A local writer who taught chess to South Bronx elementary students in the 1990s has published a new memoir detailing the career change that forever impacted the course of his students’ lives, along with his own.
David MacEnulty’s book, “Sunrise in the Bronx: Chess and Life Lessons from the South Bronx to the White House,” was released Oct. 15. He met with the Bronx Times at a Mott Haven cafe to recall his life as a chess player and teacher and the students whose lives were transformed by the game — many of whom are still in contact today.
MacEnulty took an unexpected pathway into teaching. He came from a family of musicians and, as a philosophy major at Florida State University, he “accidentally tried out for a play.” He discovered a love of acting and had some roles on stage and screen. But he later began a writing project on street crime in 1970s and 80s New York City, which quickly overtook his other interests. “Pretty soon, I was a writer, not an actor,” he said.
MacEnulty later moved up the ladder in real estate and in building management. One day, while working for unscrupulous property owners in the East Village, a longtime friend and chess master Bruce Pandolfini called MacEnulty and asked him to fill in for one day teaching chess to third graders.
At that time, MacEnulty was in his mid-40s, had never been in charge of a classroom and though he was a well-regarded chess player, he was not at the master level. But he ended up taking the sub job, and everything changed from there.
At Pandolfini’s encouragement, he happily quit his building management job to teach at Bronx and Harlem schools with the American Chess Foundation and finally landed at Community Elementary School 70 (C.E.S. 70) in the South Bronx as a full-time teacher of chess, which was a required class for kindergarten through second graders at the time.
The memoir details MacEnulty’s difficult early years as a new teacher — especially as a white man coming into a school of Black and brown students. From behavior management to how to explain the foundations of chess to youngsters who had never heard of the game, he barely knew where to begin.
“I was horrible,” he said. “The kids were just eating me alive.”
But with the strong support of C.E.S. 70 principal Sylvia Simon and veteran teacher Mark Singer, MacEnulty quickly learned how to teach at the students’ level. For instance, he realized none of them had a working definition of the word “corner.” When he instructed them to place a chess piece in the corner of the board, they didn’t know what to do — so he had to explain how straight intersecting lines come together to form a corner.
MacEnulty said he also realized that many chess masters are self-taught and that most of their instructional ideas didn’t work in a classroom environment. “I was starting with what [the students] needed to know, not where they were beginning,” MacEnulty said. “They had not understood my language of instruction.”

But once he learned to engage students at their level, they quickly took to the game, and enthusiasm began to spread for the class and the chess team at C.E.S. 70, which he was also leading. MacEnulty started seeing his students change and grow in new ways.
“What surprised me was how [chess] helped with their emotional intelligence,” said MacEnulty.
By learning the game and its history, students also learned that they can’t simply take each other’s pieces off the board or make up rules to help themselves win. The traditions, restraints and strategies of the game taught students resilience, patience, problem solving, critical thinking, emotional regulation and more, he said.
Moreover, MacEnulty realized he could tie the game into nearly any lesson from other subjects. He taught students how chess mirrored the elements of storytelling, as each game has an introduction, climax and resolution. He also taught them about Queen Isabella of Spain, who was an avid chess player and, under her reign, is said to have made the queen — not the king — the most powerful piece on the board.
His young students took it all in. Chess was “helping [students] understand life,” said MacEnulty. “That was a real eye-opener for me.”
The C.E.S. 70 chess team, which MacEnulty had taken over from his mentor Mark Singer, was made up of students who were eager but inexperienced at playing against others. There were few other Bronx programs at the time, and MacEnulty realized, “If we’re gonna get good, we have to play against the kids in Manhattan.”
He began taking the students to weekend tournaments. After six months, some of his kids started winning, proudly coming back to school with trophies for which he quickly built a display case. Parents began to get excited too, and by the second year, kids were teaching chess to each other, playing after school in their buildings and even showing up an hour before school to play.
“It just kept growing and growing,” he said — and by his third year, MacEnulty’s team had won city and state championships.
“Sunrise in the Bronx” was a way for the former teacher to lovingly recall the challenges and triumphs of his unexpected career. MacEnulty said he had been thinking about writing a memoir for a decade, but when he started writing, the draft came together in just two months, helped by copious notes he took at tournaments in the 90s and from the words of former students themselves, which are included at the back of the book.
“When looking at my life, it’s hard to find aspects of both my past and current life that have not been impacted by learning and playing chess,” wrote former student Sunil Matabeek for the book.
Matabeek started with MacEnulty on the C.E.S. 70 team in second grade, went on to win a national middle school tournament in Arizona in 1998 and later taught chess himself. Now, he is a husband and father and works as an auditor, a career he said draws upon all the skills learned in chess.
Decades later, MacEnulty is still in touch with many students and colleagues from C.E.S. 70 and recently gathered them at his home to celebrate the book launch. With pride, MacEnulty told the Bronx Times that many former students like Matabeek have gone on to successful, high-earning careers in engineering, finance, law, artificial intelligence, creative work and more.
“Every single one of them says it was chess that gave them their beginnings,” MacEnulty said.
Today, chess is not a required class in schools, but programs have expanded throughout the Bronx, including Project Pawn, which recently grew its school-based instruction into a flagship center in Soundview. MacEnulty is friends with the program’s co-founders and said he loves seeing the game become more popular and accessible to people of all ages in the Bronx.
Getting together with the C.E.S. 70 community to celebrate the book, MacEnulty was reminded of just how far he and his students have come — and how they learned and grew together.
“I look at them now, and I’m just blown away,” he said.
Reach Emily Swanson at eswanson@schnepsmedia.com or (646) 717-0015. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes