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This is the story of Lisa Lane. But it's also so much more. The year was 1959... |
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1959...
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1959... Dwight David Eisenhower was president of the United States and America had been on the road to a prosperity unthought of prior to the war in which he had been the supreme commander of Operation Overlord, including the Normandy invasion and the Allied assault on Nazi-occupied Europe. Rock'n Roll was still leading a cultural assault on young Americans despite the fact that one of its pioneers, Buddy Holly, had just died in a plane crash. This was on February third, the same day that America received her 49th state, Alaska. In just six more months, Hawaii would make it 50. America was also introduced both to Barbie, the doll and to Bic, the ballpoint pen. Prosperity often creates vision. America's vision was the far reaches of outer space. In May of 1959, Able and Baker became the first space monkeys, making their fame in the nose cone of JUPITER Missile and the very next month, NASA picked it's first astronauts, the Mercury Seven. Perhaps the music did die that cold day in February. Although Rock'n Roll still reigned supreme, in 1959 it had taken on the corporate face of manufactured teen idols. Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka and Fabian were at the head of the record-selling pack. With few exceptions, such as the Everly Brother's, 'Til I Kissed You and The Drifters', Dance With Me, the popular music scene was bland at best. And this points to the darker side of 1959. The best music being made was in the areas of jazz and blues. The jazz sounds: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong; the blues sounds: Earl Hooker, John Lee Hooker, Albert King, Freddy King, B.B. King, Billie Holiday (who died that year). All black musicians, all producing the best music and all kept out of sight of mainstream America. The Civil-Right's movement was just beginning. Meanwhile in Cuba, Batista fled and Fidel Castro declared himself "Maximum Leader" in true dictatoral style, vilefying the US and embracing the communist Soviet Union in the very midst of the Cold War. Ironically, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, which was a 1957 book about Russia and was banned in Russia but had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958 (though he was forced to decline it later), was the best selling book on 1959. |
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That was 1959, the year Lisa Lane won her first U.S. Women's Championship. Born on April 25, 1938, she was 21 at the time and had been playing chess for only two years. Lisa was born and raised in Philadelphia and saw her first game of chess in a Bohemian club called the Artist's Hut while a freshman at Temple University in Philadelphia. She becamse obsessed with the game, quit school at the end of her first year, took lessons from a local master and started playing tournament chess. In December of 1959, she won the US women's chamionship which she held until 1962. The US Women's Championship originated through the efforts of Caroline Marshall, the wife of Frank Marshall, in 1938. Lisa Lane, by virtue of both her youth and attractiveness, caught the media's attention and spotlighted chess in America more so than any other player (with the possible exception on Paul Morphy exactly a century before) had up to that time. She appeared on the the popular TV show, What's My Line; her first magazine appearance was in Look on November, 22 1960 under the title, Lisa Lane: chess champion; she made the cover of Sport's Illustrated in the August 7, 1961 issue under the title Queen of Knights and Pawns and was mentioned again in that magazine in the April 23, 1962 issue under the title, Queen's Move; she made the May 22, 1961 issue of Newsweek under the title, I Have to Win; she was in The New York Times Magazine on June 4, 1961 under the title, Queen of Pawns, etc; and on September 19, 1964 she was featured in The New Yorker's Talk of the Town under the title, Chess Candidate, Owner of Queen's Pawn Chess Emporium. Totally depending upon chess to earn her living, she moved to a small spartan flat in NYC in February of 1961 where she spent most of her waking hours honing her chess skills for the upcoming World Women's Candidates Tournament to which she and Gisela Gresser (a former and future US women's champion) had been invited along with sixteen other female players from around the world to determine who would challenge Elisaveta Bykova for the title of Women's World Champion (Bikova beat Olga Rubtsova for the title in 1958). 
She had a less-than-great performance in the Women's Candidates Tournament in Vrnjacka Banja, Yugoslavia tying with Gresser for 13th-14th place out of 18. Nona Gaprindashvili won the tournament (+10-0=6) and went on to beat Elisaveta Bykova for the Women's World Championship by a landslide +7-0=4. During the Hastings Reserve tournament, the end of 1961 - beginning of 1962, Lane withdrew from the tournament after two loses, one draw and one adjournment. It was reported that she claimed she was homesick and in love - what wasn't reported was that she hated to lose. postcard from Vrnjacka Banja |
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1964... John F. Kennedy was dead. Lyndon Baines Johnson took office unelected but would defeat Barry Goldwater by a landslide in the fall.....The Great Society replaced Camelot; Leonid Brezhnev replaced Nikita Krushchev....The CIA fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a pretext for direct US intervention in Vietnam.....the 1964 Civil Rights Act was enacted.....BASIC programming language was invented.....Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali became heavyweight champion of the world.....FTC requires health warnings on cigarette packages, even Newports.....Beatlemania Twist and Shout, I Saw Her Standing There, Love Me Do, She Loves You were instant hits...but so were I Get Around and Fun, Fun, Fun by the Beach Boys.....Baby Love and Where Did Our Love Go? by the Supremes.....as well as Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison and You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling by the Righteous Brothers.....Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel released Wednesday Morning 3 a.m. but not as Tom & Jerry.....Dylan ruled. |
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Most places note that Lisa Lane opened her Queen's Pawn Chess Emporium in 1964. There's every reason to believe this is inaccurate. It opened sometime in 1963, prior to JFK's assassination.
While she operated her chess club/shop, she prepared for the 1964 Women's Candidates Tournament. Unfortunately, 1964 proved to be a bad year for one who despised losing as much as Lisa Lane. First, she lost the US Women's Championship to Sonja Graf-Stevenson (who would die on March 6 of the next year ). Then she came in 12th out of 18 in the Women's Candidates Tournament a half point ahead of Gresser this time (It was won by Alla Kushnir of Russia, who eventually lost the women's championship match to Nona Gaprindashvili of Georgia). On May 11, 1966 Lisa Lane became co-US women's champion, sharing the title with Gisela Gresser. I'm not certain how this came to be, but in 1967, Gresser was sole-proprietor of the women's title. She considered her contemporary and then US men's champion, Bobby Fischer, the greatest player ever. Fischer considered all women players weak: "They're all fish. Lisa, you might say, is the best of the American fish." That's the last we hear of Lisa Lane. |
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