Lee Glickstein is hooked on crossword puzzles. How hooked? While sitting shiva for his father 10 years ago, he pulled out a puzzle and started solving (with a pen, of course).
How hooked? The Woodacre resident proposed to his girlfriend via a puzzle he created and slyly slipped to her one morning. The fills for 3-across, 7-across and 11-across read: “ToAudreyfromLee/Aquestionarises/Willyoubemywife?”
Audrey said yes, and today, down and across the years, the Glicksteins remain in holy gridlock thanks to a mutual passion for puzzles.
They are not alone. Crossword puzzles have been popular in America for decades. Now, with the release of the documentary “Wordplay,” the insular puzzle world has become part of pop culture legend. The film does for puzzle constructors and solvers what “Word Wars” did for Scrabble players and “Spellbound” did for spelling bee competitors.
“I loved the movie,” says Andrea Michaels, a lifelong puzzle solver and, more recently, a constructor. “I knew half the people in it. Now other people can understand my world a little more.”
When “Wordplay” first came out, Michaels actually organized a screening of the film for herself and several fellow Bay Area puzzle people, many of whom, coincidentally or not, happen to be Jewish. Recently she and fellow crossoholics have led Q&A’s and group crosswords for audiences at the Balboa Theater in San Francisco (the film screens there 11 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 26, as well as daily at the Opera Plaza theaters in the city).
Although noted Jewish comic and “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart appears in the film, and there’s a cute kerfuffle over the term “oy vey,” in one scene, “Wordplay” really isn’t Jewish. But as far as Michaels is concerned, it’s no coincidence Jews like crossword puzzles.
“Words and language are pretty integral to Judaism,” says the San Francisco resident, “and the idea of being slightly competitive verbally extends itself to crossword puzzles. Jews in particular get satisfaction from an ‘ah ha’ moment as things come together in a puzzle.”
Martin Herbach would agree. “I do it every day,” he says. “The Monday takes three to four minutes, the tougher Thursday and Friday ones take 15 minutes. Sunday takes me about 20 minutes. I’m not a super-speed puzzle solver.”
Herbach is referring to the New York Times crossword puzzle — daily and Sunday — generally considered the Cadillac of crosswords, and its editor Will Shortz the capo di tutti capi of puzzle people. As every gridhead knows, Shortz’s Times puzzles grow increasingly more difficult as the week progresses, peaking on Sunday.
For the faithful, it’s both agony and ecstasy. But when tackling the harder ones, it helps to be prepared.
“Knowing a lot of useless facts is useful,” says Saratoga resident Herbach about what it takes to be a good solver. “I happen to be cursed with a mind that memorizes the Latin names of every plant and animal. It drives my wife nuts when I point to a weed and tell her the Latin name.”
While Herbach is content to solve puzzles (he finishes off 50 a week), some of his friends have moved on to constructing, with many of them regularly writing puzzles for Shortz and the vaunted New York Times.
Among the most respected constructors is Manny Nosowsky, 74, a retired urologist and San Francisco native who came to puzzles relatively late in life.
“I was looking for something to do with my retired time,” he says. “I was interested in languages and reading. I’ve got a good sense of language phrases and idiom, and the way American English phrases go.”
In 1998 he tried his hand at constructing his first puzzles. “The editors wouldn’t talk to me at first,” he recalls. “But in the Crossworders newsletter, I had my first published. It was called ‘Post-Doctoral Work,’ and was about Maria Montessori, Papa Doc Duvalier, Peter Roger and Che Guevara [all people who found unusual second careers after medicine].”
Two hundred puzzles later, Nosowsky has risen to eminence among constructors. His puzzles appear not only in the New York Times but in the Wall Street Journal, which is almost as popular yet demands a different approach.
“You make your puzzles according to who will solve them,” says Nosowsky. “The Times solving audience is unique. They like experimentation, a lot of gimmickry and wordplay. The Wall Street Journal not as much, though the people are as sophisticated.”
USA Today, the L.A. Times and the New York Sun also publish very popular daily puzzles.
Nosowsky isn’t as convinced as Michaels about a Jewish connection, but he certainly has his own Jewish bona fides down.
His father was a chazzan back in the 1930s at San Francico’s Congregation Beth Sholom, where Nosowksy remains a member today. In the 1950s, while stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska, during a stint in the Air Force, he had a chance to put his Jewish knowledge to good use. “There was a young boy who needed a bar mitzvah,” he recalls. “I was the only one on that base of 10,000 who could teach him.”
Nosowsky doesn’t solve puzzles anymore; he’s a strict constructionist, working at it several hours a day. He especially likes how the work keeps his mind active, and even has spillover effects.
“I’m taking a Latin class online,” he says. “I’ve done puzzles on themes with Latin phrases.” He cites as an example one with the answer “quid pro duo.” (Clue: “You scratch my back and I’ll do the both of us.”)
Though he used to construct puzzles by hand, he now uses a computer program. Whatever his methods, his fans are legion. “Somebody called my puzzles soul-crushing,” he says. “I don’t know what it means.”
Maybe he should ask Herbach, a huge Nosowsky fan.
