The Life Master party for Sue Rudd and Dave Landsberg was finally held on Wednesday, December 11, at the 9:30 game. Between the fourth and fifth rounds there was a little ceremony to present them with their pins and to cut the cake. I had planned to make a speech, of course, but Donna Feir warned me ahead of time to keep it short. She said that the president (Gene Coppa) was worried about running into the 1:30 game.

I made some mental cuts as I played the first twelve hands with Jerry Hirsch as my partner. The stress and the distraction of trying to rewrite on the fly threw my game off, and that explains our mediocre results. That is my story, and I am sticking to it even though my play was actually just as bad after the speech was over.

Here is a pretty good approximation of what I said about Sue:

Over the last few years I have often given Sue rides to evening games, and almost always I have also remembered to bring her home. During those rides she told me that her goal was to have “Life Master” in her obituary. So I looked in the Courant’s Future Archives for her obituary. I want to share a little of what I found.

At this point I pulled a newspaper clipping out of my shirt pocket and read the following:

Susan F. Rudd – I’ll skip the dates – worked in the Collections Section of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, where she was known as Rudd the Ruthless. After retirement she divided her time between her family and her many hobbies. She is survived by her sons Paul and David, eight grandchildren, 27 great-grandchildren, 42 great-great-grandchildren, and one great-great-great grandson.

Susan is best known as being the only woman to win the American women’s super-senior tennis championship as an octogenarian, a nonagenarian, and a centenarian. However, her proudest accomplishment was to become a Life Master in bridge, a game without electronics that was popular in the twentieth century.

I set the paper down and turned toward Dave.

Dave Landsberg, who is a chicken farmer, does not get out much. On the rare occasions when he goes to a tournament, he always wants to hit some dive or other afterwards, where I inevitably have to deal with his legendary Irish temper. I can’t tell you how many fights in biker bars I have had to drag him out of.

 

But that’s not what I am here to talk about. I want to describe the extreme highs and lows of playing with Dave. The zenith is easy to remember. In Auburn, MA, a few years back Pat, Dave, and I were part of a five-person team in the Sunday Swiss. I was elected captain, and I assigned myself to play in only the middle four matches. We were 4-2 when I went home to mow the lawn. It was a brilliant decision. The four of them won the seventh round and then in the eighth round they defeated a team that included Sheila Gabay and Jay Stiefel to capture first in B and C.

 

The low point was in the B-C pairs in Hamden when Dave and I decided to play semi-Bergen, semi-Flannery, and semi-inverted minors. The semi- part means that on any given hand one but not the other of us remembered to play the convention. We finished dead last in both sessions. But I will tell you this: even with that miserable result I thoroughly enjoyed playing with Dave.

 

I know both of these people very well and how hard they worked for this. They both richly deserve this honor.

Thanks to Jerry Hirsch, who supplied most of the photos.