The Wilshire Chess Society (WCS) was founded on April 12, 1993 by Anthony Reynolds, Ray Montalvo, Mike White, and Sanjay Srivastava. They chipped in $10.00 each, and then immediately sent in $30.00 from their new treasury to the U.S. Chess Federation to become an official USCF affiliate. Each month they would hold a chess tournament with humorous names such as, June Juggernaut, August Apocalypse and October Oooom-pah-pah. Doug Enright was the winner of the very first WCS tournament ever held. His prize? He got his $5.00 entry fee back!
Eventually the tournaments were moved to the Community Room at the Westside Pavilion Mall in West Los Angeles. In February of 1995, Anthony Reynolds, who was running the WCS and directing its tournaments, moved his family to Virginia. It was at this time that Michael Jeffreys took over as club president and created the WCS newsletter. Raymond De turenne kept our member data base organized, Robert Nunnally was club secretary, and Lisa Edmondson treasurer.
Our first WCS monthly newsletter came out in July 1995. It contained a Black to move and win chess puzzle, along with the story of how we got our club name. (Basically, the four founders listed above sat around the balcony of the UCLA physics building trying to come up with a club name. Nobody could think of anything that the group liked when Ray Montalvo blurted out, "How about the Wilshire Chess Society?" The others said, "Sounds good to us!" And the rest, as they say, is history.)
Today, the club is run by Michael Jeffreys who serves as TD at the tournaments as well as editor/publisher of the club's monthly newsletter. Eillot Landaw assists at the tournaments with the pairings and paperwork. In March of 2002, Danny Berman created this web site to display the pictures from the Kasparov simul and to give our club a presence on the web. Lisa Edmondson, who was club secretary, retired in May of 2002.
June 2003 Update: Unfortunately, due to declining attendance throughout most of 2002 and the first third of 2003, (at our May 18th tournament, only 4 people showed up to play!), we made the decision to close down the club, as we were just losing too much money renting the room each month, paying for postage and xeroxing for the monthly newsletter, etc. You can read more details in our special June 2003 newsletter, which is our final issue.