Persons celebrating an Anniversary in April 2006

Owing to our steadily increasing number of members we are able to offer now some birthdays in the once "sparsely populated" April – we will start with our new member Knud Lysdal from the Danish town of Grindsted which is situated centrally in Jutland. His 56th birthday (on April 6th) was only two days before the meeting of our Nordic Group in Frederiksværk, so he could use this event as an opportunity to become acquainted with our board and to establish contact with our Scandinavian members. We will come back to this interesting event soon.

The next on our birthday list is Frans M. Hoynck van Papendrecht, he celebrated his 47th birthday just the same day. The Dutchman who claims the longest name of all KWA members for himself is a specialized manager of Van Stockum boekverkopers in The Hague whose chess department is one of the largest in Europe. On this occasion we remind of our last year’s general meeting where some of us enjoyed visiting this extensively equipped chess bookshop personally.

The International Master Bernd Schneider from the "blade city" of Solingen belongs to the few chess title holders in our association, while completing the 41st year of his life on April 10th he is at the same time the junior of our monthly selection. It was already 20 years ago that he gained the IM title, quite a lot of his successes of his chess career are especially connected with his club, the "Solinger Schachgesellschaft" (Solingen Chess Society) 1868 – several times he won the German team championship and even in 1991 the European Cup for club teams: in the finals against ZSKA Moscow he had then to compete against Alexei Drejew. A further highlight was the winning of the open German championship in Bad Lauterberg in 1988. Bernd is already "immortalized" at our KWA website as well, we only refer to last year’s clock simul as a supporting programme of the Klittich-Pfankuch auction where he could achieve a thoroughly respectable result. In his working life Bernd is an estate agent, meanwhile the chess book trade which he concludes exclusively via the internet serves him as a second pillar.

In the Swiss town of Chur (the Grisons) we meet KWA member Toni Preziuso, he could look back on 47 years on April 22nd. He was born in Italy, but from the fourth year of his life he lived in Switzerland where he also completed his study of psychology (university of Zurich 1981-89). His first experience of chess goes back to the beginning of the seventies – here the world championship match 1972 Fischer – Spassky may have produced an additional decisive impetus. But besides OTB play Toni has always been involved in correspondence chess too, among other things he was the tournament director of the Swiss CC Association (SFSV) in 1990/91. We have already reported elsewhere about his journalistic activities (see Publications of our Members), we are pleased that he will soon take those up again as from July 2006 he will - as the CC editor of the Schweizerische Schachzeitung - run its correspondence chess section.

Only three days later our US member Allan G. Savage was next in line – the 55th anniversary of his birthday occurred in Kensington, Maryland. You will find a short biographical sketch on him (photo included) in the internet, and he is already in the Publications of our Members as well. "Caissa's Legacy: The Great Chess Libraries" was headed his lecture which he held in 1998 - you may also read that online ...

Congratulations to all!

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