Word: constructors
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Kyle A. Mahowald ’09 is a cruciverbalist who publishes his crosswords in the Times as well as other publications, including the Wall Street Journal. Mahowald’s first Sunday puzzle was published in September 2004; 17 years old at the time, he became the youngest constructor to publish a Sunday Times crossword puzzle. Mahowald remains modest about his achievement. “It was pretty cool. I didn’t know it when I sent it in that I would be the youngest...
...Number Place (whose unacknowledged constructor, Shortz later determined, was Howard Garns, a retired architect from Indianapolis) ran once in a while in the Dell magazines, as well in the much slicker, savvier Games magazine, of which Shortz was an editor. The puzzle also ran in the magazines of Penny Press, a Norwalk, Ct., outfit that had the smarts to hire as editors some of the bright young folks from Games. The Penny Press magazines contained a more attractive mix of posers, and I found myself spending much more time with each issue of, say, Variety Puzzles, than with Pencil Puzzles...
...Wordplay, puzzle creator Trip Payne recalls that, when he moved from Manhattan to Fort Lauderdale a few years ago, he couldn't help mentioning to his new boyfriend that Intercoastal (the word for Florida's inland waterway) is an anagram for Altercation. In the movie, we see veteran constructor Merl Reagle driving past a Dunkin' Donuts shop and saying, "Put the D at the end, you get Unkind Donuts, Which I've had a few of in my day." Spotting a Noah's Ark, he says, "You switch the S and the H around, that's 'No! A shark!'" From...
...Farrar was succeeded by Will Weng, and then by Eugene Maleska, a New York City school teacher. I remember being pleased to read of Maleska's accession, for I knew his name as a Dell puzzle constructor. But Maleska was a conservative chap, a one-man Academie Francaise of English. He seemed to believe that the language had frozen decades before. Cultural references tended toward opera trivia and the novels of long-dead white males...
...Through some clear, clever graphics, all this is spelled out in Wordplay. What you won't learn in the movie is that the puzzle's constructor, Jeremiah (Jerry) Farrell - a Butler University professor of, what else, mathematics - had submitted a simpler version to the Times for election Day 1980, with CARTER and REAGAN as the interchangeable words. Maleska turned it down, supposedly asking, "What if John Anderson wins?" (I still shake my head in wonder at Farrell's brilliance, and Maleska's myopia.) Sixteen years later, Farrell revived and revised the idea. Though Shortz typically revises about half...