A Jewish Deaf Woman Revolutionized Bridge
Because bridge is a way of life with Chyah Burghard, all serious deaf bridge players are forever appreciative. Burghard, a battler who does not know how to quit, has forever changed the way all bridge players play their game.
A resident of Minneapolis, Burghard, a Jew, plays bridge with a passion that just doesn’t go away. It, also, is her profession, for she is a webmaster and a newsletter editor with the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL), which is located in Memphis.
No, she does not commute from Minneapolis to Memphis. She cannot as she is a mother with a family to look after in Minneapolis. It is her computer at home that she uses to “telecommute” with the national headquarters in Memphis.
Burghard learned to play bridge while attending the University of Minnesota. She stumbled across a game on the campus, and was immediately hooked. Very luckily for her, she combines her two loves – Computer Science, that she majored in college, and bridge while working for the Memphis headquarters.
She faced flagrant discrimination when playing tournament bridge. Naively she brought a pad and pencils to her very first bridge tournament, fully expecting the players to be cooperative. Must to her disgust they weren’t.
All bridge players would call out their bids verbally. Because Burghard cannot hear, she asked the bidders to face her so she could keep up with and to keep track of their bids. Instead of being sympathetic to her deafness the worst elements in human nature surfaced among these obsessed opponents. They refused to face her; refused to slow down their lip movements; refused to raise the number of fingers to indicate their bids, refused to write anything down on a pad that she provided for them. They would not take anything out of their mouth – be it cigarettes or toothpicks or pencils or even chewing gums. They would do anything possible except to face her, even “innocently” blowing cigarette smoke to her face. In other words they were just utterly nasty and ornery, not wanting to have anything to do with her, and wishing she would just “go away.”
Burghard would not stand for this nonsense. Researching the ACBL rule book, she discovered much to her horror that nothing was in writing to give deaf and disabled players a level playing field, a break they would need to remain competitive among players of normal hearing.
Rolling up her sleeves she successfully lobbied the ACBL delegates to require bidding boxes in tournament play. Fortunately for her the ACBL people were very supportive of this concept and had this piece of legislation passed. “Over 60 percent of bridge players are senior citizens. And many of them have hearing problems,” she said.
If you stop by a tournament bridge room and watch the players play, you will see the players write down their bids and place them in the bidding boxes. Like with Dummy Hoy who came up with the strike signal for the baseball umpires to use or with Gallaudet that invented the football huddle, the bidding box is another society’s contribution by a deaf person.
Despite her unusual first name, Burghard, a Bridge Life Master, is Jewish. “My name is the female version of the name Chaim Potok, author of the book THE CHOSEN. It is the same way as Andy and Andrea,” she explained.
What about Burghard’s deafness? “I wear hearing aids in both ears, as my hearing loss is profound,” she said. She started losing her hearing as a teenager, and she suspects her family genes as the reason. She took sign language courses, but admittedly she has forgotten what she has learned.
