A Life Transformed by Chess: True Tales of Frank Camaratta

Our interview series with Frank Camaratta, the founder of House of Staunton, is coming to a close. We’ve heard from Frank on his childhood in Philadelphia and his careers in aerospace and chess. Odds are high that you’ve learned something new about Frank, even for those who are lucky enough to know him personally. We’ll finish up with some fun stories and reflection, told in Frank’s inimitable style.

In this final installment of our interview, Frank reflects on some favorite anecdotes and what’s currently keeping him occupied. As idleness has never been one of Frank’s factory settings, there’s no rocking on the porch for The Maestro.

Interview questions and answers have been edited for clarity and readability. In over five hours of conversation, topics ranged from baseball to space shuttles, and these are the highlights. This interview has been presented in three parts, this third and final part covering some of Frank’s favorite anecdotes and philosophical considerations. For Part I, click here, and Part II is here.

A Brush with Bobby Fischer

Frank went to Iceland in 2005 to present a custom Gothic Chess set for a proposed exhibition match between Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov. The match was doomed from the start, but it was a rare opportunity for Frank and House of Staunton.

Frank: I got a call around the spring of 2005 from a guy who’d invented something he called “Gothic Chess,” which is Capablanca chess with the Chancellor and Archbishop reversed. [Note: This was Ed Trice, who invented Gothic Chess in 2000.] The game is played on a 10 X 8 board with the two additional pieces I mentioned.

Ratcliffe: And ten pawns as well?

Frank: Yes. I never liked the game. I didn't think it played well. Anyway, he says he wants to set up a Fischer/Karpov match with Gothic Chess. Fischer refused to play Karpov in ‘75. He beat Spassky in ‘72, and the next challenger was Karpov. Fischer simply refused. He got into a squabble about the rules of the match and declined to play. Typical Fischer stuff. I thought, why should he? Fischer is a world champion, why risk it? Nothing to gain and everything to lose.

Frank: For this new match, they had around $14.8 million committed. Karpov was signed. I have a copy of the signed paper. They contacted me when they were trying to convince Fischer to sign. I said, “Fischer is never going to agree to this. Why don't you try to set up a match with Spassky? People want to see Fischer. They don’t care who he plays.” I knew he was comfortable with Spassky. They were friends, and Fischer knew he could beat him.

Frank: They went with Karpov. They asked me to design the chess set for it, so I did. It’s my Collector Series set with the addition of the Archbishop and the Chancellor. I made two sets and custom 10 X 8 chess boards for the game.

Frank: The plan was to go to Reykjavik, Iceland, and meet with Fischer so he could approve the set. Fischer had his own entourage. One of them was a model. I’m 6’3” and this blonde towered over me!

Ratcliffe: So the scene is very glamorous—he’s a celebrity.

Frank: Yeah. When we got there, Fredrik Olofsson was in the room. He was an Icelandic GM and a good friend of Fischer’s, and Bobby trusted him to handle the negotiation. I had the pieces out, showing them around. Fredrik took the pieces to Fischer in another room, because he wouldn’t talk to us directly.

Frank: Fredrik came back after a while and told us it was missing a piece. Sure enough, the piece was in the box. That was how we knew Fischer had actually played with the set. He liked it, and said he would meet with us, but we had to give him an additional $50,000. We’d already given him $20,000 just for the opportunity to present the set. It’s Saturday night in Reykjavik, and I had about $10 in my pocket. We couldn’t come up with the money, so I packed up my wares and left. After we left, the demands from Fischer kept increasing, and finally the event collapsed.

Ratcliffe: He was very unpredictable, wasn’t he?

Frank: That’s a kind way to put it. [laughter] We do know Fischer played with the set and liked it. I had one of the sets at the museum in St. Louis for a while, but it’s been purchased by a private collector.

Existing vs. Really Living

Franks sent me a personal theme song for him, “Standing Outside the Fire” by Garth Brooks. One of the lyrics seemed especially apt: “Life is not tried, it is merely survived,
If you're standing outside the fire.”

Ratcliffe: You’ve taken a lot of risks in your life.

Frank: My knees have been replaced, but we’ll overlook that. [laughter]

Ratcliffe: It seems like in some cases you're compelled to take these risks. You see something no one's done, and you can't understand why no one has done that. You take it on yourself.

