Dorothy Rice Sims


Dorothy Rice Sims was an American sportswoman, aviator, bridge player, artist, and journalist.

Family

Born in Asbury Park, New Jersey, on June 24, 1889, Sims was one of six children of Julia and Isaac Rice, a businessman who founded the Electric Boat Company. Her younger sister Marion also became famous as an aviator and sportswoman. Their mother Julia B. Rice founded the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noises in New York City.
Father Isaac Rice was born in Bavaria and raised in Philadelphia. He was also a musician and musicologist, chess player and patron. Dorothy and Marion were the second and fourth of six children, the second and third of four daughters.
According to the cultural historian Hillel Schwartz, as paraphrased by a New Yorker journalist:
Julia Rice's campaign resulted in a federal law "quieting the whistles of ships in federal waters".

Early years

"The careers of the six Rice children attracted considerable attention in New York, because their parents encouraged them to stifle their inhibitions." Dorothy Rice left school at twelve, she recalled in her 1940 memoir Curiouser and Curiouser, seeing "no point in clogging my mind with things that everyone knew"; her father was pleased rather than vexed. Later she studied sculpture and painting in Paris.
As a young woman she was a motorcycle street racer riding a blue Indian and became the first amateur licensed woman pilot in the United States, training at Wright School, Mineola, New York, in 1916).
Her first husband was the artist Waldo Peirce. She met Peirce through a mutual friend, George Biddle, and wrote in her 1938 autobiography, Curiouser and Curiouser, "I inquired Waldo’s height—he was six feet two. This seemed a dignified height. I told George to produce Waldo, which he did. We got married in Madrid, in a German Methodist Church, with the American vice-consul, who was a Filipino, to make it legal."
A website using the name Mile High Club regards the "Club's" "founder" as pilot and design engineer Lawrence Sperry, along with "socialite Mrs. Waldo Peirce" citing their flight in an autopilot-equipped Curtiss Flying Boat near New York in November 1916.
"Why, Mrs Peirce and I didn’t have what you might dignify by calling a real accident. It was only a trivial mishap. We decided to land on the water and came down perfectly from a height of 600 feet and would have made a perfect landing had not the hull of our machine struck one of the stakes that dot the water, which staved a hole in it."

The New York Times reported on October 16, 1917, that Dorothy Rice Peirce "seeks divorce; ... alleges non-support and cruelty".
She met Hal Sims when he chartered her plane; they later married. Their home in Deal, New Jersey, described in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle as reminiscent "of the castles of the feudal barons in medieval days" became a headquarters for bridge experts.

Bridge

Sims was "an expert in motorcycle racing, flying and sculptoring, but her bridge ability was just moderate". She became a famous bridge player, however, as one of her expert husband's partners and for her frequent use of "psychic" bids, or "psyches" ; she is credited with having coined the term "psychic". According to bridge player and writer, Albert Morehead, "She did not actually invent the psychic bid, though it is generally credited to her, but she did give it its name and she wrote the first and only book about it."
Sims and Sims won the second annual Master Mixed Teams tournament in 1930, evidently with two men as teammates. They were runners-up in 1933. In 1930 they were also runners-up in the second annual Board-a-Match Teams for the Chicago Trophy.
Sims and Sims faced Ely and Josephine Culbertson in a long rubber bridge match during March and April 1935. After her death in 1960, New York Times bridge columnist Albert Hodges Morehead wrote that "bridge lost the last and most lovable of the greatest and most colorful foursome it ever knew. ... These four took contract bridge ... and made it a world-wide habit. They accomplished this partly by design but more by the accident of their personalities." Dorothy was "delightfully naive and guilelessly outspoken. Each was a perfect foil for all three of the others."
Morehead also observed that he Morehead had been one of three substitute players available to the Culbertsons in the Culbertson–Sims match contested for three weeks beginning March 25, 1935. His byline appeared on a weekly article covering bridge beginning November 3, 1935 and he remained the bridge editor until succeeded by Alan Truscott in January 1964.
According to her obituary in the New York Herald Tribune, her trademark psychic bidding "was but another manifestation of an instinct for nonconformity ... developed in her during childhood."
;National championships
Sims was a winner or runner-up in "national" tournaments exclusively before the creation of the American Contract Bridge League by merger of competing organizations in 1937. Today the ACBL recognizes the following as her achievements in North American Bridge Championships-level competition. Beside the limitation to first and second place it may be incomplete in the extent of contemporary competition for "national" titles.
Wins
Runners-up
The Master Mixed and Chicago were mixed and open tournaments inaugurated in 1929.
On all three listed occasions Sims and Sims played as partners.
The inaugural, 1929 Mixed Teams runner-up is unknown.

Death

After the death of P. Hal Sims in 1949, she traveled as a "political correspondent for various newspapers".
She died of a heart attack on March 24, 1960, while in Cairo, Egypt. "on the eve of her return home from a world tour"

Books