World Champion Bridge Player Lewis Mathe Dies in Canoga Park

Lewis L. Mathe, a member of the 1954 World Champion U.S. Bridge Team and a leading proponent of the West Coast contract bridge style in which straightforward bidding is preferred over the more methodical play popular in the East, died Monday in Canoga Park.

Mathe, an unsuccessful candidate for Congress in 1972, was 70 and suffered from heart disease.

Born in Hungary, Mathe came to the United States as a boy and after serving with the Army Air Force in World War II began winning almost every major American bridge title. He won the Spingold Knockout Teams crown in 1954, the same year his team bested a European unit in Monte Carlo for the world title. Five years earlier he and Edward Taylor, also of Los Angeles, had won the All-Western Masters’ Pair Championship.

Ahead lay victories in the Vanderbilt Knockout Teams, Board-a-Match Teams, Men’s Teams, Mixed Teams, Open Pairs, Blue Ribbon Pairs, Life Master Pairs and Mixed Pairs. The last match, in Phoenix in 1971, was believed his final major national triumph.

Mathe also represented the United States five times in international play. His teams finished second on three of those occasions.

In 1968, Mathe, a real estate broker by profession, was elected chairman of the Board of Governors of the American Contract Bridge League and later became the Los Angeles representative on the league’s board of directors. He also was a bridge correspondent for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

Mathe’s survivors include his wife, Eugenie, three sons and one daughter.