“Instead of weird facts and making you memorize obscure words, there’s a lot of trickery with the modern constructor,” he says. “So a late-in-the-week puzzle will have offbeat and tricky clues, or use a semi-obscure meaning of a word. It’s a jousting match where you know they’re trying to trick you and you try to stay on guard.”
For puzzle-constructor Glickstein, the challenge is keeping a step or two ahead of the solvers. Sometimes that effort takes up a lot of psychic energy.
“For years I was addicted to coming up with themes,” he recalls. “I would be holding my wife’s hand, seeming to listen to her, and she’d notice my fingers tapping. She would say, ‘You’re counting letters!’
“In Puzzlers Anonymous,” he jokes, “when we have the urge to solve a puzzle, we get drunk.”
His addiction goes back to childhood, when he would watch his father solve the New York Time puzzle every Sunday. “There was a lot of crossing out,” he remembers. “He’d laugh and always say the number — 42-across — like we cared.”
Clever clues or answers like “Liszt Price” or “Haydn Go Seek” stuck with him. He started solving at age 15 and never stopped. Glickstein went on to work as a comedian and later as a public-speaking coach. However, his puzzlemania deepened several years ago when he discovered the New York Times puzzle forum, an online discussion group that more than anything else has brought the puzzle community together.
“The people are very warm, very helpful,” he says. “I started [constructing] more puzzles. You get ideas and inspiration, and if you stick with it you’ll get it.”
Adds Herbach, “The culture attracts very well-rounded, if a bit nerdy, folks. In the movie the point is made that there are a lot of musicians, scientists, mathematicians.” And ex-presidents: Bill Clinton is one of the marquee guest stars in the film.
One of the first puzzles that inspired Glickstein to create his own happened to be a Nosowsky original from the Sunday New York Times. “The puzzle was titled ‘Gaining Weight,'” he remembers. “He took common expressions and added [the suffix] -ton to it. So the clue ‘Take the algae out for stroll?’ had as its answer, ‘Walk the plankton.'”
As any puzzle person knows, a question mark in a clue is a dead giveaway that the answer is more than a bit whimsical.
Andrea Michaels may just be the queen of puzzle whimsy, at least in the Bay Area. She has a chronic case of logophilia that shows up in her work and hobbies (she is a professional namer and a tournament-level Scrabble champ).
Her first New York Times puzzle in 2000 was dubbed “All Shook Up” and featured a grid design that resembled a jagged seismic faultline. “A lot of people didn’t do it because of the way it was printed,” she says. “They thought there was something wrong with the newspaper.”
She also created several holiday-themed puzzles for j. back in 2003 and 2004. Of course those puzzles had Jewish themes, and titles like “Gelt Trip.”
Just to prove her mind never stops working, Michaels interrupts an interview to point out that “Britney Spears” is an anagram for “Presbyterians” and “Pepsi-Cola” is an anagram for “Episcopal” (both of which made it into puzzles of hers).
“Words,” she says, “are my whole life.”
Like Glickstein, the Minneapolis native got her start in crosswords doing the Sunday puzzle with her college professor father. “It was our bonding,” remembers Michaels, “like a father and son at the Talmud. Now when I visit him, his wife buys a whole second copy of the Times; he does what he can, then I’m called in to clean up what’s left.”
She even credits crossword puzzles for helping her love life. “The most romantic time in my life,” she recalls, “was when I was dating a Jewish man and we would do puzzles in bed.”
Currently, Michaels is working on a book of Jewish-themed crossword puzzles. Tentative title: “Who Nu?”
At the same time, her compatriots are also busy constructing new puzzles. Glickstein calls his latest “Swap Meat.” Example: For the clue “meek marlin” the answer is “chicken of the sea;” for the clue “cowardly angel,” the answer is “lamb of God.”
Once in a while, the constructors slip in a Jewish expression. Glickstein once saw the word “shmuck” used in a puzzle, which drew some disapproval from fellow Jewish puzzle people. Yet there it was, right in the New York Times.
Other such words that pop up on crossword puzzle databases include shlep, shmaltz, tsuris, chutzpah, matzah, mazel tov, Yom Kippur and noodge.
Other than Will Shortz and a handful of puzzle legends like Merl Reagle, nobody gets rich on crosswords. The New York Times pays $125 for a daily, $700 for a Sunday.
But what they lack in riches is more than compensated by the friendship and fun factor. Shortz hosts an annual puzzle convention/tournament in Stamford, Conn., and for those who go, a splendid time is guaranteed for all.
Nosowsky recalls attending a convention of the National Puzzlers League in Washington, D.C., which involved an intense puzzle competition. “The American Nudists Association was meeting next door,” he says. “I asked what would happen if a bunch of streakers went through the room. Of course, nobody would look up.”
With the endless punning, musing and letter counting, the long hours and the bad pay, the perpetual fear of being branded a royal nerd — one wonders: Why do they do it?
The puzzle people have their reasons.
“Life is so uncertain,” says Glickstein. “It’s not neat. Solutions aren’t clear. But when you solve a puzzle, it’s a perfect world. You have this perfect grid, and it’s all gonna work out.”
For Manny Nosowsky, the mild-mannered urologist-turned-crossword puzzle rock star, the explanation is simple: “Nobody ever asked me for my autograph after a vasectomy.”