The Record from Hackensack, New Jersey • 82

Impressions Inside The Losers 3 What do compulsive gamblers want money or death? Morris Canal 7 New Jersey's Big Ditch was her first superhighway. 10 Boxing Club It's where the fighter goes to learn his trade. At Ease In Your Home Famed architect designed Teaneck landmark home. S-1 Tennis, Anyone? 1 4 The new. outfits range from sexy to traditional.

16 In Defense Of Chinese Checkers Although hi my own with most ony man when the fare of the evening is Chinese Checkers, I'm not much for games ordinarily, being either too wise or too listless to partake of them with avidity. Like everyone else, 1 suppose, I've done my share of time behind a Poker hand and I've set up the board more than once when the cry was Parcheesi. I've shuffled cards, dolled out bogus money, spun spinners, and hunted that elusive die which invariably, maddeningly, finds its way off the table and under our cabinet grand which sits in the ner. I've gone back spaces, forfeited rolls of the dice, surrendered pawns and knights and bishops, been jailed with more regularity than a bibulous seaman, and I've not passed Go times without end. I've done it all won, lost, argued.

And some parlor games I can abide. Cassino is a fine diversion and an occasional pinochle hand never hurt anyone, while Scrabble in minor doses is not unrewarding. But most games leave me distant. Poker is witless, dominos silly, chess promotes headaches, and one must be unhinged to delight in bridge. At one time, true, I was deep into Monopoly, that most American of amusements.

So expansive, so urban; Then came the night that my wife and I played a round with an aging Trotskyite who insisted we nationalize my Railroad. Had he suggested this proletarian departure before play began or, more important if it had been his well, I might have rejected the proposal The Biker When Dad Cooks Stew is an ideal answer for the male left alone at home. ihe hone ot Sen sea, and in that interval he had been victor in all but a handful of nightly contests. Or such was his reputation across his checkered past. A great watermelon of a man, he would sit in the galley after meals and take on all comers.

Simple, unpretentious, like the game itself; there was a champion. So I'll stay with Chinese Checkers, an esteemed friend, fast and fluid with the complex simplicity of a canvas by Ce'-zanne. It is the king of games people play and those who claim otherwise, who toy with it occasionally and malign it, who fail to appreciate its depth and breadth and the nuances that exist when keen minds contemplate the possible permutations of a handful of marbles on a starred board, those who scold that it lacks the cerebral challenge of chess to those benighted individuals we offer fore-giveness. For they know not what they play. BUDDY BURANELLI but I certainly would have thought more highly of his motives.

As it was, the game ended on a truculent note and with it my contact with Monopoly and that particular reformer. No, I'm not much for games ordinarily. But Chinese Checkers is altogether different. Here is assuredly the nobility of game-dom, an enriching endeavor and one blessedly free of pomposity, with no tournaments, no titles, no international tribunal to set rules, to govern conduct, to propagandize its virtues and ultimately disrupt its tranquility. Poker has its Scarne, bridge its Benito Garrozzo, chess its Bobby Fischer.

Chinese Checkers needs no glory names. Consider for a moment a man I knew once, but whose name 1 do not recall. He was a superstar unheralded, a wizard in the art of Chinese Checkers who earned his keep as a messboy in the merchant service. He had shipped on many a tired freighter, this fat Portuguese, 40 years or more at Letters some kind of outlaw Ed Comporetti Carlstadt May 4 Gift For Mom? Editor, At Ease: Your food article, "Mother's Day Dinner" (At Ease, May 2), was good for a chuckle or two, The shadow world of the compulsive gambler is the subject of this week's cover, and artist Bill Newton supplied the illustrations for Roger Beime's story. Other Features Books 1 8 Listening to America Pilgrim Son.

The Sky's the Limit Music 20 Cal Tjader On A Fantasy Trip Stamps, Coins 21 Pet Doctor, Bridge 22 Camera Angles 23 Crossword 23 THE SUNDAY RECORD but the picture was hilarious. I wonder how many mothers across the land got this kind of soalled present, and survived the heart attack that must surely have come after seeing a beloved kitchen reduced to a shambles Amy Podhoretz Fair Lawn May 3 Editor, At Ease: 1 liked your story about motorcycle racer Kurt Liebmann (At Ease, May 2). It's about time somebody printed something that didn't make every biker look like 2 May 30, 1971.