John S. Hilbert (C.N. 10195):

Walter Cowles Bixby was born on 17 January 1845, in Princeton, NJ. His parents soon moved to Brooklyn, where Bixby first went to school. He learned chess at the age of 14. He attended Williams College, a private liberal arts school in Williamstown, MA, where he graduated in the class of 1867. He was an early player of baseball and had a varied career. He taught in school for a few years in Hoboken, NJ, but by 1871 had become an “inspector of ores in the iron district of Pennsylvania”.

Around 1875 he travelled to the Hawaiian Islands, where he lived for seven years, working in the sugar milling business and, by his own admission, not playing chess. In the early 1880s he returned to Brooklyn, and engaged in business. He never married, living the rest of his life in Brooklyn with his sister. During the 1880s he joined the Brooklyn Chess Club, where he competed in club events and occasionally composed chess problems.

Bixby was remembered as quiet, shy, mild-mannered and patient. He was active in the Brooklyn Chess Club almost until the very end, having played his last game there five days before his death, which was said to be “from an attack of bronchial pneumonia” on 9 March 1916.

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Sources: J. Gaige in Chess Personalia (Jefferson, 1987), pages 39-40; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 29 May 1913 (largely reprinted in the American Chess Bulletin, July 1913, page 152); The Obituary Record of the Society of Alumni, Williams College, 1916-1917 (April 1917, Sixth Series, 1910-1919, No. 7), pages 356-357. A small photograph of Bixby was on page 67 of the American Chess Bulletin, 1905 (Rice Gambit Supplement).’