A move made to remember a chess great

He took the chess world by storm at 22, coming out of nowhere to win one of the top tournaments in the world. Chess specialists rank him as one of the top three Americans ever to play the game, alongside the great Bobby Fischer, and they still obsess over what he might have accomplished if not for his premature death, at 33, from syphilis.

But in Somerville, where he was born in 1872, Harry Nelson Pillsbury and his brief, remarkable career are long forgotten.

''Probably no one remembers him, outside the chess community," said Chris Chase of Somerville, a three-time New England chess champion and a member of the Boylston Chess Club, which has its headquarters in Davis Square. ''Most people know Bobby Fischer, and that's it."

Pillsbury, who was once famous for playing chess against multiple partners while blindfolded, deserves better, says one of his fans. Paul MacInnis, a 50-year-old salesman and amateur chess player from Andover, says he will not rest until the chess great is honored with a plaque in Somerville.

City officials are open to the idea, though a spokeswoman said the city does not have the money to pay for the plaque. The spokeswoman, Lucy Warsh, acknowledged that most people at City Hall knew little about Pillsbury before MacInnis approached them.

Even on Sargent Avenue, where Pillsbury was born, his name sparked little recognition yesterday. ''I haven't heard of him, and I've been here 40 years," said one resident, contacted by phone, who declined to give her name.

MacInnis, who is raising money for the project with the help of the Massachusetts Chess Association, said he hopes Pillsbury will be memorialized with two bronze plaques by June 17, the 100th anniversary of his death. Ideally, he said, one would be placed at the site of the 19th-century school the chess player attended, near the Winter Hill Community School, and another, with the permission of the current owners, would identify the house where he was born.

If the recognition raises Pillsbury's profile, the chess great would take his place among a relatively small group of well-known figures born in Somerville, including football player Howie Long and Bobby ''Boris" Pickett, the composer who wrote the 1960s hit ''Monster Mash."

Chess specialists say the honor is long overdue and well deserved.

''He's one of a small handful of American players who would be instantly recognized," said John B. Henderson, a spokesman for America's Federation for Chess, a Washington state-based group that promotes chess education, and the chess columnist for The Scotsman, the national newspaper of Scotland. ''He had one of the most phenomenal memories you could ever hope to see."

On at least one well-documented occasion, Henderson said, Pillsbury was shown a list of 20 of the world's longest names, mostly obscure diseases and medical terms, for 20 seconds, while he was playing more than a dozen chess games at once. Pillsbury then recited the list from memory without mistake.

Fond of cigars and the card game whist, Pillsbury would often smoke, tell jokes, and play cards -- while he was engaged in 10 to 20 chess games, said MacInnis, who first heard of the chess legend when he was a boy in Quincy, learning chess from his father and his father's friends.

Part of his fondness for the 19th-century player stems from a sad likeness in their personal histories, MacInnis said: Both men were in high school when their mothers died.

Pillsbury was devastated by the loss, according to MacInnis, who learned much of what he knows about the chessman from a 1996 book by Jacques Pope. Pillsbury's family encouraged him to play chess to take his mind off his grief, and, at the late age of 16, he learned the game.

Pillsbury, who never made it past ninth grade, had worked as an advertising salesman for Filene's, but his chess skills soon led to a new career: At a wax museum in New York, he hid inside a mock chess-playing ''robot" and faced off against customers who paid a dime or nickel apiece to take him on.

Chess soon became a more serious pursuit. In 1895, when he was 22, the Brooklyn Chess Club paid to send him to England for the prestigious Hastings Tournament, and he ''came from nowhere to win," beating the world's best players, said Henderson.

Later that year, at a tournament in St. Petersburg, Russia, Pillsbury contracted the syphilis that would eventually kill him, MacInnis said. Though Pillsbury would reign as US champion from 1897 until his death in 1906, he stopped playing chess in 1904, and his skills were weakened by the disease before that, said MacInnis. ''When you talk to people about Pillsbury, there's always a kind of melancholy there, because his life was so short and he was never world champion," he said. ''You almost want to say, 'Harry, why'd you have to die?' "

MacInnis, who has played 22,000 games of online chess, and decided to seek recognition for Pillsbury after the youngest of his three children left for college, first tried to establish a memorial near the chess player's grave in Reading, which does not mention chess. But cemetery rules would not permit any change without family permission, and MacInnis does not know of surviving family members.

In Somerville, where he estimates each plaque will cost about $3,200, MacInnis thinks a bit of poetry from Haverhill native John Greenleaf Whittier would be perfect, engraved under the chess player's name and dates: ''For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been!' "

''I equate him to a comet," MacInnis said. ''It burns brightly in the sky, but burns out quickly."

Jenna Russell can be reached at jrussell@globe.com.