He has all the questions
Crossword puzzle culture comes to the big screen today with a film featuring local word master Merl Reagle.
By Steve Persall
Published July 7, 2006
Merl Reagle has the chipper air of someone whose life is no work and all wordplay.
Certainly he spends time and effort trying to stump millions of crossword and Sudoku puzzle fans. The puzzles he composes appear in newspapers nationwide, including the St. Petersburg Times, and in paperback collections for easy carrying through the day.
That Reagle gets paid to construct temporary confusion seems to be the only part of what he does that resembles a job. The 56-year-old Tampa resident is way too happy toying with cryptic clues, anagrams, weird spellings, puns and pop trivia. His mouth spouts linguistic tangents while his eyes search for any indication that the listener gets them. Otherwise it won't be fun.
"Did you know that 'dyslexia' scrambles into 'sex daily'?" Reagle said, reaching for a laugh. "So you can say, 'I can't read this because I have sex daily.'
" 'Katie Holmes' scrambles into 'She Like-a Tom.' You could have a scramble-theme crossword answer that's 'OAF Schwarz' instead of 'FAO Schwarz' because OAF Schwarz is where all the clumsy people buy their toys."
And that's just a few seconds of a half-hour interview. You should see what Reagle
can do while thinking inside the 225 boxes that comprise a typical crossword puzzle.
Patrick Creadon's documentary Wordplay opening today gives viewers a peek at Reagle's process as he constructs a puzzle based on the film's title. Later, we see former President Bill Clinton, comedian Jon Stewart and filmmaker Ken Burns solving it, relishing their gradual awareness of the theme and its cleverness.
Wordplay portrays Reagle and New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz leading a new generation of puzzlers who prefer humor to high academia and pop culture to Latin root words. Many aspire to compete in the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, such as the 28th edition chronicled in Wordplay.
Some crossword rules established nearly a century ago still apply while others are practically obsolete, except to old-school holdouts griping about the changes.
Reagle, who began constructing puzzles as a teenager, doesn't hesitate to depict this as an "us vs. them" situation.
"There are two kinds of solvers in America: those who like crosswords as a test and those who like crosswords as a game," Reagle said recently at the Sarasota Film Festival, where Wordplay was shown.
"When the people who like them as a test try to solve one of our puzzles, they complain and write letters saying the puzzle should be a vocabulary exercise. All this gag stuff has nothing to do with what crossword puzzles should be. The people who like crosswords as a game can solve the test puzzles; they just don't like them. They're too boring."
Thirteen years ago, such heresy would've been squashed by crossword purists, championed by the New York Times and its puzzle legacy. New wave puzzlers couldn't beat the status quo until Shortz joined them in 1993 as the newspaper's fourth crossword editor ever. Barriers to using words such as brand names for answers disappeared and an unofficial moratorium on comedy ended.
"When we were on the outs we were all on the same page about this stuff," Reagle said. "In the old days, 'crossword humor' was an oxymoron. Once one of us got into the New York Times, our philosophy became the norm.
"We're trying to decerebralize it. We're trying to make puzzles so that you can talk about them to other people, so they have a life off the page. The three-toed sloths, the Malaysian canoes, the Swahili word for flange; who cares?
"We try to get all that stuff out of puzzles, making it more like Jeopardy on a page. Jeopardy has geography and history but also tough TV trivia, so you have to have general knowledge of what's going on around you. Crossword puzzles should be for the roundly informed person, not the person who knows the most obscure crud in the world.
"There are still an awful lot of people who don't have a playful turn of mind and we've left them behind."
Reagle demonstrated what naysayers are missing, starting with off-hand comments about the odd ways manufacturers sometimes spell their products - Ty-D-Bol and Reddi-wip for example - and how many consumers don't notice.
"We love bringing this stuff to people's attention," he said. "This is stuff they've used for years and they're not really aware that's how you spell it, especially in crosswords where there's no spacing; Ty-D-Bol looks like 'tydbol.'
"It's alphabet soup. That's the basis of how the philosophies of the old school and the new school differ. To make something hard for us is to use alphabet soup. Fort Dix, New Jersey is 'ftdixnj,' with a clue like 'a famous military installation, on an envelope.' That's technically seven letters ending with a 'j.' That makes (a solver) wonder what could this possibly be? If it ends with a 'j' they must have something wrong.
"Or something like 'A-to-Z,' which is technically three words in four spaces and the clue is something like 'completely.' I've gotten letters from people asking what the heck is 'atoz'?
"Because of the lack of spacing we get to play with words in a whole different way. That's how we make things hard, or we can clue easy words hard. We don't like to use the obscure stuff unless we're forced into a corner."
Wordplay describes the bond that develops between puzzle constructors and solvers learning to identify their style, like chefs or filmmakers. Reagle considers himself a medium-to-hard puzzlemaker, so he doesn't get the vitriolic mail a master such as Shortz receives.
"It's mostly a lonely pursuit," Reagle said. "They feel like they're doing a mind-meld of some sort, or they try to guess what kind of weird wavelength I'm on this week. They like the fact they're being challenged. I have to do changeups in themes so they don't know what to expect each week; anagrams or some kind of quotation, riddles. They don't know what to expect.
"Whatever it is, they're just ready for it. It's like you're throwing baseballs at them and they're ready to hit whatever you've got."
The analogy is appropriate since New York Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina is one of several celebrities discussing their crossword obsession in Wordplay. Creadon's film doesn't contain many secrets for success but does illustrate the pastime's vast demographics.
"It cuts across everything you expect," Reagle said. "Sure, there are word nerds, but there are also truck drivers and athletes. Take Jon Stewart; comedians aren't supposed to be that smart. They usually try to say how unsmart they are, to bring themselves down to the audience's level."
Reagle paused, laughed, then shared his private joke: "We play this little game among ourselves sometimes, guessing who does or doesn't do crosswords: 'Sylvester Stallone? Not a crossword fan. Britney Spears? Not a crossword fan.' Probably not."
But Reagle has been wrong before about the game. Thirty years ago he gave up his avocation, wondering if there was a future in puzzle construction.
"When I was 25 or 26 I said, 'Who wants to look back on a lifetime of making crosswords puzzles and doing nothing else?' It seems weird to look back and say that's all you did your whole life. Now it doesn't seem like a bad idea."
His profession also set up Reagle with a suitably fun epitaph for his afterlife, suggested by legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen:
"Here lies Merl Reagle: Five across, six down."
Steve Persall can be reached at (727) 893-8365 or persall@sptimes.com.