Remembrance
“In 1969 Larry was in the Army studying Russian while I was in the Air Force studying Serbo-Croatian. We met on a weekend when I went to the library building looking for a game of chess and went on to become good friends. We would meet again in Texas and again in Europe … . We maintained a correspondence for many years; his letters always contained at least one … annotated game that he had played.
“I loved reading his meticulously crafted articles in Chess Life. (The one he wrote to mark the passing of Nigel Eddis comes to mind—vintage Larry!)
“Larry Parr was one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.”
—USCF life member Steve Latus, remembering Larry from the Monterey language school
Parr Confidential
Born of a prosperous family in Seattle, Washington on May 21, 1946, Parr graduated cum laude from both Bellevue High School and the University of Washington, with a B.A. in history. After graduation, he served in the Vietnam-era U.S. Army, where he was selected to work in the Army Security Agency, which recruited its personnel from those scoring high on the Army’s intelligence test. The agency was tasked with monitoring, trans- lating, and interpreting military communications from the old Soviet Union and its allies. Of course, all this work was classi- fied. Parr was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where he recalled that he studied Russian until “I thought my head would burst.” Later he was stationed close to the old East German border. Larry was mysterious and unchar- acteristically tight-lipped even to his closest friends about his intelligence work that was on the cutting edge of the U.S. Cold War efforts. How Larry, of all people, must have chafed inwardly at not being able to talk and write about these key experiences!
After his discharge, Larry served as a teaching assistant at his alma mater until taking a job with Reuters News Agency in 1978. It was during this stint as a stringer that Parr found the atmospheric for- mer British colony that would become his expatriate-home.
He also encountered human tragedy that left an indelible mark. Frank Elley often heard Larry tell the story:
This was during the days when the “boat people” were fleeing Vietnam after the communist takeover, and many of them landed on the shores in Malaysia. Larry took a translator down to the beach and wrote up the stories of the people he interviewed there. This was a pivotal moment in his life. Day after day, for weeks, he heard and wrote these stories of heartache and tragedy. And it changed him, forever. He became convinced that communism, and Russian communism in particular, was a monstrous evil. And he dedicated his life to combating it.
It was during this time in Malaysia as well when Parr discov- ered that the reaction to his writing would make him very unwelcome in certain circles. Elley again tells it best:
One evening he slipped into a meeting of government officials where journalists were not allowed. Deputy Prime Minister Mohamad Mahathir was addressing the problem of the Viet-
44 Chess Life — July 2011
namese boat people. At one point during the talk he said that perhaps they could solve the problem by sending some soldiers down to the beach with machine guns. Larry believed that Mahathir was gauging the reaction of the crowd to the idea, seeing if his “jest” would raise objections. Larry wrote up the story, and who knows—it might well have prevented a mas- sacre. He was warned at the time that Mahathir was a powerful, up-and-coming politician and this was going to turn out very badly for him.
Months passed and nothing happened. But when Mahathir took over as prime minister, the next day soldiers were at Larry’s door. He was given 24 hours to leave the country. He left his home and cherished friends behind and went back to Seattle. His life had fallen apart. A few years later, this is the man we met in New Wind- sor, New York, as the new editor of Chess Life.
Raising Circulation
Elley, the soft-spoken and self-effacing outgoing Chess Life editor, could hardly have been more different from his replace- ment, who was nevertheless to become a lifelong and life-changing friend. Parr’s Chess Life abruptly departed from the studiously impartial coverage of his predecessor.
To be fair, Parr’s term of editorship coincided with some of the most disputatious years in chess history, encompassing then- FIDE-president Florencio Campomanes’ infamous stoppage of the 1984-85 Karpov-Kasparov match for the world champi- onship, the awarding by Campomanes of the 1986 Chess Olympiad to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (precluding the participation of Israel), and FIDE’s notorious 1987 declaration of journalist Ricardo Calvo as “persona non grata”—to recount only a modest sampling. Parr chafed at the restrictions that would be imposed by those who envisioned the periodical as a temper- ate “house organ.” Indeed, only some nine months into the job, Parr jerked readers forward in their seats and rocked some concerned officials back on their heels with the memorable September 1985 issue, whose cover-teaser screamed, “Kas- parov Blows Lid Off Fidegate: Gives ‘Deep Throat’ Interview.” The issue brought a seething Campo to the U.S. clutching a crum- pled copy of Chess Life. By March 1988, Parr and USCF agreed to part ways.
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PHOTOS: CHESS LIFE ARCHIVES
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