I never met nor corresponded with Merl Reagle. Truthfully, I haven't even solved many of his puzzles. Yet, he was a big reason why I started creating crosswords puzzles -- "real" crossword puzzles -- in the first place.
One puzzle I did solve of his was his famous Simpsons puzzle. It is still my favorite crossword puzzle of all time. Not because it was so expertly made (although it was), but because it provided the most remarkable solving experience I've ever had. The puzzle ran in The New York Times on November 26, 2008. At the time, I was in graduate school putting in long hours on my dissertation. I was feeling so stressed and so overworked that I was struggling to remain productive. I decided it was in my best interest to take an entire day off (a "me day," if you want to be cutesy about it). So I woke up around noon and went to the neighborhood sports bar. There I watched NFL games, consorted with my fellow locals, and got properly buzzed off whatever shitty "domestic" (i.e., foreign conglomerate-owned) beer was on special.
After the four o'clock games had ended, I went up the street for a falafel and then walked to a bookstore and bought the day's New York Times. I immediately took out the magazine part containing the crossword puzzle and asked the man at the register to recycle the rest of the paper. There was no sense in pretending I was going to read any of the articles. Plus, the Sunday paper is quite thick, and I didn't want to carry the entire thing home.
I made it back to my apartment just in time for the start of The Simpsons. This was purely accidental. Despite being my favorite show ever, I hadn't watch it regularly in years. I just was just looking for something palatable to put on in the background while I solved my puzzle and waited for the late game to start -- The Simpsons happened to be it. I had no way of knowing this particular episode of the show was going to be about the puzzle I was eagerly anticipating.
The puzzle started smoothly; I was into it, but some of the cluing seemed off to me. I remember being particularly befuddled by the clue "Yul Brynner died the same day as ___ Welles (odd fact)". I found that clue very, well, odd. A more astute solver might have suspected something was up, but I'm more of a good "coffee table" solver than I am a true expert, so I just carried on as usual. That is until Will Shortz and Merl Reagle appeared on my TV and blew my mind. Crossword puzzle solvers live for the "a-ha moment," but seldom do we get to experience a "holy-fucking-shit moment!" like I did that night.
I excitedly barged into my roommate's room and explained everything to him and his girlfriend, knowing full well that they wouldn't care at all -- that they couldn't care at all. Without the years of context of being a huge crossword puzzle fan and a huge Simpsons fan (they were neither), there is no reason for anybody to think this was a big deal. But it was a big deal to me, and I had to tell the only people around, even though I knew they wouldn't get it.
***
Going back about a decade earlier, I had another crossword-life changing experience involving Mr. Reagle. I was about 21 at the time, in college, and I had just started creating "crossword puzzles." I use quotes because I had no idea what I was doing, and what I created resembled actual, publishable crossword puzzles in only the loosest sense. My puzzles were meandering mish-mashes of words I found interesting (often sports or math words) and could fit together in some way. There were no themes and no symmetry to the grid; two-letter words were common, as were isolated singleton squares; and the shape of the grid, although rectangular, was whatever size it was when I (arbitrarily) felt like quitting -- 12 x 15, 18 x 13, 20 x 20, whatever. Everything was handwritten on graph paper, and if I misnumbered the grid, say, I missed 21-Down, I would add a 20-A-Down and a 20-B-Down rather than renumber a large portion of the grid. My puzzles were awful, but still I showed them off to friends and family as if they were masterpieces. (Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.) I had no ambition beyond this. The thought of publishing a puzzle never even crossed my mind. It didn't even occur to me that one could publish a puzzle. For as much though as I gave it, crossword puzzles appeared in the newspaper through immaculate construction.
One summer break, I went to a friend's beach house for a few days. My friend's mom, knowing I was into crossword puzzles, gave me a Reader's Digest containing an article about crossword puzzle construction. It was written, of course, by Merl Reagle. I read the entire article standing in the exact place where it was handed to me (it was in Reader's Digest; it wasn't very long). The article (which can be found in full here) gave the basics of crossword puzzle construction from A to Z. It gave the rules and conventions of construction, discussed theme consistency, Crosswordese, and taste considerations. It also gave me my first crossword-puzzle "holy-fucking-shit moment!". I had no idea crossword puzzles were a "real thing" in this way. I didn't know about themes or symmetry or word counts or any of it. And I certainly didn't know there were people out there who spent their lives thinking about such things. This was a new, intriguing world to me. I felt like Ilie Nastase surely felt the first time he learned the basics of tennis or like Isao Aoki during his first round of golf.
When I returned home, I started constructing in a new light. I also started solving vociferously to get a feel of how real crossword puzzles worked. I still remember the first themed puzzle I constructed: It was titled PROFESSIONAL COLLABORATIONS. And the theme answers were as follows:
Ken Shamrock collaborating with Ken Kesey, and others? ULTIMATEWRITERS
Leonhard Euler collaborating with David Copperfield? MATHEMAGICIAN
Madeline Albright collaborating with Marilyn Manson? SECRETARYOFHATE
It was not a publishable puzzle, even by the lower standards of the day (you might notice the inconsistent and ugly "and others" in the first clue). But it was kinda cute, and most importantly, it looked like a publishable puzzle, and the process by which I made it could lead to a publishable puzzle. And it did. I had my first puzzle published in Games magazine a few years later.
Anyway, all of this is a long way of saying Merl Reagle was the man. Even as somebody who did not know him at all, and who was not even very familiar with his work, he had a colossal influence on me as a constructor. That's how deep and widely spread his roots were in the crossword puzzle community.
