Who was Norman T. Whitaker? He was a patent attorney by profession but also a criminal and a chess player of near IM strength. He came from a prominent Philadelphia family but ended up on the wrong side of the law with multiple convictions for car theft, sending drugs through the U.S. mail, insurance fraud and molesting a minor. He was best known for attempting to bilk the Washington Post heiress (who at the time owned the Hope Diamond) out of a small fortune through a scheme he devised in which he claimed to be able to return Charles Lindbergh’s kidnapped baby. Of course he had nothing to do with the kidnapping. And that’s not to mention assorted other schemes he perpetrated on unsuspecting marks in his role as a conman. I was one of his victims. It was only for five dollars, but I was still conned.

Shortly before my discharge from the U.S. Military in 1967, I participated in a small tournament in Charlotte, North Carolina. When I showed up early on Sunday morning for my 4th round game there was an old man with crutches sitting in the room. He was surrounded by a gaggle of players. He had been asked to adjudicate an adjourned game between a local expert and his opponent. Whitaker questioned both players about the position and determined that the expert, though he had a better position, did not know how to win the game so it was declared a draw.

Whitaker then began to spin yarns about players I’d only heard about: Herman Helms, Frank Marshall, Isaac Kashdan, Herman Steiner, Al Horowitz, Sammy Reshevsky, Arthur Dake and a host of other famous masters he’d met and played.

I have to admit that at the time I had no idea who Whitaker was. None. Anyway eventually he got to the point as to why he was at this unimportant event. He had a box of paperback books titled 365 Selected Chess Endings that he had coauthored with an Expert named Glen Hartleb. The book was written in both English and German.

In 2007 Sam Sloan was in the process of reprinting Whitaker’s book and was surprised that almost nobody had ever heard of it. Sloan said he asked around among collectors and only GM William Lombardy had heard of or even seen it. Sloan claimed it was a good book worthy of study. I had a different opinion.

You see Whitaker had told all of us that if we bought the book and studied everything in it, we would be a master. Of course I bought an autographed copy. Who wouldn’t want to be a master? Anyway when I got back from the tournament I started going through it. It only had positions and their solutions…no explanations. I don’t like problems, realized there was nothing in it that would elevate me from 1600 to mastership and Whitaker had lied so I threw it away. Darn! What would such a rare original edition autographed by Whitaker be worth today?

Thanks for the anecdote.

On the positive side, you learned for just $5 how to spot a conman.