Persons celebrating an Anniversary in February 2006

In this place we have already repeatedly met Yuri Averbakh, the living chess legend has completed his 84th year on February 8th. But this doesn’t prevent him to keep on cultivating his chess passions – again and again his commitment as an author and chess historian has been verified in chess magazines: so we may read that he devotes much time together with his friend Isaac Linder to help the Moscow Chess Museum – he has been personally involved there since 15 years. (See the article "Michael Sherman visits The Moscow Chess Museum", in CHESS Sept. 2005, pp 58-60.) And to the last KARL issue (no. 3/2005) he contributed an article on Botwinnik’s chess computer where he let drop many personal reminiscences of his great example.

At the turn of the year two new members from Italy increased their national KWA group – Gino Di Felice from Mosciano Sant’ Angelo (in the Northern Abruzzo Region) is one of them: he celebrated his 51st birthday on February 20th. Gino particularly likes collecting of tournament crosstables, up to now he has collected more than 15,000 (from 1851 up), thus succeeding Jeremy Gaige, the doyen of all chess archivists. Till now the first part of this compilation has been published in book form – Chess Results, 1747-1900 (we have just presented this work in the Publications of our Members), as well as recently the subsequent volume Chess Results, 1901-1920. The additional parts (Chess Results, 1921-1930. Chess Results, 1931-1935) are planned to come out this year, furthermore the Chess Results, 1936-1940 will be included. We hope the KWA can be helpful to our industrious collecting friend in his search for still missing crosstables.

We close with a real anniversary – Harrie Grondijs from the Dutch town of Rijswijk is the last one of our monthly trio: he looked back on whole six decades on February 21st. Being a composer of endgame studies and author of numerous books on those Harrie has already immortalized himself in the chess (study) world. Being endowed with a bustling industriousness he is driven to best performance time and again: after two editions of "No Rook Unturned" and the "Unforgotten Chess Men" a new book is in preparation now, for many months he is working hard on it in his free time. It’s a pity that recently his website has been deleted by a malicious operation, without backup this loss couldn’t be repaired any more. At least Harrie took it with composure ...

Congratulations!

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