CHESS
HORIZONS
Meet Ray
George Duval
Meet Ray, He’s my dad.
In case you are wondering how
I got to be such a chess enthusiast,
you needn’t look much further than
one click up the genealogical tree in
my family. Being father’s day, I
thought I’d take the time and tell
you the story of Ray, my dad.
Ray grew up in a small town in
Maine and was the youngest of 4
children. Since his three older siblings were much older, there
weren’t many shared interests. This
meant my father had to find things
to entertain himself with.
Ray was about 7 when he went
to his Uncle Harold who proclaimed
to be a checkers champion, and he
sought to learn the game. Though
Uncle Harold was great at checkers,
his way of teaching meant beating
my father and laughing at his mistakes. My father loved board games
and collected games that even included chess pieces. This was the 1940’s
and in Brunswick, Maine, chess
was not a household world.
During the war, my dad went to
a boarding school in West Newbury,
Massachusetts as a young teen. Chess
was introduced to Ray by a Clarence
Bisson, a local boy who was also sent
to West Newbury, Mass. Clarence
showed Ray how to play and proclaimed that he was the “champion”
at Billerica. He skipped teaching
Ray about castling and en passant
because “they were rarely used”. It
didn’t take my father long to beat the
champion of Billerica high school.
Eager to learn, Ray found a
local bookstore that carried some
basic chess books. With the money
he made as a young teen working at
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WWW.MASSCHESS.ORG
the family bakery, he picked up a
couple of these books to get started.
He began playing with his friends
and anyone who showed an interest.
He found a few friends in High
school to play. He yearned for better
competition and discovered Postal
chess to be an answer. He’d get several cards going in the mail playing
several games. This was a great period for him to hone his skills in the
days before the internet and ICC.
As a young man in the late
1950’s, he was a newlywed. He
found the local chess club in the
city of Portland, Maine to fulfill his
growing passion for the game. My
mother would rather see him head
off to a chess club on a Friday than
hanging out in the bars, which was
never the case for my dad. The only
time he’d hang out in a bar was on
a Saturday morning, as their bookkeeper. After all, he was a CPA.
The early years of raising a
family and moving to a small town
in Maine gave him limited chess
options other than the postal games.
I was the youngest of three. Once I
reached school age, I remember him
teaching my sisters to play chess.
Unlike Lazlo Polgar making a psychological study out of his children,
Ray merely provided us the opportunity. As I watched my oldest sister
attempt her best game at dad, with
knights developed off the edge of
the board and nothing in the center,
she was in tears by the end of the
game and swore it off. I, on the
other hand, was eager to dive in. I
didn’t care if my pieces were taken
immediately off the board. I’d only
come back for more.
It was about this time in the late
1960’s that he started up a chess
club in small coastal college town.
The pool of players came from the