Blum on Bridge Gatlinburg 1999
	I will set the scene. It's 1 a.m. on a below-40 degree spring Tennessee night. The location, Gatlinburg Town Square, a five-story building with a courtyard layout identical to that of the Marco Island Radisson. My unit, on the fourth floor, is a two-bedroom two-bath timeshare. The front bedroom is separately keyed and may be entered from outside without going into the main unit. For 12 years I've had the use of the apartment annually during bridge tournament week. The plot thickens. Asleep in the front unit is Bernie DeYoung, whose friend, Sean Ganness, has been playing in the midnight KO's. I am dozing in the master bedroom. Suddenly there's a knocking on my chamber door (no, no, not a Poe's tap-tapping quoth the Raven, "nevermore," but a real hard bang, bang). It's Sean yelling, "Bob wake up. Get out here." Springing out of my bed I dashed through the living dining area past the kitchen zooming out the door to the outside landing. Only then did I realize I was in my skivvies in a non-Florida atmosphere. "Bwa." Sean was leaning over the railing pointing to the outside pool below. "Look, look," he said. I forgot the cold when to my eyes appeared three black bears, momma with her two cubs, foraging through the garbage cans. Wow, what a sight. Only one small problem. Where was papa bear? Our wait for an answer came as quickly as the time it takes for the light to turn green and the guy behind you to honk his horn. This time when I froze it twern't from the cold air, for there on the floor below rumbling past the elevator toward our stairwell was dear old dad. My first thought was, "Wouldn't it have been a blast had the elevator door opened and someone gotten off?" OOPS! The commotion on the open stairwell brought both Sean and I to our senses. Though my skivvies were a bit damper than they were when I had donned them earlier in the day, I had the presence to dart toward our unit, the balls of my bare feet skimming across the frozen tundra (or cold cement). Reaching the entry, my only thought was "That bear's not going to eat any of my porridge." After slamming the door behind us, I experienced a first, dialing 911. With bated breath, I waited for an answer. It came and I babbled to the feminine voice on the other end of the line, telling her of the bears without cages. I was taken aback when she said in a calm and boring voice, "I'll send someone to shoo them away." Sure enough about 10 minutes later I watched from my bedroom balcony four frightened and recently well-fed bears scoot back to their lair. It was only then that I realized I was in Gatlinburg, Tenn., at the foot of the Smoky Mountains, where apparently this is not a rare occurrence. Sean, a Canadian living in North Miami, is a fine bridge player. On the final Saturday Sean had no partner until our third roommate, 30-year-old champion Geoff Hampsen, arranged for him to play with his friend, Renee Mancuso of Redondo Beach, Calif. Never having met, they played errorless bridge winning the two session Open Pairs by four boards with a 419 score. Second place was a distant 374. So much for established partnerships. I guess Murphy's Law came to the fore when I sat at the table in the first match of the first event of the week, in the top flight of the Bracketed KO, and who should my right-hand opponent be but John Blubaugh. I hadn't seen John in probably two years and here I had just written the article appearing in last week's Islander. By the way, I was mistaken as to the total number of tables for the week of the Gatlinburg regional. The actual count, close to 6,000. I was happy to see good friend Roberta Hodge, a long-time winter resident, several times in the playing area. She didn't come to Marco this year due to illness in the family. However, she was her own winning self as she tied for 1st and 2nd place for the early morning continuous pairs series and had her name pop-up, placing in a couple of other events. When Roberta isn't at Camelot, her old Kentucky home is in Lexington.