![]() “If we ever had to make cuts for space, we knew we could never cut Merl because we would get hundreds of complaints from people who were addicted to his puzzle.”Īs a freelancer, Mr. “He was obviously the most popular feature in both Image and what later became the San Francisco Examiner Magazine,” said Paul Wilner, who edited both magazines and now teaches journalism at the Academy of Art. That last page of the magazine was often the first page readers turned to in the old Sunday Examiner & Chronicle. “I had to make only one a week, so I threw all my efforts into making that one puzzle as good as it could be,” Mr. His big break came in 1985, when he was hired by the San Francisco Examiner to supply a one-page puzzle for the back page of Image, a slick Sunday magazine it was launching. Three years later, he moved to Santa Monica. He also started selling crosswords to various puzzle magazines. In 1975 he moved to San Francisco, where he managed the old El Rey movie theater on Ocean Avenue, and started writing scripts to sell to Hollywood movie studios. He got his newspaper start as a copy editor for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson. He graduated from Catalina High School and the University of Arizona, where he majored in English with an emphasis on creative writing. Reagle was moved by his mother to Tucson when he was 12, along with his younger brother, Sam. Reagle said he designed his first word puzzle in first grade, based on the names of his classmates. In an interview that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 2009, Mr. His father, Sam, was a truck driver, and his mother, Evelyn, was a nurse. He couldn’t walk down the street without finding puzzles in street signs.” Reagle’s Sunday crossword for the Examiner’s magazine in the 1990s. “He had the quickest mind I have ever come across,” said Michael Gray, who edited Mr. He not only constructed the puzzles, but he also constructed a puzzle of newspapers that carried them. Reagle was the most widely self-syndicated puzzle creator in newspaper history. “Merl’s puzzles were funnier than anyone else’s, and it was important to him that the humor be real-world humor,” said Shortz, who believes Mr. Reagle was such a force in the word game industry that he was once featured as an animated character on “The Simpsons” and was a subject of the 2006 documentary “Wordplay,” in tandem with Shortz. Reagle created an original crossword every week for the Examiner, then The Chronicle after the two papers merged in 2000. Not only does it run in the paper seven days a week with varying degrees of complexity, but you can also complete NYT Crossword puzzles online, and there’s even a video game adaptation of it for the Nintendo DS.Īs for the crossword puzzles being “sinful”… we’ll give you a clue.For 30 years, Mr. ![]() Today, the crossword has moved far beyond its primitive origins. Fun fact: He’s the only “academically accredited puzzle master” in the world, holding a degree he designed himself in “enigmatology.” It’s such a specialized degree, there’s not even an entry for it on, but it stems from the word enigma. Shortz has gained widespread notoriety since that time, taking the puzzle to higher and higher heights over the years. Will Weng and Eugene Maleska followed in her footsteps before Will Shortz took the coveted reins in 1993. Since that time, there have only been four editors of the NYT Crossword puzzle, beginning with Margaret Farrar, who served as editor from the publication of the first puzzle until 1969. By 1950, the paper began running a crossword puzzle daily. The first puzzle ran Sunday, February 15, 1942, and it was, in fact, a primitive pursuit, (’s first definition for the adjective: “Being the first or earliest of the kind or in existence”), as they were the first major US paper to run a crossword puzzle. So, what absolved the crossword puzzle in the illustrious publication’s mind and made them eat their words? Reportedly, it was after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that Lester Markel, the paper’s Sunday editor at the time, decided the country could use some levity, primitive or not. In 1924, the paper ran an opinion column that dubbed them “ a primitive sort of mental exercise.” (Here, we’re inferring they meant primitive as in “simple unsophisticated”-’s ninth entry for the adjective) and a “sinful waste.” Harsh! When crossword puzzles first came about in the 1920s, the NYT turned up its nose at them. There are plenty of crossword puzzles in publications across the country, but when we think of the pinnacle of puzzledom (Not officially a word, but, perhaps, it should be?), the purveyors of the most preeminent puzzles, we bow to The New York Times (NYT).įor more than 75 years, the NYT crossword puzzle has been stumping readers with its clever clues and then sending them soaring when they finally fill in all the squares. ![]()
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