North American Tiddlywinks Association

NATwA founded • 27 February 1966


During their first week at MIT, Freshmen are temporarily assigned to a living group and then they scout out dormitories and fraternities to decide which ones they are interested in bidding on. On his first day as a Freshman at MIT, in August 1972, Rick was temporarily assigned to MacGregor House’s B-Entry living group. On that same first day at MIT, Rick witnessed two students flicking winks on the carpet and down the stairs (but that’s not how the game is really played!)

As it turns out, at the time B-Entry was the center of winking at MIT, having been the home for Bill Renke, Craig Schweinhart, Ross Callon, and Jay Wollenberg. Winker Tim Schiller had been in A-Entry the year before. MIT had sent a team of 8 winkers to England in the Spring of 1972, where they astounded the Brits by winning all but one match. Rick bid on B-Entry as his desired living group, and the B-Entry barons opted to select him.

Soon the upperclassmen arrived in B-Entry, and while Bill had left MIT (in fact, earlier in 1972), Craig, Ross, and Jay remained. They all lived in the “Zoo”, a self-named section of B-Entry with 5 dorm rooms on the lower floor of B-Entry. Rick lived in B-Entry on the middle floor. A winks table was always present on that floor at the bottom of the stairs. B-Entry, by the way, occupied three floors of MacGregor House: the 11th through 13th floors.

Other MIT winkers joining the world of winkdom along with Rick in the Fall of 1972 included Charles Frankston, Owen Knox, and Derek Rogoff.

Rick considers Ross to be his winks mentor, as they often played practice games on a dedicated winks table that was always present in the lobby of the Zoo floor on the lower level of MacGregor House’s B-Entry.

In his early winking days, Rick was given a choice to join either the Zoo team or the MIT team when playing in the 1972 Eastern Regionals and 1973 Continentals. He chose to play for Zoo. Later, he opted to play for MIT.

Rick’s early winks games were losses. Then, in the 1972 Eastern Regionals, he achieved his first non-win, a tie in a game with Don Fox and Mex (Rich Davis) vs. Rick and Lewis Stein. That game ended with each color having 1 time-limit point (nowadays called a tiddly), and a very big pile. A hard-fought battle, ending in a clever tie. Ya gotta lose to learn how to win.

With Dave York in the 1973 Continentals B Division.

Rick borrowed paper tournament scoresheets from Sunshine and photocopied them around 1978. Rick was instrumental in digitizing NATwA tournament scores starting in 1978 and wrote statistical analysis software using the MacLisp programming language on the MIT-ML (Mathlab) PDP-10 computer. Joe Sachs and Charles Frankston assisted in digitizing NATwA tournament scores. In later years, starting around 2010 and thereabouts, NATwA tournament scores were converted to use the MariaDB database and software written in PHP (and HTML/CSS) to generate reports from that database. 

Rick started researching the history and origins of tiddlywinks with Fred Shapiro in 1978. He established the Tiddlywinks Reference Bibliography in 1978, and has maintained it in various forms for many years thereafter.

He won 2 NATwA Pairs tournaments and subsequently competed in and lost one World Pairs challenge.

Rick edited Newswink, the official NATwA publication, for its editions numbered 10 through 29, dating from 1980 to 1997.

Rick started collecting tiddlywinks games in 1981, and as of 2022, owned nearly 2000 tiddlywinks games. 

Rick established an early tiddlywinks online presence in 1994 on a personal website and then maintained Tiddlywinks.org starting in 1997. He then set up iftwa.org in 2018, following his appointment as IFTwA Secretary-General.


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