n a two-week period in 1938, my father purchased two pieces of real estate. The first was a two-story building at 84 Dixwell Avenue, two doors away from the office he had rented his first five years in New Haven. His new office space was on the first floor with a small two-bedroom apartment above it.

He decided the next week to look for a beach house in Milford, Connecticut, a small city 15 miles west of New Haven on Long Island Sound. His realtor had shown him houses in Cedar Beach, a community of small, tightly clustered houses. Before looking at other properties, they returned to the realtor's office. While there, the realtor received several calls from Cedar Beach homeowners. He was told he would be boycotted from selling in Cedar Beach, if he sold my father a home there.

My father and the realtor, then, drove by a property for sale in Wildemere Beach, a neighborhood with larger homes on nice-sized lots. Interestingly, there were two houses on the property: an apartment over a garage and a larger house next to the beach.

My father never got out of the car. He knew, after the hostile response he received viewing houses on Cedar Beach, that he would be precluded from buying the property at 310 Broadway, if he took a look inside.

He bought it, anyways.

DAMEDAME Literally: the checkerboard game. A symbol of craftiness, intelligence and strategy.