Historical Stuff

In the summer of 1957, the Lebanon (Ohio) Roller Rink used to have a Rock 'n Roll Dance every Saturday night after the skating. That's where we met - Jim, a 20 year old college student and Gwen, a 15 year old upcoming High School Junior. 

The next two years went by in a whirl, and in the summer of 1959 four things happened in a 21 day span. Gwen graduated from Kings Mills High School, Jim graduated from University of Cincinnati, we got married and we moved from Ohio to the high plains of Texas. 

Since then we've lived in lots of places; (Texas, Georgia, Trinidad, Tennessee, New York, Tallahassee FL, Rainbow Springs FL), and now here we are.

Jim was first a Chemical Engineer, but became disenchanted about 1978 and became a High School Physics/Math teacher (that's when we moved to Florida). Gwen was variously a secretary or office manager except for the twelve years in Trinidad where she was a Lady of Leisure. After the move to Florida, she joined the ranks of Civil Servant for the State of Florida in Tallahassee.

We've done a lot of things since the Summer of '57 but one of the things we never did was start a family.  

Playing Bridge

During our first year of marriage, Gwen learned to play Bridge. Jim had started playing in college, and it seemed a natural thing to start doing. We had one couple in our group of friends who were pretty good and we played a lot of late nights with them. As we moved from place to place sometimes we played Bridge, but many other times we didn't. During our twelve years in the Caribbean we got our first taste of Duplicate, and enjoyed it a lot.

After the move to Tallahassee in 1978 we dropped Bridge from our lives for no particular reason other than getting caught up in our professions, Gwen being a civil servant and Jim teaching. More than twenty years passed before we would play again.

Retirement. Looking for something to occupy our time. Hunting an excuse to travel. This is what brought about our return to Bridge. We decided to join the ACBL and try our hand in one of the tournaments. We remembered ourselves as being pretty good (ha) so we thought it would be fun. What an Eye-Opener! We kept getting trounced! And we also found out we were playing antique systems while the whole Bridge World had moved forward.

So we got serious. Jim started reading up on the new (to us) Standard American Bidding System, and teaching the stuff he learned to Gwen. We both started working on our game and we began to slowly improve.

During the years 2006 to 2011 we combined our quest for "Masterpoints" with vacation trips and played in many, many Sectional and Regional tournaments; sometimes doing well, other times not so well. We attended three ACBL National tournaments, in San Diego, New Orleans and Orlando. Finally, in 2012, at our local club in Ocala, Fl, we both earned our 300th Masterpoint and became Life Masters.

Since moving to FV, we have only been to one tournament, one held here in Bradenton. Don't know if we will ever do it again, but it was surely exciting during the 5-6 years we were competing!