My wife and I owned a house in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, on Euclid Heights Boulevard, from 1986-1991. That location put me within walking distance of the old Arabica coffee house on Coventry Road. The Coventry district was quite a Bohemian scene in those days and there I met numerous interesting characters of the sort one expects to find in coffee houses: the flâneur and flâneuse, wannabe poets and novelists, pseudo-intellectual bullshitters of every stripe, and a wide range of chess players from patzers to masters.
It was there that I became acquainted with International Master Calvin Blocker. Observing a game of mine one day, he kibitzed, "You'd be lucky to be mated."
One day he came to my house to give me a lesson. He pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down from memory the famous game in which the great Paul Morphy crushed Count Isouard and the Duke of Braunschweig in 17 moves. "Study this," Calvin said.
Here is his story.
Harvey Pekar talks about Coventry.
For the true chess aficionado, here is 45 minutes of Grandmaster Ben Finegold on Calvin Blocker.
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