A Helping Hand Sparks a Friendship Between a 32-Year-Old Woman & an 83-Year-Old Former Chess Champion

Isabelle and Tom walking in the Los Feliz neighborhood where he has lived alone for the past 40 years.

2024 was a year of change for Isabelle Rosa. 

“The past few years, post-COVID, I’ve been taking stock of what I have, as a lot of people have been doing. I felt like the joy of my life had been sucked out in a lot of ways. I was existing, but I wasn’t living.”

She closed her business selling Tesla parts, separated from her husband, and moved from North Hollywood to Silver Lake. She also composed a list of things she wanted to do in the new year. On that list: She wanted to help people. “I don’t think I intended that to be a career choice. It just meant that I want to help if I can.”

One day in March, she noticed an older man wearing a suit jacket, walking. She’d seen him previously multiple times. “I was like, oh, he’s so cute. I was walking my dog, and he was directly across the street. My dog, who is very perceptive, stopped dead in his tracks. He would not walk. It was kind of a sign,” she laughs. “But seriously, something inside me said I needed to talk to him.”

Approaching the man, she noticed that his jacket was dirty and tattered. His fingernails were dark, and he was missing most of his front teeth. “But we started talking. He was very suspicious and reserved. He’s like, why are you being nice to me? During the course of an hour, I find out that he used to be a chess champion. Literally, he was the United States amateur chess champion in 1966!”

The man, whose name is Tom Lux, shared with Isabelle that he had been an electrician in the Navy during the Viet Nam war. Never married, no children. He’d lived alone in the same house, just down the street from Isabelle, for the past 40 years. “He told me that I was the first person who tried to talk to him in 15 years. Most of his interactions consisted of ordering from the same burger place a few blocks away.”

More conversations followed, and with each one Isabelle became more riveted. Tom, who is 83 years old, is a classic introvert—a guy who through most of his life kept to himself. After his Navy career, he worked as an electrician and then sold ads for the now-defunct publication The Recycler. He retired in 2003. Two years later he was declared legally blind,  losing his driver’s license. In the ensuing years, he found himself more and more alone, and, as he puts it, “a deep depression” set in. His family and most of his friends had passed, and all personal contact ceased during COVID. So did communication. Tom had no computer, internet, television or phone.

“I’d say during a two-year period I didn’t talk to a single person. Honestly, for most of COVID, I didn’t even know what was happening,” Tom recalls.

Most of his time was spent at a table at his rented home. With a chess notation book sprawled out, he’d play chess with himself. “You analyze what other players have done and then you play against that,” he explains.

When things started reopening, he started walking to his local burger place again. But he discovered that conversation had become difficult. “He said he had to reteach himself how to talk because he had basically forgotten,” says Isabelle.

When Tom invited her to his house, Isabelle discovered that it was ice cold and messy, with few provisions.

An article in Chess Life magazine about Tom. He was the United States amateur chess champion in 1966, and during the competition swept the field 7–0.

“So I went to Goodwill that day and I bought him a whole bunch of clothes. Then I bought some food for him. I could tell that he thought it was strange. Look, he had had no contact with people since basically before COVID. It was clear that he needed a little help,” she shares.

Isabelle started routinely popping over to Tom’s house for coffee and visits. The two would occasionally take walks. She started ordering on Amazon things he needed such as space heaters and dropping them off along with food. Tom gradually let down his guard and a trust developed between the two. At one point, Tom expressed concern about reciprocity in their friendship. 

“He wants to feel useful, as a lot of people do. So the trade-off we made was that he would teach me chess. And he still does. He’s an incredible teacher. I mean, his level is off the charts. He memorizes the board, even at his age,” she says.

Not only has Tom taught Isabelle how to play the game, but he has also taught her how to read complex chess notation.

“She is a really fast learner and quite good,” he shares. Has she ever beat you? “No, not yet; but soon. It will be a good day when she beats me,” he laughs, taking a puff on his Camel cigarette.

“And so for me, what has occurred is simply a friendship. It is not just me helping an old man. This is a friendship, and one where I’m learning something.”

Over the past year, during their twice-weekly coffee-and-chess sessions, Isabelle says she has enjoyed watching Tom blossom. “I think he was and honestly still is suffering from loneliness. But when I look back at when I first started hanging out with him and compare it to now, he is a different person.”

He has also gotten back his ability to converse. “He can discuss any topic with you, from astrophysics to Seinfeld to chess to quantum theory—anything, really. He’s very knowledgeable, good with puns, and great with language. His syntax is incredible. He is a very high-IQ functioning person. It’s like in that Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit. There’s this tunnel vision that occurs. I’ve seen that in Tom.”

Isabelle says she has learned that introversion can be tricky as a person gets older. “When you are younger, loneliness can just be a part of being an introvert. But as you get older, people move away; they pass away. That loneliness can get magnified.”

Watching the two play chess one sunny fall day at Isabelle’s house, one wonders if caution lights ever go off for her. Many, if not most of us, recoil at the thought of anyone being overly dependent on us—particularly a nonfamily member. We refrain from getting too involved.

“I didn’t see it from that perspective because when I look at Tom, needy isn’t the first thing I think of. The first word that comes to mind with Tom is intelligent. I see a very intelligent man. And so for me, what has occurred is simply a friendship. It is not just me helping an old man. This is a friendship, and one where I’m learning something.”

It is not Isabelle’s first intergenerational friendship. She was raised in a troubled home and often felt the need to get out of the house. She befriended an older lady who lived nearby. “She was probably close to Tom’s age, maybe a few years younger. I spent multiple years with her. She taught me how to knit. We watched the show Murder, She Wrote together. I’ve always seen people as people, not for their age or anything else, but who they are, who their soul is.”

And this is not the first time she’s reached out to help an older person who was down on his luck. In 2019 we did a story in Ventura Blvd on how Isabelle helped her father, Giovanni, a former “caterer to the stars,” kick off his successful business, Giovanni’s Tiramisu. He was 71 then, and struggling financially. She helped him develop and market (on social media) a dessert delivery business. Five years later, Giovanni’s Tiramisu is still going strong, and it has put a spring in her father’s step. He now has what so many of us crave and find elusive in our later years: purpose.

“With Tom, I felt a similar feeling as what I felt with my dad. It was like this immense sense of sadness, grief and shock about the situation they were in. With both, I had this feeling I had to do something.”

Today Isabelle’s efforts to improve Tom’s life continue. She got his heat turned on, had his house cleaned, and has been trying to help him with his finances. Tom, who receives Social Security checks, has about $150 a month left over after paying rent. “He would go eight days without eating,” she says. 

Tom apparently never signed up for VA benefits or Medicare, and Isabelle has spent the last several months trying to navigate all the red tape so he can start receiving monthly checks. She is also working to get a social worker assigned to his case. In the meantime, she has launched a GoFundMe that has put $20,000 directly into Tom’s bank account.  

From a personal standpoint, Isabelle’s life is still in flux. She hasn’t yet decided on her next career, and she is in the midst of renovating a house in Toluca Lake—all of which raises the question: What will happen when she embarks on her next chapter, living miles away from Tom? She insists that she’ll continue to be in Tom’s life. “How could I not?” 

A goal as of late: to get Tom to go to Griffith Park, where a group plays chess on Sundays. “He is still trying to work up the courage. He’s been used to seeing me. But I’m working up to that.”