AArizona Daily Star Tucson, Arizona Friday, January 05, 1962 - Page 44
Brains Pays Off 05 Jan 1962, Fri Arizona Daily Star (Tucson, Arizona) Newspapers.com
With Other Editors
Brains Pays Off
Insider's News Letter
In case you haven't noticed, it's Out these days to call a professor absent-minded, just as it's Out to make jokes about the college chess team—and the two facts may be related. What with outside consulting contracts, running businesses on the side and writing big-selling books, many professors are making a lot more money easier than some of the shrewd school-of-hard-knocks types.
The lesson that it pays to have brains hasn't been lost on the young and may be one reason that chess, the symbol of braininess, is booming. Scores of tournaments are being played in nearly every city across the country and the market for chess literature and equipment is bigger than ever. (Riding on the crest of this new boom, Encyclopedia Britannica's first programed learning device on a nonacademic subject is on chess.)
Campus observers note that the chess champs are doing at least as well with the coeds—many of whom are chess stars in their own right—as are star quarterbacks. The girls seem to sense that in business or in the cold war, as it's now being fought, the hero is the boy with the most brains.
Even on the sports pages, it's better to have outwitted the opposition that to have rolled over it. And parents seem to be giving toddlers chess sets as gifts in record numbers, all in the wistful hope that they may turn out to be Bobby Fischer's (he's the 18-year-old grand master who started playing at the age of six with a gift set.)
