE and tick "search all issues" and type in "Fischer" then hit "Search Inside". 


     Of the Stonewall, Horowitz explained that white aims to "build up, with judicious speed, a foolproof pawn skeleton in which his pawns are placed on d4, e3, c3 and f4. It must be emphasized that white must not stubbornly persist in his plans regardless of the moves he encounters. At all times white must be ready to exploit weakness." 
 

1 comment:

  1. Actually, David Daniels and Burt Hochberg substituted for Fischer when he was unavailable during his run. Al Horowitz and then Larry Evans only took over after the last column by Fischer.

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