GM William Lombardy

The death of GM Lombardy -- see William Lombardy, Chess Grandmaster Turned Priest, Dies at 79 (nytimes.com; Dylan Loeb McClain) -- reminded me how little I knew about one of the USA's strongest chess players of the 20th century. The first paragraph of Wikipedia's article, William Lombardy, sums up nearly everything I know.

William James Joseph Lombardy (December 4, 1937 – October 13, 2017) was an American chess grandmaster, chess writer, teacher, and Catholic priest. He was one of the leading American chess players during the 1950s and 1960s, and a contemporary of Bobby Fischer, whom he coached from the time Fischer was age 11½ through the World Chess Championship 1972. Lombardy led the U.S. Student Team to Gold in the 1960 World Student Team Championship in Leningrad. He was the only World Junior Champion to win with a perfect score.

Google search returns not only the principle Lombardy page of top chess resources,

• Chessgames.com: The chess games of William James Lombardy
• Chess.com: GM William Lombardy, 1937-2017 (Mike Klein)
• Chessbase.com: William Lombardy 1937-2017 (Macauley Peterson)

it also returns some specialized material.

• WilliamLombardyChess.com: William Lombardy American Chess Master
• KevinSpraggettOnChess.wordpress.com Bill Lombardy: My chess friend (Spraggett on Chess)

As for my blog, Posts for query lombardy picks up only nine posts, most of which are brief references to GM Lombardy in a monthly 'On the Cover' post. The only post about Lombardy, A Chess Playing Priest (August 2017), has little to with chess.

I also searched my collection of chess images, the majority from eBay, and among the many thousands of images, found exactly eleven. Half of those mentioned Lombardy only in passing in the associated text. Of the other half, two were copies of the same photo, shown below.

Combining the essential elements of the text for both photos gives,

14th Chess Olympiad, 1960, Leipzig, Germany; William Lombardy watching over Ghitescu vs Fischer.

To rectify this unsatisfactory situation, I'll do a short series of posts on Lombardy. One angle worth exploring is from 'Spraggett on Chess':-

One of the fondest memories of the time I was a high school student at Rosemount High in Montreal was hiding away in the library stacks, poring over the back issues of Chess Review, at that time the most popular chess magazine in North America. [...] In particular, the articles written by Grandmaster William Lombardy (who was also at that time a Roman Catholic Priest) were among my favourites. There was something unpretentious about the GM’s style of writing that made it seem as though he was speaking directly to the reader, one on one as it were.

This ties into another of my own posts, The Trainers’ Tree (June 2015), where I learned that the FIDE Trainer Awards listed 'Lombardy William (USA), 2014' in the Hall of Fame.