Art lives much longer than artists, so while it's true I have done very few of Merl Reagle's puzzles, this doesn't have to always be the case. Someday I hope to have the chance to "discover" him for myself. I hear he was pretty good.
One puzzle I did solve of his was his famous Simpsons puzzle. It is still my favorite crossword puzzle of all time. Not because it was so expertly made (although it was), but because it provided the most remarkable solving experience I've ever had. The puzzle ran in The New York Times on November 26, 2008. At the time, I was in graduate school putting in long hours on my dissertation. I was feeling so stressed and so overworked that I was struggling to remain productive. I decided it was in my best interest to take an entire day off (a "me day," if you want to be cutesy about it). So I woke up around noon and went to the neighborhood sports bar. There I watched NFL games, consorted with my fellow locals, and got properly buzzed off whatever shitty "domestic" (i.e., foreign conglomerate-owned) beer was on special.
After the four o'clock games had ended, I went up the street for a falafel and then walked to a bookstore and bought the day's New York Times. I immediately took out the magazine part containing the crossword puzzle and asked the man at the register to recycle the rest of the paper. There was no sense in pretending I was going to read any of the articles. Plus, the Sunday paper is quite thick, and I didn't want to carry the entire thing home.
I made it back to my apartment just in time for the start of The Simpsons. This was purely accidental. Despite being my favorite show ever, I hadn't watch it regularly in years. I just was just looking for something palatable to put on in the background while I solved my puzzle and waited for the late game to start -- The Simpsons happened to be it. I had no way of knowing this particular episode of the show was going to be about the puzzle I was eagerly anticipating.
The puzzle started smoothly; I was into it, but some of the cluing seemed off to me. I remember being particularly befuddled by the clue "Yul Brynner died the same day as ___ Welles (odd fact)". I found that clue very, well, odd. A more astute solver might have suspected something was up, but I'm more of a good "coffee table" solver than I am a true expert, so I just carried on as usual. That is until Will Shortz and Merl Reagle appeared on my TV and blew my mind. Crossword puzzle solvers live for the "a-ha moment," but seldom do we get to experience a "holy-fucking-shit moment!" like I did that night.
I excitedly barged into my roommate's room and explained everything to him and his girlfriend, knowing full well that they wouldn't care at all -- that they couldn't care at all. Without the years of context of being a huge crossword puzzle fan and a huge Simpsons fan (they were neither), there is no reason for anybody to think this was a big deal. But it was a big deal to me, and I had to tell the only people around, even though I knew they wouldn't get it.
***
Going back about a decade earlier, I had another crossword-life changing experience involving Mr. Reagle. I was about 21 at the time, in college, and I had just started creating "crossword puzzles." I use quotes because I had no idea what I was doing, and what I created resembled actual, publishable crossword puzzles in only the loosest sense. My puzzles were meandering mish-mashes of words I found interesting (often sports or math words) and could fit together in some way. There were no themes and no symmetry to the grid; two-letter words were common, as were isolated singleton squares; and the shape of the grid, although rectangular, was whatever size it was when I (arbitrarily) felt like quitting -- 12 x 15, 18 x 13, 20 x 20, whatever. Everything was handwritten on graph paper, and if I misnumbered the grid, say, I missed 21-Down, I would add a 20-A-Down and a 20-B-Down rather than renumber a large portion of the grid. My puzzles were awful, but still I showed them off to friends and family as if they were masterpieces. (Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.) I had no ambition beyond this. The thought of publishing a puzzle never even crossed my mind. It didn't even occur to me that one could publish a puzzle. For as much though as I gave it, crossword puzzles appeared in the newspaper through immaculate construction.
One summer break, I went to a friend's beach house for a few days. My friend's mom, knowing I was into crossword puzzles, gave me a Reader's Digest containing an article about crossword puzzle construction. It was written, of course, by Merl Reagle. I read the entire article standing in the exact place where it was handed to me (it was in Reader's Digest; it wasn't very long). The article (which can be found in full here) gave the basics of crossword puzzle construction from A to Z. It gave the rules and conventions of construction, discussed theme consistency, Crosswordese, and taste considerations. It also gave me my first crossword-puzzle "holy-fucking-shit moment!". I had no idea crossword puzzles were a "real thing" in this way. I didn't know about themes or symmetry or word counts or any of it. And I certainly didn't know there were people out there who spent their lives thinking about such things. This was a new, intriguing world to me. I felt like Ilie Nastase surely felt the first time he learned the basics of tennis or like Isao Aoki during his first round of golf.
When I returned home, I started constructing in a new light. I also started solving vociferously to get a feel of how real crossword puzzles worked. I still remember the first themed puzzle I constructed: It was titled PROFESSIONAL COLLABORATIONS. And the theme answers were as follows:
Ken Shamrock collaborating with Ken Kesey, and others? ULTIMATEWRITERS
Leonhard Euler collaborating with David Copperfield? MATHEMAGICIAN
Madeline Albright collaborating with Marilyn Manson? SECRETARYOFHATE
It was not a publishable puzzle, even by the lower standards of the day (you might notice the inconsistent and ugly "and others" in the first clue). But it was kinda cute, and most importantly, it looked like a publishable puzzle, and the process by which I made it could lead to a publishable puzzle. And it did. I had my first puzzle published in Games magazine a few years later.
Anyway, all of this is a long way of saying Merl Reagle was the man. Even as somebody who did not know him at all, and who was not even very familiar with his work, he had a colossal influence on me as a constructor. That's how deep and widely spread his roots were in the crossword puzzle community.
Art lives much longer than artists, so while it's true I have done very few of Merl Reagle's puzzles, this doesn't have to always be the case. Someday I hope to have the chance to "discover" him for myself. I hear he was pretty good.
