Larry Evans, 78, who parlayed his record as one of America’s best professional chess players into a career as a writer whose syndicated chess column ran for more than two decades and reached millions of readers, died Nov. 15.
Evans, who wrote for insiders as well as for those whose passion for the game had yet to be discovered, died of complications from gallbladder surgery at a hospital in Reno, Nev.
A sparring partner of the American chess phenomenon Bobby Fischer, Evans was also a prodigy. He announced himself as a new chess talent when he was 15, winning the prestigious Marshall Chess Club championship in New York. Four years later, in 1951, he topped one of the best players in the world, Sammy Reshevsky, to win the U.S. Chess Championship.
Evans went on to become an international grandmaster in 1957 and to win four more U.S. Chess Championships, the last in 1980.
William Self, 89, a prolific producer who brought a long list of successful shows to television — “Daniel Boone,” “Peyton Place,” “Batman” and “M*A*S*H” among them — transforming 20th Century- Fox Television into a leading supplier of programming to the networks in the 1960s and ’70s, died Monday in Los Angeles. The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter, Barbara Malone.
After overseeing the anthology series “The Schlitz Playhouse of Stars” in the early 1950s, he took executive positions at CBS and Fox, where he developed or oversaw some of the most successful and prestigious shows on television. He also produced the pilot episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
Denver Post wire services
