From The Los Angeles Evening Herald, June 28, 1921:
9-YEAR-OLD CHESS MARVEL ANALYZED BY NOTED
PSYCHOLOGIST
Herbert Lapham, character analyst and psychological expert, last night watched the child wonder of the age play against men old enough to be his grandfather and defeat them, and this is what he has to say of the infant prodigy:
Herbert Lapham
Samuel Rzeschewiski [sic] is a boy not so different from other normal boys, either in size or physical makeup. He is quite small and has a head slightly above the average for his age, but not excessively so. He is well balanced all around but of a distinctly mental type with a fairly active body and well developed normally if not overly crowded in his studies or too much confined. He has some of the characteristics which seem to inevitably mark the youngest child in a family of four or more where the parents are of mature age at the time of the last child’s birth in that he is quite serious — too much so for his ultimate good. Then, too, he has not a strong physique.
NATURAL RESULT This is a natural pre-natal result where the parents are harmonious and mental tendencies of middle life are in ascendancy over the physical. All parents have the opportunity to produce highly mental children at middle age if they prepare for it. Sammy is mild, non-aggressive, kindly disposed towards all people and things, even tempered and wholly amenable to influence and control except where his ideals and personal rights are concerned. He is strongly individual, has the possibility of developing a firm will, and will be fairly ambitious but never selfishly nor obtrusively so.
This boy should be called a young man because his co-efficient of intelligence is equal to or greater than that of the average boy. He has one remarkable development, that of intellectual reasoning and concentrating ability, coupled with a strong intuitive faculty. First of all he has a “hunch” as to the best thing for him to do in all affairs, and his association with people who are engaged in concentrated mental effort — as in chess — has brought out that sense of “knowing” without having to figure it out. Psychologists call this a more or less direct contact with the subconscious mind. If this boy had greater imaginative visualizing ability he would be hailed as a clairvoyant instead of a chess player.
His decisively predominant reasoning power protects him from straying off into psychic realms for he is logical and efficient in his processes of thought. He is of the type of personality which prefers things useful and workable rather than fanciful and impractical.
SENSITIVE TO CRITICISM Sammy is very sensitive to criticism or any adversity of life or surroundings. He is of that type of children who should never be corrected. In the first place, he has a keen sense of justice and what is right, a loving and responsive feeling toward all, birds, flowers and kindly people, a tendency to reason analytically, synthetically, deductively and inductively to a judgment which is nearer the truth than that of a very large number of his elders. His mistakes would be only those of a clear-seeing mind meeting up with conditions of life imposed by a not overly developed civilization. This is particularly true because of his idealistic and impersonal tendencies.
If he is not foolishly overcrowded in his studies, is not forced to expend his mental abilities uselessly, and allowed entire freedom in his choice of pursuits, he will be heard from in literary, inventive and general creative lines of a highly scientific nature, wherein the benefit of mankind in general is the moving spirit.
