Dorothy Hayden Truscott, 80, Bridge Champion and Author, Is Dead (Published 2006)

Dorothy Hayden Truscott, for many years the top-ranked woman in bridge and the winner of four world titles and more than two dozen national championships, died on Tuesday in New Russia, N.Y. She was 80.

Her death was announced by her daughter Margaret Cooke. It followed a long battle with Parkinson's disease.

Mrs. Truscott won four world titles as a player: the Venice Cup in 1974, 1976 and 1978, and the Women's Team Olympiad in 1980. She was the nonplaying captain of the winning American Venice Cup team in 1989.

Dorothy Johnson was born in New York City on Nov. 3, 1925, four days after Harold S. Vanderbilt had introduced his new game, contract bridge, to three friends while sailing the Panama Canal. She graduated from Smith College and briefly became a math teacher in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Bridge was already an important part of her life. Her parents, Dorothy and Reginald Johnson, were keen players and had taught her the game when she was 7. Normally Mrs. Truscott would watch her mother play, but if her father was pouring some drinks, she would bid and play his hand. Then one evening a player arrived an hour late, and Mrs. Truscott filled in. She was addicted for life.

Mrs. Truscott moved to Park Forest, Ill., and one afternoon a week took the train into Chicago to play rubber bridge. She returned to New York City in 1956 and worked for three years as an actuary at New York Life Insurance.

It was clear, though, that bridge would be a major element of her life. She won the first of her national titles in 1959, and in 1965 became the second woman to play for the United States in the Bermuda Bowl world team championship. (The first was Helen Sobel.) Mrs. Truscott competed in Buenos Aires and was one of the main accusers in a major bridge scandal involving cheating allegations against the British pair of Terence Reese and Boris Schapiro.

She won one world silver medal, from the 1965 Bermuda Bowl, and six world bronze medals, from the Open Pairs in 1966 (she is the only woman to win a medal in this event); the Women's Team Olympiads in 1968, 1972 and 1976; and the Women's Pairs in 1962 and 1974.

Mrs. Truscott was inducted into the American Contract Bridge League's Hall of Fame in 1998.

Mrs. Truscott's first two marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by three daughters, Catherine Hayden Thurston of Cambridge, Mass., Margaret Cooke of Painted Post, N.Y., and Bobette Thorsen of Lititz, Pa., and 10 grandchildren. Her son William died in July 1951, and her son Brian died in January 1992. Her husband since 1972, Alan Truscott, the bridge columnist for The New York Times, died last year.

Also an excellent bridge teacher, Mrs. Truscott wrote two best-selling bridge books, "Winning Declarer Play" (1969) and "Bid Better, Play Better" (1970). With her husband she wrote "Teach Yourself Basic Bidding" (1976-77) and "The New York Times Bridge Book" (2002). Also in 2002, she published "Hell Gate," a historical novel about early Dutch settlers in Harlem.