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William "Willie" Julius Champion Jr., lived a long and storied life marked by his introduction of the ancient game Kalah to the west (esp. U.S.) and related work.
Vitals
William Julius Champion Jr. was born on June 15, 1880 in Trinidad, Colorado to US Civil War veteran William Julius Champion Sr. and Elvira Hellen Gammons, a decendant of Mayflower passenger Thomas Rogers. Willie married Alice Viola Brown on June 15, 1908 in Boston, Massachusetts. He died February 12, 1972.
Education
Champion graduated Cum Laude from Yale University in the class of 1905 after walking from his childhood home in White Cloud, Michigan to Yale's campus in New Haven, Connecticut (over 850 miles), and "earning all of his expenses" as he put it. His major was Geology. The jobs he worked to pay for school included a sales agent for the Saturday Evening Post and a summmer on the road with the Barnum and Bailey Circus (which later became the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus
Professional
Willie experienced wild swings in fortune throughout his long life. In addition to various business ventures and investments he held full or partial interest in a gold mine in Colorado and the Champion Lead Mine in Niranda, Ontario Canada. A local newspaper obituary called him a "radio pioneer" saying that after graduating from Yale William moved to the Boston area and went to work with Lee DeForest inventor of the vacuum tube and goes on to say that he "helped setup and operate Boston's first radio transmitters".
Kalah
Champion truley loved the ancient board game of Kalah and worked for years to popularize the game in the U.S. He long held that the game has intrisic educational value and held other benefits as well. Family history has it that in 1910 Willie first read about ancient games like Kalah. He started manufacturing Kalah game sets in the Mystic, Connecticut about 1940 and later in Salem, Massachusetts, Brockton, Massachusetts and finally Holbrook, Massachusetts around 1960. A Time magazine article from June 14, 1963 outlines the ancient history of the game and Champions efforts to introduce it in the U.S. Also mentioned in the article are efforts by M.I.T. programmers to program a DEC PDP-1 computer to play the game. Willie beat the computer once, otherwise the computer had no trouble beating "Champion Champion", a fact which bothered him all his later years.
Travel
Though he never drove, William was very well travelled. In addition to Kalah related sales tours of the U.S. he travelled to Canada, Greece and other parts of the Mediterranean
References
- Territorial cansus for Colorado 1885, Las Animas County
- Loring, Judith Cooper, (2004) Champion Family History - personal notes
- Curts, Boyd G. (editor, class secretary) (1930), History of the Class of 1905 (Yale)
- The Boston Globe, Saturday, December 7, 1962 page 23.
- Melrose Free Press December 19, 1963, "Kalah Recognized as Valuable Educational Aid - 350 Students Participate in Tournament"
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