Frank: I've always come up with, “Why can't this be done?” Most of the time you get put off. I don't enjoy that quality of mine most of the time, but I don't have a choice.

Ratcliffe: It seems like your solutions are often very pragmatic. You're not concerned with whether it's elegant or not; you're concerned with whether it works. In engineering circles, I can see how that would be unusual.

Frank: I was always accused of not being a real engineer. [laughter]

Ratcliffe: Are there any risks that didn’t pan out? Anything you regretted?

Frank shared an anecdote about testing he did for his first employer related to landing helicopters on vessels at sea. After creating complex models, he needed to collect additional data aboard ship in choppy sea conditions. He caught a ride on a Navy ship out of Norfolk, VA to Cape Hatteras in November, a season known for its challenging sea conditions.

Frank: My team and I went out on a Navy destroyer. Three days went by, and the ocean was like glass. Nothing. I’m in the top bunk of three in the “instance closet,” our quarters for the trip. I’m in my bunk, and the next thing I know, all three of us are on the floor. There are streams of water coming through the manhole covers and the ship is bouncing around.

Frank: I go up to the bridge, and the captain is hanging onto the back of his chair. There’s water pouring in through the side of the bridge. There’s a guy hanging on outside, there’s water everywhere, but I still assume these guys have this under control.

Frank: I head back, and the second-in-command comes running by. I asked him, “What’s up?” He says, “We just took a 63-degree roll,” then he says the ship’s limit is 65 degrees. In the control room, the power is out. It’s pitch black. The sailors have plexiglass sheets where they’re marking the roll angles and cheering. [Note: This is absolutely something sailors would do.]

Frank: We were called to general quarters in the officers’ mess and issued lifejackets. The ship was rolling because it had lost power. I was sitting there thinking, “If the ship turns turtle, how do I get out? Everything is reversed.” The guy next to me says if the ship turns over, cold water will hit the boilers and the ship will explode.

Ratcliffe: You don’t have to worry about getting out, in other words.

Frank: Right. The very next thing I hear is a loud explosion. What the hell was that? Turned out, the power failure was due to someone turning off the steam to the boilers. The engine that runs the turbines was shut down. The second in command saw the valve was turned off and turned it on. The sudden noise was the boilers restarting. The ship regained power, and the captain was able to right it and head for shore.

Frank: We're sitting down and talking to the captain on the way in. “Is this normal? This must happen all the time.” He said, “I never came as close to losing a ship.”

Ratcliffe: Yeah, no, that’s not normal.

Frank: They pull in at Norfolk, gangplank goes down, and I think we were off before it ever hit the pier. With my instrumentation, I could actually plot how much more time we had. Another case of coming up with an idea and thinking, “Gee, that’d be neat.” [laughter]

Ratcliffe: Sea stories are good. The sea stories you can come back and tell yourself are the better ones.

Ratcliffe: I have a theory about people who grow up without much or have a difficult childhood. We can take certain risks because we know where we came from—and what’s the worst that can happen?

Frank: I might be poor.

Ratcliffe: Been there, done that.

Frank: Interesting thing about that, my father didn’t understand what I did. He thought it was dangerous. My mother never had a negative comment or asked why.

Ratcliffe: Do you think she had confidence that you were able to work your own way through things?

Frank: I guess she did. I mean, she literally went through hell. She had to do whatever she could to make money. She was a button sewer during the war years, piecework. I would sit there and run the thread through the wax and put the needle in the pin cushion. She took a job at a bakery, and I walked her to and from work.

Frank: It didn’t bother my father. I was supposed to go work on construction job sites when I got old enough. That was the plan for my life. I wasn’t planning to do anything more until I learned to play chess.

Ratcliffe: Thank goodness somebody shoved a chess piece into your hand.

Frank: Some people regret it, I’m sure. [laughter]

Focusing on the Good Stuff

Frank sold House of Staunton in 2008 at age 65 and retired, although that doesn’t mean he’s slowed down much. Freedom from corporate life means he can spend his time on things he enjoys. He is still designing new and innovative chess products.

Ratcliffe: House of Staunton went from being your passion project to being one of the premier chess equipment retailers. When did you decide that you were ready to go and do your next thing?

Frank: Strictly an age factor. I can’t do this forever.

