The 2024 holiday season drive to support Peoria’s Give the Gift of Chess Now, an outreach program spearheaded by the Peoria Outreach Quarterly (POQ), has been temporarily suspended after yet another local young chess member was brutally beheaded in a gangland confrontation between rival outlaw chess gangs, the Queen Machines and the Eggwhites. Both gangs had previously been lauded by POQ spokespersons for their active work with Peoria youth, helping to run Give the Gift of Chess Now booths and staffing volunteer activities. More recently, however, their life-size chess battles have grown more heated and literal, resulting in fisticuffs, block-wide brawls, and the unfortunate beheadings.
‘We at POQ believe that chess is foundational for creating opportunities and cultivating life skills through the gift of chess, a universal language that can unite and foster peace in our communities,’ POQ Official Street Chess Adjuster Barbara Sinclaire told The Gorko yesterday, ‘not gangland style executions.’
Yet this is not the first time that chess has driven youth movements to acts of irrational, hot-tempered violence. The Chess Club Massacre of 1874 occurred between the rival chess clubs The Pawns and The Wooden Nights (sic), in which fourteen young chess aficionados fell in a faceoff under the original Wilson Bridge. In the 1890’s the Knight Ripper struck South Peoria, stalking, murdering and dismembering the leaders of The Rookery, leaving his signature black knight in the mouths of his victims. Although the identity of the Knight Ripper was never discovered, many suspect that he was in fact the president of the Peoria Draughts Club, Mr. Sylvester Hyatt Jasbeme, whose son Sylvester Jr. was incarcerated in the 1920s for plotting to burn down The Fridge Street Chess Club. And even in our own times outbursts of violence has been documented at the scenes of street chess in our town, including daytime murder-by-cane-sword in Peoria parks in 2011, 2014, and 2017.
‘The chess battles have gotten out of hand,’ remarked Lauren McCrumble, Chief of Peoria Lake Police, and although ‘steps are being taken to ensure that Peoria’s chess-youth-at-risk are engaging in safe, consensual, protected chess,’ many senior members of Peoria chess gangs continue to encourage violence as a solution to such ‘chessfrontations.’
‘It is a turf war at this point,’ said Rumpy Lewis, sergeant-at-arms of the outlaw chess club Satan’s Own, ‘both the Machines and the Eggshells know that, only squares like you take a bit of time to catch on.’
Image generated on Magic Studio
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