Happy Birthday CrossWord Puzzles
When I think of crossword puzzles, I think almost immediately of two people. The first is my mother, who has delighted in doing crossword puzzles for as long as I can remember. (Which always came in handy when I was stumped for a Christmas gift for her. ☺) Whether sitting in the living room of our home or on the screened-in porch at the family cottage by Otsego Lake, my mom regularly has a book of crossword puzzles in hand. The second person I think of is my uncle, Franklin Fry, who worked late into the night, slept in each morning, and awoke to do the New York Times crossword…in pen.
I suspect many of us know folks who loved the crossword puzzle. And so I thought it made sense to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of the world’s favorite puzzles, first published in the New York World on December 21, 1913. Originally called the Word Cross, it was developed by Arthur Wynne, a British-American puzzle enthusiast. Although it took almost a decade to catch on, when it did it took the nation – and eventually the world – by storm.
Crosswords are interesting, I think, not because they demand that you know a lot of words – although that helps! – but because they force you to think “sideways,” to come at clues from different angles, to hold and test a variety of possible answers. Not bad training for decision making in all kinds of situations, when you think about it!
To celebrate the birth of the crossword, I’ve put a short CBS news video below. You can also learn more from this article from the Smithsonian (which includes Wynne’s first word cross).
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