Frank: I figured I could always design chess sets and sell antiques. I've written articles, given talks on the history of chess sets. I’ve come up with the Camaratta Index of Staunton chess sets. I'm well known internationally for expertise in this area, and I’ll always have that, but I always have that desire to design. What was getting to me, I would come up with a neat design, and copies are on the market from some overseas manufacturer before I can get it out as my own design. It was bothering me, seeing somebody stealing my designs, and I couldn’t do anything about it.

Ratcliffe: Copyright infringement is a real problem.

Frank: I’d rather do it the way I'm doing it now. I design something and House of Staunton buys it. If somebody copies it, it’s not my problem.

Ratcliffe: It puts you solidly on the creative side of it instead of the managerial side. Riffing off the mention of your love of woodworking, how do you design a new set? Do you carve the pieces? Are you using computer-aided design?

Frank: Pencil.

Ratcliffe: Pencil.

Frank: I have all my sketches, and I keep a record of them. Some of them are engineering drawings, but I draw them by hand. Since the bulk of a chess set is turned, there's not much to do. You give it the dimensions and shapes you want, specify the weight, specify the proportions. After that, the main artistic challenge is the knight head.

Frank: I designed some pretty interesting knight heads. One time, I saw a unicorn that was kind of neat. When I got it home, I scraped off the horn, beautiful! [laughter] When I first started producing my sets, I was the only one who insisted on attention to detail. There's a certain visual presence that the set, in my opinion, has to have.

Note: One outstanding example of Frank’s design is the world’s largest chess piece, the “Championship Staunton” king standing outside the World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis, MO. Certified by Guiness World Records, this 20’ wonder is a replica of the piece he designed for the first Sinquefield Cup in 2013.

Ratcliffe: What else do you do? I know you have done a lot of things as a chess enthusiast and executive, but what are your other hobbies now?

Frank: I play games. I was a tournament bridge player. I've learned Shogi, Chinese chess, things like that. I collect model cars. I’m a car nut, so I've owned a lot of performance cars. I haven't killed myself yet, but I guess I'm working on it. [laughter]

Frank: I'm 81 years old. I realize there's a limit to what I can physically do.

Frank described his extensive experience with home repair and construction. From making his own wooden moldings to installing an air conditioning unit, he’s done a fair amount of heavy labor in his spare time to remodel and customize the homes he’s lived in. Not content to just build the house, he also made many of the furnishings inside.

Frank: Yeah, I like to tinker. As I said, I like to get a home where it's framed out and the outside is done, and I'll go in. I like working. It all comes from my upbringing. At this age, unfortunately, I have to hire people. I'm not really good at that, as you can imagine.

Ratcliffe: [laughs] Do you stand over them and watch what they're doing?

Frank: “Don't do it that way. This is the way you do that.” [laughter]

Ratcliffe: My husband was an electrician in the Navy, and he's an electrical engineer as well. I can completely imagine him doing that when the day comes.

Ratcliffe: It’s been a real pleasure talking to you about your story and the highlights you’ve so graciously shared. I wanted to finish with one last question. Your nickname, “The Maestro”? I saw that in several places. Can you explain where that came from?

Frank: Well, I wish I knew! When I had my site, my picture had me in front of a display cabinet with chess pieces in it. I had my arms folded, formal blue shirt and a very stern look. I put a caption underneath it that said, “I am smiling.” For some reason, it got tagged with the name of “The Maestro.” It possibly had something to do with chess politics as well, but I don’t really know.

Ratcliffe: Oh, that’s fantastic! It’s a mystery! [laughter] Thank you for your time, it’s been fascinating to learn more about your life and get to know you.

Frank: You’re welcome.

In Conclusion

Speaking with Frank about his engineering career and many contributions to the game of chess was a delight. What struck me most was the role chess played in a most unconventional path to success and accomplishment. From “upper poverty” to entrepreneurial success, Frank Camaratta has trusted his gut, stood up for his convictions, and sought to solve the tough problems others couldn’t. There’s not a better analogy for this life well-lived than a well-played game of chess.

For more information about the Staunton chessmen and how the purchase of an old chess set sparked a revolution in chess gear, read our upcoming History of the Staunton Chessmen. We’ll talk about how these player-focused pieces came to be and get some additional insights from Frank Camaratta. You won’t want to miss it!