LUCKY, LUCKY ME!!!

Reflecting over the years, few have been lucky to have been wed to two very special individuals who are held in high esteem in the bridge world both for their accomplishments and their honor and deportment at the table.   I shared many happy, serious moments and some very sad ones with both.   However, allow me to recount a humorous reference from The Lone Wolff, Bobby’s tell-all of his sixty-five years on the bridge scene.  

However, this one starts out focusing on my betrothal to Norman and is a prelude to Bobby’s funny tale.  After Norman and I got engaged in 1963, he took me back to his home in Merchantville where his  mother proudly marched me up to the third floor attic and presented me with four old (but clean) huge grocery garbage bags.   One contained newspaper articles, clippings. ACBL Bridge bulletins, etc.   I figured out immediately I had been assigned the chore of making several scrapbooks of Norman’s many triumphs.   I dreaded looking through the three bulky, obviously heavy bags and stared in wonderment until I realized they were old blackened tarnished trophies like the Vanderbilts, Reisingers and Spingolds plus, plus, plus.   Eventually I carted them home and had most of the premier ones invicted (that seems to be the word they used for this expensive process though I couldn’t find it in the dictionary) to preserve them from ugly tarnish and to this day tediously polish the rest of both Norman’s and Bobby’s (when I am having visitors).   It is a very long, filthy and exhausting endeavor.   Dusting is one thing – polishing is another!

They are prominently displayed (together with Bobby’s eleven world championship medals and trophies) in my joint Kay-Wolff (that’s Norman and Bobby’s) magnificent Trophy Room here in our home in Summerlin.  Fortunately (and I mean fortunately) dozens of Bobby’s are absent and this is the story I alluded to in the opening.  

Back in the late fifties or early sixties Bobby and his buddies were playing in a Texas border town tournament and decided to cross into Mexico for some of his favorite food.   They were stopped by the border patrol and when a bulgy suitcase full of Bobby’s indiscriminate trophies were discovered in the trunk of his car, they politely said they would confiscate them temporarily and return the precious metals when they came back into Texas that evening.   As  they returned to the border, the honorable policeman dutifully rushed to Bobby to return his booty as promised.

“KEEP THEM,’ he blurted!  (GOLD AND SILVER??  HARDLY!  Little did they know!)