“What am I, John of the long arms?”

How It All Started

Mike Pfeifle, one of our current veteran players, recalls being a co-op student in the late 1980’s playing cards at lunch with his fellow co-ops while working at Electrohome. There was always a table of card players he would watch playing a game he didn’t know. It was Bridge.

Once Mike was hired full-time in 1990, he and a few others would fill in when the regulars would need a player. Dave Weber was one of these regulars along with Ed Fronchak and Dave MacQuaig all who had been playing bridge at Electrohome for decades already. They were from an older generation of Electrohome employees whose familes joined them working there after the war and where some even met their wives.

The bridge tables were a place to connect and either, find out what was going on in other departments and on other teams, or just get your mind off work for a while. Tables were limited in the cafeteria so in order to ensure your spot, you might throw your sweater in front of a chair while you lined up for lunch, or maybe you snuck down a few minutes early to claim your spot.

Dave Weber was a skilled Bridge player and the one to teach Mike and the ‘new’ generation of players. Dave, and the players before him, developed a special bidding convention in order to maximize play for the alloted lunch hour. One level contracts were avoided and many of us gained serious tenacity (or maybe just audacity) to make a game before the clock ran out. This became the defacto Electrohome/Christie convention that is still played to this day. The bridge game eventually broke away from the cafeteria and impromptu tournaments started to be played.

As the years passed, many of the usual suspects at the bridge tables moved on from what was now Christie Digital, but the games were still played-less and less in person and more utilizing online options, but its kept us all connected. One late-night in-person bridge session found us discussing who started it all and Dave's name was mentioned and stories told. We became determined to connect with him and maybe he would even be willing to play a game or tournament with us! As we googled for his contact information we realized that we had missed him by a matter of weeks. Dave passed away in July 2023 after a short battle with cancer and never got to know how his bridge legacy still lives on.

The annual Dave Weber Memorial Bridge Tournament is held in honour of the man that started it all.