On a snowy evening in the early 1900s, a newspaper editor at the New York World was hunched over his desk trying to think of something special for the Christmas issue.
Remembering the small word squares he had solved as a young Brit in Liverpool, he drew a diamond-shaped grid with numbered squares and numbered clues. It contained 32 words, and his simple instruction read: "Fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions."
The puzzle appeared Dec. 21, 1913, and what 42-year-old Arthur Wynne had created was the first crossword puzzle.
It was an instant success. Mail poured in. Seeing the crossword's popularity, Wynne pushed for the newspaper to copyright it, but his bosses considered the crossword a passing trifle. New York Times editorials labeled them a waste of time.
After just a few years, Wynne's interest waned. He still made crosswords, but he also accepted reader submissions, becoming the country's first crossword editor, as well. By 1921, after eight years as captain of the crossword, Wynne handed the wheel to someone else.
That someone was a Smith grad named Margaret Petherbridge, a World secretary who had hopes of being a journalist. Like almost everyone on the staff, she was utterly uninterested in the crossword and simply picked the ones that had interesting shapes. She never tried solving one.
However, the paper's most popular columnist, Franklin P. Adams, was an avid fan and began leaving his solved puzzles on Petherbridge's desk, with the mistakes highlighted.
After a year, Petherbridge had been shamed enough. She decided to try to solve a puzzle — and couldn't. Rather than feel Adams' glare, she set about organizing the puzzles in her files. Within months she had devised rules for crossword creators — amazingly, a list still followed today. She simplified the numbering system, stressed the use of common English words, limited the black squares to one-sixth of the grid and, in essence, standardized the crossword puzzle.
From then on, puzzles that had a high degree of craftsmanship were first to be chosen. The crossword finally looked like a feature that was here to stay.
Then, in 1924, two Columbia grads decided they wanted to get into publishing. Crossword puzzles were more popular than ever, yet there had never been a collection in book form. So they enlisted Petherbridge and two colleagues to compile one: "The Cross Word Puzzle Book." It sold 400,000 copies in only a few months.
Two more books followed, selling 2 million copies in two years. The two young publishers were Dick Simon and Max Schuster, and the first crossword book launched their careers.
And Petherbridge's career. With the books, crosswords became a national phenomenon. Petherbridge married in 1926, becoming Margaret P. Farrar, and under that name she would go on to edit the Simon & Schuster crossword series for 60 years.
Petherbridge never expected such a seemingly genteel activity to be so controversial.
There was a crossword-related news story in the New York papers almost every week: A Baptist preacher constructed a crossword for a sermon. A man refused to leave a restaurant until he finished a crossword and had to be escorted out by police. A Cleveland woman was granted a divorce because her husband was obsessed with crosswords. A Budapest waiter explained in a crossword why he was committing suicide; police were unable to solve it.
All the while, the Times called crossword solving "a temporary madness," serving "no useful purpose whatsoever," and an "epidemic" that would soon be over.
In 1942, the Times finally gave in and hired Margaret P. Farrar as its first crossword editor.
So whatever happened to Arthur Wynne?
As readers of The Washington Post might know, I make the crossword for the Post magazine every Sunday. I live in Tampa, Fla., but in this age of instant everything, I just attach the puzzle in an email and click "send."
Such technology has made my puzzling life much less puzzling. And it was while surfing the Web in the 1990s that I found Wynne's grainy Associated Press obit from the Jan. 17, 1945, Toronto Daily Star. It was one paragraph:
"Clearwater, Fla. (AP) — Arthur Wynn, credited with inventing the crossword puzzle, died Sunday. . . . Wynn was born in Liverpool, England, and came to the U.S. 50 years ago to enter the newspaper business."
First, I was stunned that the man who had invented a feature that was in nearly every newspaper in the world, even in 1945, was given such short shrift. Second, that they spelled his name wrong. And third, that he died in Clearwater. There I was, a lifelong puzzle guy in Tampa, reading that the man who invented the crossword puzzle had died 25 miles from where I was sitting.
And that became the puzzle with no answer: Where was he buried? Somewhere in Tampa Bay? If so, is there a gravestone? Or was he transported to a family plot in Liverpool? Fifteen years later, I still had no answer.
The break came in July this year. While surfing the Web, my wife, Marie, found the hometown obit of Wynne's oldest daughter, Janet. It mentioned that there was another daughter living in Clearwater. Wynne had married a third time to a much younger woman and had fathered a child at 62. That daughter's name was Catherine Wynne — they called her Kay — and she was 11 when her father died.
Her married name was Kay Wynne Cutler. She had turned 80 in April and was living in Clearwater. It took Marie only minutes to find her number and call. The conversation lasted 15 minutes. We tried not to show that we were giddy as kids in an ice cream parlor. We agreed to meet.
Kay walks with a cane but is sharp. She laughs easily. She brought articles about her father. As far as she knows, she is the only one in the family who is a crossword fan.
She had the answer to my "grave" question. There was no burial site because there was no burial. Her father had been cremated. Kay says she was too young to know, but she thinks his ashes were scattered in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, she was a student at Anona Elementary, a happy accident for the daughter of a puzzle creator — the name of the school is a palindrome.
Kay said her father used to say that he never made a penny off the crossword puzzle. In this, the 100th anniversary of his invention, I hope he can settle for recognition.
Merl Reagle is a professional puzzle author.
© 2013 Columbia Daily Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.[1]
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- ^ © 2013 Columbia Daily Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. (www.columbiatribune.com)
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