AArizona Republic Phoenix, Arizona Sunday, October 27, 1957
Mother Worries About Genius, 14, Who Lives Only For Chess
MANHATTAN (NANA)—What price child prodigy? That question comes to mind regarding 14-year-old Bobby Fischer, an intense, nail-biting youngster now hailed as the youngest chess master in the United States.
When the slender, sandy-haired Bobby won the U.S. open chess championship in Cleveland last August, triumphing over 176 other players, Al Horowitz, editor of Chess Review, remarked, “Nobody in the world could have played better than Bobby on this occasion.”
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AND AT THE Manhattan Chess Club, where Bobby, the youngest member, plays several evenings a week, Hans Kmoch, the club's general manager, said:
“He's so great that he shows the same potential as the immortals Paul Morphy and Jose Capablanca. He may some day become a world champion.”
Bobby lives with his mother and 20-year-old sister in Brooklyn. Mrs. Regina Fischer, his mother, a cheerful-looking visiting nurse, said the young chess genius, a high school sophomore, was precocious even as an infant. In nursery school, she said, he was a whiz at cutouts and other puzzle games.
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AND AT 7, he was a master of magic and card tricks. He was about the same age when he first learned to play chess, having become immediately fascinated when his sister, Joan, brought home a set she had picked up at a notion store. And from then on, he's been practically living with the game.
Mrs. Fischer has long been concerned over her son's total absorption in chess. Outside of a little tennis, which he plays at high school, where his grades are average, he doesn't appear to have any other interest at all, she said.
