The Boss
Frogs, Chessboards and Grids
By PATRICIA R. OLSEN
I COME from a family of mathematicians. My mother taught math in middle school, high school and college, and my father was a math professor. He was also a poet, a musician and a chess player — a true renaissance man who had an extraordinary influence on me. I’d come home from school to find him listening to orchestra music while following along with the musical score and pretending he was conducting.
My parents, one brother and I lived in a three-room apartment, which was common at the time. My father and I were always involved in engineering projects and spent a lot of time outdoors fishing, hunting for mushrooms and picking berries. I kept hedgehogs, wild rabbits and frogs under my bed.
My father taught me to play chess when I was about 3, and I joined an after-school, government-run chess club when I was 6. When I was 10, we moved to Lithuania, where I became a youth champion seven years later, in 1988.
As I grew older, my father was concerned that I might never have any marriage prospects, so he tried to interest me in domestic activities. He gave me pots and pans on my birthday and taught me to cook. Once we sewed a suit as a present for a cousin’s birthday.
It turned out he didn’t have to worry — I married at 19. I had met my future husband, Leonard, on the first day of an international chess tournament in Bulgaria. I was attending Vilnius University in Lithuania, and Leonard was from Ukraine. He proposed on the last day of the tournament, and we were married shortly afterward. We left for the United States in 1991, when the Soviet Union was collapsing and America was in a recession.
For a while, Leonard delivered pizza, and I worked at a dry cleaners in Cleveland and finished college at Case Western Reserve University. We wanted to give chess lessons, but we needed to advertise, so we asked a local activist and chess player to sponsor an exhibition in a city park one Sunday. I had 26 opponents and played them all at once. I won 20 games, lost three and had three draws. Standing on the sidelines, Leonard announced the opening of our chess academy and signed up students.
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