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Longtime Roanoke Valley resident Walter Muir helped make postal chess a national phenomenon.
The address of 1722 Orchard Drive, Salem, Virginia, became familiar to thousands of chess players throughout North America and throughout the world. It was the home address of Walter Muir, a man who spent the second half of his nearly century-long life building a genuine society of letters among people that played chess games through the mail. The game they played was referred to as correspondence chess or postal chess.
Correspondence chess is a game of pondering and patience. Players have three days to respond with the notations for their countermove. Correspondence chess tournaments can take as long as three years to complete.
“It’s social and the games are well researched and well played,” International Correspondence Chess Federation (ICCF) Grandmaster and current ICCF champion Jon Edwards says. Edwards played Muir in correspondence chess on several occasions. Like many correspondence chess players, Edwards started playing because he had a young family at home and couldn’t take the time to travel. “There’s a meaningful competition with the possibility for advancement, but above all, each game is a supreme challenge, every move like an adjournment.”
As ICCF-USA secretary, Muir mailed players a packet with information on playing against domestic and international opponents. He assessed their skill level to place them in competitive matches.
Courtesy of Jon Edwards
Correspondence chess letter from Walter Muir to Jon Edwards, 1996.
Walter Muir wore many hats in this world he cultivated, including as an elite player, an administrator and a promoter. He often had 60 correspondence chess games going simultaneously. Additionally, Muir played opponents from over 60 countries and collected the stamps from the places around the world from which his opponents hailed.
Muir founded the United States Postal Chess Union and served for many years as the secretary of the ICCF-USA. He contributed significantly to the global administration of ICCF, offering thoughtful advice on which players should be given the rankings of international masters and grandmasters. Locally, Muir served for several years as the president of the Roanoke Valley Chess Club (RVCC), the oldest continuously active chess club in the state of Virginia.
Correspondence chess had tens of thousands of devotees across the United States for much of the twentieth century. While the availability of internet chess has cut deeply into the appeal of correspondence chess in the last two decades, Walter Muir created for several generations of chess players a community of likeminded individuals that transcended borders. Correspondence chess is the clear forerunner of the kinds of online gaming that are now enjoyed by millions of people the world over. Muir was rightfully known as the “Dean of American Correspondence Chess.”
Muir was born in Brooklyn in 1905 and raised in upstate New York, the son of Canadian parents. He studied engineering at Cornell University, where he came upon his two greatest passions. As a sophomore, he started playing correspondence chess, then a small and disparately played game with little in the way of formal organization. He also met a history major named Dorothy Sanders who became his lifelong companion. Walter and Dorothy married in 1932 and they remained together for the next 62 years. Like Walter, Dorothy was a chess enthusiast. She was a three-time national women’s correspondence chess champion (1958-1960).
Muir’s chops as an over-the-board (in person) and correspondence chess player were impeccable. Being a dual American-Canadian citizen, Walter competed in and dominated play in the Canadian Correspondence Chess Association, winning nine national titles between 1928 and 1942. Twice he won British Commonwealth correspondence chess titles and won nine ICCF Master Tournaments. His bona fides were also strong as an over the board player. He won the Roanoke city championship on three occasions and finished second in the three Virginia state tournaments in which he chose to compete—all of which took place in Roanoke. For in-person tournaments, Muir dressed to the nines, wearing a white dinner jacket and black bow tie for gameplay.
In 1971, he earned the title of International Correspondence Chess Master. Perhaps Muir’s most famous match was a 1960 victory over Soviet correspondence chess champion Peter Atjashev, making the Salem resident one of the first Americans to defeat a Soviet player of that caliber.
In 1972, the University of Louisville’s library acquired Muir’s vast collection of chess books. Muir donated more than 500 books and magazines, which he delivered personally to university librarian John Demos. The collection includes many antique British chess magazines and books which were not previously available in the United States. Thousands of records of Muir’s games are included in the files, which would be most beneficial to the international chess community if they were made available online.
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The story above is a preview from our September/October 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!