Diary of a Bridge Pro #16

​  Happy Easter, all. 

   Not much time to write right now - flying to Florida later today to partner up with client Walter Schenker in the Southeasterns. Walter has been my core client for some years, a Wall Street guy originally from Long Island with a background not too different from my own. He was doing his undergraduate work at Cornell when I played my first duplicate back when I was in 7th Grade, and then he was a graduate student at Columbia Business School when I won my first Reisinger Knockout and made my first Spingold final in 1980, at the ripe old age of 20. 

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  I had an ambivalence about including this next section - too Jewish, maybe, I figured. But a trusted adviser asserted that I should publish this - that some people care, even care deeply, about “the history of bridge”. So let transparency rule supreme throughout the land - here goes:

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  Perhaps if I had it to do again I would have visited Kaplan more often during the 15 year stretch that we were partners and then friends. I first met him in person in the autumn of ‘82 when I went to see him at his brownstone on 94th Street and speak to him about playing in the Grand Nationals. We did, and we wound up winning the New York District. Then in August of 1997 I saw him for the last time, during the period he was in and out of Roosevelt Hospital in the West 50’s (of Manhattan) where he received treatment for the cancer to which he finally succumbed.    

  The incident I want to describe occurred eight or ten years previous to his death. I had resolved to visit Kaplan regularly, though as a practical matter I fell far short. I wanted to supplement the encounters we’d have at the tournaments where we partnered up. Despite my intentions I didn’t get there very often - maybe once a year.  New York lives don’t allow much time for activities that aren’t a high priority, so I always had something more pressing to do. Sleep, eat or make some money, those were three of my big pursuits in those years. 

  But I knew it would help me to go visit him, partly because compared to all the rest of us, Edgar had a more modulated, less frantic life. I admired and respected that, more than envied it, I guess. I understood that my own life was unusual as well. Most of the New Yorkers I knew, the ones who were closest to my age (thirtyish) as opposed to Edgar’s (sixty-something at the time) - were preoccupied, absorbed, even, with day jobs, Crisis Management, or with logging long hours at their core business. No one had  a lot of time left over for reflective contemplation - or for leisurely lunches, visiting friends, or rowing on the pond in Central Park. So the fact that I could consider engaging in activities like that (even if I could only rarely make the notion become manifest) put me in that small minority of New Yorkers leading a relatively unhurried life

  There were periods where I saw more of him. For a while Robin Kay, Norman’s daughter, lived in a spare room in the brownstone. I used to visit her sometimes, I remember seeing the epic Game Six of the 1986 Mets-Red Sox World Series with her there. Then there was a period where I held IMP Games at Edgar’s home - Nick Nickell used to play, and Michael Rosenberg, Sam Lev, Jimmy Rosenbloom - Zia if he was in town. Plenty of bad players, too, naturally - the game wouldn’t have made sense without them.

  The conversation I’m about do describe would have occurred a few years after that ‘86 World Series - it must have been late Autumn, for I remember the Manhattan sky being overcast and gray - wintertime - and in that period, I spent my winters in Australia, so most likely it was November, I’m thinking.

  Of the several dozen times I visited him in that fifteen year period, I remember our conversation on one occasion in the late eighties or early nineties particularly well. It was autumn, I was a month or two from leaving NY for Australia - I went to Australia every winter in that era - a marvelous way of life, I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time.

  I held some fear that the story might reflect badly on Edgar’s memory, or on yours truly - hopefully it doesn’t. But even if it does, well, I’m here to spread light. And at the least this story may shed some. Ultimately, it’s just a couple of guys from the New York Jewish Atheist Tribe (not saying that Edgar or I were or are atheists - he probably was, though we never discussed it - certainly we are/were both Jews). 

  Certainly Edgar and I didn’t often discuss theology, or anything in the way of Jewish mysticism, or spirituality - I would estimate the number of exchanges we had on those subjects over the years at zero - and we did not have one on this day either. Though we could have, Edgar brought a truly open mind to our conversations - as long as I didn’t suggest that we switch to a relay system of bidding, I doubt he would have been very receptive to that.

  As always, his spacious study, which overlooked West 94th Street, just a block from the park, was cluttered with his books and various pages to be pieced together for the upcoming issue of Bridge World. I was sitting on the one idle chair, or maybe it was a foot-stool opposite him - or maybe an ottoman - his study wasn’t furnished with great intention, it was more of a lair….we had tackled most of our business at hand, perhaps a discussion about prospective teammates for a tournament - absently, I noticed a stapled document, I guess it was or a dozen pages, with typed profiles of maybe twenty or thirty nominees for the reconstituted Bridge Hall of Fame. 

  Some readers here may be familiar with the storied history of The Bridge Hall of Fame, others not. The history of Kaplan and The Bridge World magazine, dating all the way back to the Culbertson Era and the invention of the game by Vanderbilt, are both intertwined with that of the Hall. 

