While in the South, Bobby was getting his first exposure to racial prejudice. Blacks were still not allowed to sit at the counters. Bobby had to ask his mother what it meant when he saw a drinking fountain that was labeled COLORED ONLY. Regina was furious at the prejudice she was witnessing, but no one else seemed to care.
One of the men on the trip began to hint to the others that he was ready to seduce Regina and that he thought she was a willing seductee; he became a laughingstock one night when she adamantly refused him entrance to her room.
Crammed in the car, the group sometimes tired of chess talk and reminisced about other adventures, real or imagined. Whitaker cracked at least one joke a day, usually tasteless: “I know a woman who will pay me one thousand dollars to see me in the nude: She’s blind.” Bobby often asked for explanations. “See me later, kid; I’ll tell you,” someone would pipe up.
During the six-hour trip on the ferry from the Duval Street dock in Key West to Havana, Bobby and an older player, Robert Houghton, played blindfold chess, visualizing the evolving game and calling out their imaginary moves; but when they reached nine or ten moves and the game became more complicated, the positions began to dissolve in Houghton’s mind and he couldn’t continue. To Bobby, the positions were as clear as if he had the game set up on a board in front of him. After a few additional attempts sans board and pieces, the invisible match was abandoned and they played on the portable set. Bobby won dozens of quick games during that session, not losing one.
Havana in 1956 was a feisty, corrupt city. Tourist agents called it “The Pearl of the Antilles,” but it was more provocatively referred to by others as “the sexiest city in the world.” Filled with gambling casinos, brothels, and streetwalkers, and with rum costing only $1.20 per bottle, the city had a reputation for debauchery. More than 250,000 American tourists went to Havana that year, most to have a wanton weekend or two. The Cabineers, however, were in Havana to play chess, and although it’s possible that some of the men went to the infamous Shanghai Theater or to other shadowy places at night, the team members played a match almost every day.
The major team match against the Capablanca Chess Club was disappointing for the Americans: though Bobby and Whitaker won their games, the five other Americans lost. Bobby gave a twelve-board simultaneous exhibition against members of the club and won ten and drew two—“just for fun, not for money,” he was quick to explain. He later summed up his experience: “The Cubans seem to take chess more seriously.… They feel more the way I do about chess. Chess is like fighting, and I like to win. So do they.”
The New York Times took notice of the Log Cabin tour with a headline: CHESS TEAM ENDS TOUR. The story pointed out that the Cabineers ended the tour with a minus score; they won 23½ games and lost 26½, but Whitaker and Bobby were the leading scorers in the club matches at 5½–1½ each, excluding Bobby’s ten wins in his simultaneous exhibition.
After Bobby’s three-week adventure, returning to Brooklyn and to school was anticlimactic. Nevertheless, the boy enjoyed getting back to the familiarity of the unregimented school and to the opportunity to play with his friends at the Manhattan Chess Club. In retrospect, he said he enjoyed his four years at Community Woodward, mainly because the unstructured routine enabled him to “get up and walk around the room if you wanted” and to dress any way he liked (“ordinary polo shirts, dungarees or corduroy pants”). He also enjoyed his status as the school’s resident chess player. Instead of Bobby’s adapting to the teachers or the administration, the staff ended up adapting to him. When graduation from eighth grade occurred, however, in June 1956, Bobby elected not to attend the ceremony, because he didn’t want to give up an afternoon of chess and because he disliked “any kind of formality and ceremony.” He was thirteen and intended to spend the summer studying and playing chess. Although he’d be entering high school the following September, that transition, exciting to many youngsters, was of little interest to him.
Jack Collins, one of the great teachers of chess, lived with his sister Ethel in Brooklyn and was host to a chess salon in his apartment called the Hawthorne Chess Club, which met there regularly. It was open and free to just about anybody who wanted to play—or study—the game with him, although he did charge a token fee to some for individual lessons. He was kindhearted, highly self-educated, and had an uproarious sense of humor. Some of the greatest players in the United States were Collins’s pupils, such as the Byrne brothers and William Lombardy. Collins’s apartment was stocked with hundreds of chess books, chess paintings and statues, and furniture and draperies decorated with chess figures; it was a virtual chess museum. Jack had exchanged a few words with Bobby when they met in Asbury Park, New Jersey, at the U.S. Amateur Championship during Memorial Day weekend in 1956. At that meeting Collins had invited Bobby to come to the apartment, and two weeks after, the boy appeared. Collins wrote about Bobby’s first visit to his home:
Bobby Fischer rang my doorbell one afternoon in June 1956. I opened the door and a slender, blond, typical thirteen-year-old American boy dressed in a plaid woolen shirt, corduroy trousers, and black-and-white sneakers, said simply: “I’m Bobby Fischer.”
I had seen him once before, and I replied, “Hi, Bobby, come on in.” We went into the living room and sat down at the chess board. I knew he was rather shy and I am not always easy at first meetings either. So, it seemed the best thing to do was to become immediately involved in the thing we both loved best—chess. I happened to have a position from one of my postal instruction games set up on the board. It was a difficult position, and I had just been analyzing it for about half an hour. I nodded at it and asked, “What do you think about this position, Bobby?”
Bobby plunged right in. Within seconds he was stabbing out moves, trying combinations, seeking won endings, and rattling off variations, his fingers barely able to keep pace with his thoughts. He found several hidden possibilities I had not seen. I was deeply impressed. Of course, I had heard of his remarkable talent. But this was the first time I realized that he was really a prodigy and might become one of the greatest players of all time.
Just as Bobby had fairly leaped into—and established residence at—the Manhattan Chess Club the previous summer, he soon became a regular presence at Collins’s salon. The chess teacher’s place was only a few blocks from Erasmus High School, and Bobby would dash from the school during lunch hour and free periods, play a few games with Collins while eating his sandwich taken from home, then hurry back to school. At three p.m. he’d return and spend the rest of the day over the board, eventually having dinner with Jack and Ethel, more often than not eaten while the two friends were still playing or analyzing. Bobby would continue at the board through the evening, until Regina or Joan would come and escort him home. Bobby and Jack played thousands of games—mostly speed—analyzed hundreds of positions, and solved dozens of chess problems together. Bobby also became a constant borrower of books from the Collins library. The short, stunted man confined to a wheelchair and the growing boy went to movies, dined in restaurants, attended chess events at clubs, and celebrated birthdays and holidays together. The Collins apartment became a home to Bobby in every way, the boy being thought of as part of the family.
Was Jack Collins, in fact, Bobby’s most important teacher, overshadowing Carmine Nigro? The question should be raised, since Bobby later in life said he’d learned nothing from Collins. In truth, Bobby’s quick dismissal of Collins’s contribution may have been delivered out of cold, ungrateful pride. Certainly, Collins replaced Carmine Nigro as Bobby’s mentor after Nigro moved to Florida in 1956, the year that Bobby and Collins met. Bobby would never see Nigro again.