Dorothy Rice Sims

Dorothy Rice Sims (June 24, 1889 – March 24, 1960)

Early years

"The careers of the six Rice children attracted considerable attention in New York, because their parents encouraged them to stifle their inhibitions." riding a blue Indian and became the first amateur licensed woman pilot in the United States,

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" (Dorothy Rice) 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. 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 (contract bridge) Master Mixed Teams tournament in 1930, evidently with two men as teammates. (Except 1930, the winners and runners-up apparently comprised two men and two women, presumably playing as mixed pairs.) 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 (now the Reisinger).

Sims and Sims faced Ely and Josephine Culbertson in a long rubber bridge match during March and April 1935 (Culbertson–Sims match). ["The Culbertsons won by 16,130 points in 150 rubbers."] His byline appeared on a weekly article covering bridge beginning November 3, 1935 (for the Vanderbilt Cup tournament) 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." 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".