There is archival footage of Thurber. He talks about his cartoons being rejected fifteen times by The New Yorker, and tells how the writer E. B. White stuck up for him. This means E. B. White gets a shout-out from Thurber thirty, possibly forty times a day. The New Yorker went on to publish hundreds of Thurber’s drawings.
We go up the same stairs Thurber’s aunt threw shoes down. She did this at night to scare off imaginary burglars.
Thurber’s actual typewriter sits under a gooseneck lamp. The last thing he typed was “Please. Do Not Touch.”
Another item that really belonged to Thurber: his magnifying loupe. It is placed in front of a photo so we know what the thing is. The photo is of Thurber wearing the loupe drawing a cartoon. He is two inches away from the paper.
When Thurber was a kid he lost an eye playing “William Tell” with his brother.
I don’t know how much being half-blind affected Thurber’s drawings. The film explained one of the reasons he was first rejected by The New Yorker was his drawing of a seal did not look like a seal. E. B. White argued that a Thurber seal was better than a real one.
E. B. White did more than argue; he pulled Thurber’s drawings out of the trash. Recognizing value where others had not. He fought to make people understand that though the work was crude, it was special. And he won.
We stop at a wall of autographed eight-by-ten photos. They are writers that once had residencies here. Our favorite is a guy whose name we can’t make out because he has signed his face.
Next to the kitchen is the gift shop. I ask the cashier where we can find the “These Are My Jewels” statue. She is polite but has no idea.
The statue is from a chapter in My Life and Hard Times. Columbus gets hit by an imaginary flood. A woman, trying to escape, climbs the town’s Civil War monument. “These Are My Jewels” is inscribed on the statue. Thurber drew a cartoon of the woman on top of the bronze soldiers who watch “with cold unconcern.” She wasn’t naked in the story but is in the cartoon.
“Maybe it’s by a courthouse?” Jason asks.
“That could be. It’s worth a try,” the cashier says.
Drawing by James Thurber from “The Day the Dam Broke”
The center of downtown: Sherman, Stanton, Grant, and Sheridan are there as described. So is the phrase “These Are My Jewels.” But instead of an empty pedestal above them, there is a sculpture of a lady. She isn’t naked, but you can see nipples through her dress. I look up and think about how back at the house, Thurber is probably saying nice things about E. B. White right now.
GATEWAY DRUG
Clue: Game changer Farrar?
Straight out of college, Margaret Petherbridge got a job as a secretary to the Sunday editor of the New York World.
This was 1919.
It wasn’t part of her job description, but one of Margaret’s duties was helping Arthur Wynne edit the Sunday crossword puzzle.
The first crossword puzzle was actually published by the New York World in 1913. It was created by Arthur Wynne and was labeled “Word-Cross Puzzle.”
A few weeks later the typesetters messed up and set the title as “CrossWord Puzzle.”
So when Margaret went to work, crosswords were a new thing. The New York Times looked down its nose at them. Other papers just thought they were too much work.
Even the New York World thought the puzzles weren’t worth the trouble and tried to stop printing them, but the readers revolted, threatening to switch to one of the twenty-five other New York daily papers (none of which had crossword puzzles).
As it turns out, Margaret was put on this earth to edit crossword puzzles. Little by little, she improved the structure and rules. She wasn’t trying to make the puzzles harder; she was trying to make them more enjoyable. The clues got less dry, the grids more attractive, and the challenges more satisfying.
Around this time Richard L. Simon had an aunt that was hooked on the New York World’s crossword puzzles. She asked him to find her a book of just crosswords. Richard found such a book didn’t exist, so he decided to make one with his partner, Max Schuster.
They asked Margaret to help.
The CrossWord-Puzzle Book came out in 1924 with a pencil attached as a sales gimmick. It was the first book of crosswords ever printed.
People caught puzzle fever. Dictionary and thesaurus sales rose. Library encyclopedias got a workout. Everyone all the sudden knew what a gnu was. And Simon & Schuster overnight became a major publisher.
Hundreds of thousands of The CrossWord-Puzzle Book sold within the first year.
More crossword books by Margaret followed. Checkered clothes became popular, and newspapers across the country were forced to carry crossword puzzles.
Except The New York Times, which called them a “primitive mental exercise” and feared the crossword would be a gateway drug to comics.
Then World War II hit. A memo was sent around The New York Times offices suggesting that crossword puzzles be added to the paper. The Sunday editor thought it would give people something to do if there were blackout hours, and might help lighten people’s mood.
The memo included a correspondence with Margaret, who had been contacted for advice.
The Herald Tribune runs the best puzzle page in existence so far, but they have gotten into a bit of a rut. Their big puzzle never ventures even one imaginative definition, and lacks the plus quality that I believe can be achieved and maintained … We could, I dare to predict, get the edge on them with the above plan.
The above plan was to have “meat and dessert” on the Sunday page. A challenging puzzle that gave “real satisfaction,” plus a smaller, more humorous puzzle that acted as the banana split.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger was the owner and final decision maker of The New York Times. He loved crossword puzzles and was sick of buying the Herald Tribune.
Margaret was hired as the editor, and the first New York Times crossword puzzle ran February 15, 1942.
A puzzle editor doesn’t construct the puzzles. The puzzles are sent in by hobbyists. This situation was set up by Arthur Wynne from nearly the get-go. People wrote to him criticizing his first puzzles, saying that they could make a better puzzle. Go right ahead, I dare you, was Wynne’s response, saving himself a ton of work.
Margaret’s job was to set rules, make the puzzle the right difficulty, check facts, add life, and find great puzzle constructors.
She assembled a Delta Force of elite puzzle constructors that were brilliant and poetic. Her rules weeded out any mediocre grids, and from its beginning the New York Times puzzle was seen as the best.
Every source I’ve read calls her a “puzzle pioneer.” At a time when women all over the country were giving their jobs back to men, Margaret was kicking ass.
In 1926 Margaret married John C. Farrar, one of the founders of the Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing house. John was born in Vermont, went to Yale, spoke out against censorship, and published the writer Flannery O’Connor.
I bring John up because from what I’ve read he was a great man and the least talked-about letter of FSG, but mostly because Margaret’s last name changed to Farrar.