Personalia

Susanne van Kempen appears for the first time in our birthday column, she enlarged the company of our members at the beginning of the year and celebrated her special day on August 1st. On this year’s tour to Brunswick-Ströbeck the lady from Leverkusen had already joined in – you may find photographic instances of that in our galleries. Her collecting field is rather special and therefore clearly laid out, namely the combination of chess and belles lettres. It’s a very good thing that she also made a helpful contribution to the evaluation of the BoC prototype by providing quite some original feedback.

Only two days later the Norwegian Ole Kristian Førrisdahl celebrated a real anniversary by looking back on 40 years of his life. Unfortunately he was unable to come to the meeting of our Nordic members in April this year, so we have nothing new to tell and have to refer to our last year’s entry.

For the first time as well we meet in this place the US-American Philip McCready from Washington state, he turned 51 on August 8th. The former Seattle Chess Club President is known to be committed to collecting, and for some time he has been planning a book about the chess career of IM Nikolai Minev, for this he was still looking for missing games. But we don’t know which point this book project has reached in the meantime.

Our senior member Jean Mennerat has completed his 89th year on August 11th. Being the greatest French chess book collector he was naturally included in the well-known Letter to Bert (see p.34) before he was "discovered" by the international chess press last year (see NiC 5/2005). Our new members shouldn’t miss the KWA’s special eulogy of last August ...

Geurt Gijssen who celebrated his 72nd birthday just in the middle of the month is also universally famous. Geurt Gijssen is regarded as the most respected contemporary chess arbiter and he was also nominated by the FIDE for the chief arbiter of the coming world championship match Topalov – Kramnik. This year some of our members had the opportunity to see him once again functioning as arbiter at the Turin Chess Olympiad.
(You will find more on G.G.’s life in our appreciation of 2004.)

A further French member now follows on our birthday list, Eric Ruch has been 45 years young since August 26th. As already explained two years ago he had to the greatest possible extent devoted himself to correspondence chess and its history. Meanwhile Eric has published an interesting online article dealing with partly strange correspondence games between Paris and Marseilles in the 1880ies; strange because there were played games according to "Qui perd gagne" rules as well, but the "Qui perd gagne" (Losing Chess) of that time was not in accordance with today’s losing chess, the goal of the game was rather a regular selfmate. Thanks to Eric Ruch the extremely indigestible notation from the old sources has been transformed into a readable modern form.

The final birthday greetings of this month go to Utrecht where René van der Heijden celebrated the double "5" in his years of life on August 29th. There is always a good chance to meet him personally at KWA events taking place in the Utrecht area (i.e. in Holland), at last at the board meeting in Amsterdam (August 2005), and some of us got to see him at the last Wijk tournaments too ...



Congratulations!




PS: You will find all previous birthday greetings in our archives!