  As best I can reconstruct things - I really should ask Jeff (Rubens) - the Hall had had two moratoriums on inductions by that point, around 1990 - there were an initial ten inductees, sometime in the late nineteen-thirties, and then may another ten, guys like Kaplan himself, along with some other giants like Roth, Schenken, or B. Jay Becker, in the early sixties. Then, nothing for 25 years. But at the time of this encounter, probably thanks to the efforts of Edgar himself, the Hall was about to be resurrected.

  Which explains why, sitting there on this foot-stool in his cluttered study was this monograph with brief bios of a couple of dozen new nominees, listing the administrative and at-the-table bridge achievements of these two dozen worthies, ⅓ of whom may have been deceased, and ¾ of whom were no longer active in tournament play.

  I recall being a bit sullen rather than animated that morning - if it was in fact morning - probably around 11:30 AM - I had a bad habit of neglecting meals and being cranky as a consequence - still haven’t shaken that one - but I guess I must have said to him, at a lull in the conversation, something like “So let me ask you something….”

  “Shoot….” he might have said, though that isn’t the type of idiom he would employ, unless he was intentionally being ironic - he had a deep love for language and a rich internal life - 
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  At this point, dear reader, I will beg your forbearance in allowing me to embellish the conversation I had with EK that day. While I could have spoken to Edgar about anything, and occasionally did - he was a highly educated guy, exceptionally learned even among a cohort of learned people. His broad knowledge on multiple subjects felt almost inevitable, or incidentally. Latin, Greek, calculus, trigonometry, he knew something about all of them. Academically, Edgar had had an outstanding high school experience, at the private school a block from where we were sitting, Columbia Grammar. Then for college, he attended Cornell - he wouldn’t have been much more than a freshman there when he was drafted into the US Armed Services - perhaps he enlisted - he would have been drafted if he didn’t. He turned 17 in 1942, the April after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Like everyone else at the time, he probably took that personally, the attack by the Japanese on US forces at our naval base in Hawaii, at Pearl Harbor. Also known as: “The Sucker Punch That Shook the World”.

  World War II was one of many subjects we never discussed, along with theology, Jewish matters and how much help it was okay to give partner during the bidding - none, I figured, but I was from a different era. As for WWII, which he had fought in as a radio man on bombing runs in the Pacific - while in some respects the war defined our era - even forty years on, we were still living in the “Post-war era”. While I knew tons of veterans (my own father, Edgar, Al Roth) - details of the war went largely undiscussed. The prevailing thinking at the time ran, “If you were there you already know, and if you weren’t there - there’s no way to describe it (the horrors of war).” 

  Certainly WWII and the Holocaust were very far from our respective trains of thought that day - it was over forty years since he’d enlisted - I’m thinking he enlisted, I doubt he’d have waited until he was drafted, though he may have - as a practical matter, the easiest way to enlist was simply to wait for a letter from the Selective Service Department, directing you to report for a physical - “Greetings!” the letters began.

 “So let me ask you something,” I said to him, “All these people on this list of Hall of Fame nominees….”
  “Yes?” he may have echoed.

  “All these people….P. Hal Sims of Deal, New Jersey, Alvy Sheinwold, your husband-in-law (Kaplan had published a best-selling bridge book with Alvy and then married Sheinwold’s wife, Elizabeth - he and Edgar reconciled after a few years and from that time on Kaplan called his former partner his ‘husband-in-law’)”.
  “What about them?”
  “Ely Culbertson…
  “Yes?”
  “Ely Culbertson,” I repeated. “Jew, not Jew?”
  “Both.”
  “Both?”
  “He may have had a Jewish grandfather, from Russia.”
  “Oswald Jacoby. Jew, not Jew?”
  “Not Jew - though many think he is. Brooklyn-born.”
  “Curt Reisinger?” 
  “Jew, but he tried to pass.”
  “Richard Kahn?”
  “New York Jew.”
  “Waldemar von Zedtwitz.”
  “The Baron? Waldy? Is that a question? Whoever heard of a Jewish Baron?”
  “Eric Murray.”
  “Eric Rutherford Murray?” he echoed again, startled. “His people came over on the Mayflower, if Canada had a Mayflower.”
“Sami Kehela”.
“Iranian Jew.”
And so we bantered, back and forth, as I got a crash course in the bios of twenty legends of our bridge world.
“Eddie Kantar. Jew, obviously, but from where?”
“Minnesota.”
“Ha-ha”
“Rumania.”
And so we went through the rest of the list, Eric Kokish and Sam Gold, Don Oakie and Lew Mathe.  
  
Executive Summary:

Edgar Kaplan - it was a privilege to know him.

  Next Up (Blog #17): Peter Leventritt’s favorite Edgar Kaplan Story.​