Sport: Air-Mail Chess

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As it has for three centuries, the little Bierstube known as Bauern-Lola still echoes to the drinking songs of the burghers of Kronach (pop. 10,000), in Bavaria. Except on Wednesday nights. Then the town's 70-year-old chess club takes over, and antlered deer heads brood silently from the walls. In recent years. Kronach's players got tired of each other's familiar tactics. West and away, across the Atlantic, they decided, there must be the kind of competition that would put the old spirit back into Kronach's club.

Thanks to a Hungarian D.P. who had stopped by for a few games at the Bauern-Lola before he made his way to the U.S. Kronach found its new opponents in Peoria. Ill. There, Distillery Foreman Henry Cramer listened to Kronach's ambassador and wrote to Bavaria suggesting an international match to be carried on by mail. Each town fielded a 21-man team, with each member carrying on two games at the same time.

That was in the spring of 1951. Foreman Cramer, as Peoria's playing secretary, kept up a monumental correspondence with Alfred Joanni manager of a Kronach porcelain factory and the only man in the Kronach club who spoke English. For four years, the international airmail match ground on. Although each letter was vitally concerned with the progress of 42 chess games Joanni and Cramer managed to mix in some gossip, too. "We got to know the families and troubles of partners across the ocean." says Joanni. ''Pictures were exchanged. When one of the Americans died we let the Peorians score the game for him in reverence to the deceased."

For all the Bavarian solicitude, Peoria could not stay the course. Last week, with Kronach ahead 23-18, Peoria's W. E. McCraw, last American left in the match, was faced with a passed pawn and a hopelessly cramped position. Reluctantly, he resigned. This month, as a token of friendship, Kronach's citizens will present a porcelain trophy of two chess players to the officer in charge of U.S. forces stationed there.