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Robert Burger (burg@northcoast.com)
Robert Burger USA
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Try to solve this! You can find the hint in the story below, but if it is not enough see the solution to original No.362
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ELEVATORS
The Mechanics Institute Chess Club, in San Francisco, is the oldest
club in the country (if not the world) in continuous existence at its
present location (since 1868). And open seven days a week. It occupies
much of the fourth floor of a nine-story building at 57 Post Street.
Shops are on the ground floor, the library on the 2nd and 3rd, and
business offices from the 5th to the 9th.
In that club I was introduced to chess problems in 1950 by Adolph J.
Fink. He was one of the original Good Companions from 1918, when he
came back from France as a battle-weary corporal. When I first met
him he was a contender in the U.S. Championship, the best that
Mechanics Institute put forward for half a century.
To accommodate chessplayers, who played to midnight during tournaments
-- long after the business offices and the library were closed -- one
elevator of three was kept operating late, but would not go beyond
the fifth floor. This was no problem until one evening Mr. Fink demanded
to go to the seventh floor to retrieve some books he had checked out of
the library earlier and had left at a friends seventh-floor office.
The elevator operator was adamant: "You go to the seventh floor, I cut
you off!" he threatened.
"What if I go to the fifth, and walk up from there?" Fink proposed.
"The right elevator, no -- the stairway will be blocked by it!"
Fink thought for a minute. "Then the solution is -- whats left."
Mr. Fink was kind to me as a young composer, often wondering about these
new-fangled try problems, but always keeping an open mind. Even about
elevators.
Bob Burger