Margaret Farrar’s Delta Force of puzzle constructors came from all walks of life: musicians, prisoners, sea captains.
And high school students.
My dad would call Margaret up directly. She would explain that a person of good intelligence should be able to finish the puzzle in the time it takes to get from Scarsdale to New York City.
The first New York Times crossword puzzle constructed by my dad was printed in 1959 while he was a senior at White Plains High School.
Kenneth Henry Shopsin (my father) was born 1942, in the Bronx. His father, Morris, owned a paper factory with his brother, Sydney, that was located on Vandam Street in downtown Manhattan.
As a kid my dad would get beat up for being Jewish. His neighborhood in the Bronx was mainly Irish, Italian, and racist.
When my dad was 12, black people started to move into the neighborhood. My grandpa Morris wanted to leave right away. Not because he was racist. Because he was a Jew. He knew his property value was going to go down.
But he waited for two or three years to sell. He didn’t want to be the first one on the block to sell to black people. He didn’t want the neighbors to say, “Ah, those fucking Jews, they will do anything for money.”
Morris came home one day with a big smile. He had learned that the Irish guy three doors down had sold to blacks, which gave him permission to sell to blacks, too.
The Shopsins moved to White Plains, New York, a few blocks from the border of Scarsdale.
In summer my dad regularly took the train down to work at the paper factory.
He ended up on the same schedule as a man named Bill.
Bill was an executive at Union Carbide that was three times my dad’s age, with a wife, two kids, and an office designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He wore a suit and did the New York Times crossword puzzle every day.
One day Bill and my dad did the puzzle together, and they both had a great time. From then on my dad and Bill found each other on the Metro North platform each morning, pencils in hand.
They would celebrate each victory together by crumpling up the completed crossword and throwing it in the trash.
When summer ended, my dad started doing the puzzles alone. Which sounds sad, but it wasn’t. He had found a passion.
My dad met Margaret by mail when he ordered some puzzle constructor paper with a preprinted grid. He didn’t use the paper the way you were supposed to. The way my dad made puzzles was he just took old puzzles and filled them in with new words and clues. Then he copied the puzzle onto the special paper.
Margaret’s telephone number came with the special paper.
The number came with the constructor paper because there are a shit ton of rules to construct a New York Times puzzle. Rules that were all created by Margaret. Maximum % of black squares, diametrically symmetrical, slang is okay, obscure words are not, you can’t use clues that have been used before (“repeaters”), no diseases allowed, and on and on.
The puzzle fever had long died down. Bridge was now king. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred or two constructors. My dad was paid fifteen dollars a puzzle, more for a Sunday puzzle, but not much.
There is a twinkle when my dad remembers Margaret. He never met her in person, but all the puzzles she rejected or accepted came with a full-page letter and annotated clues.
“You could just call her anytime?” I asked my dad.
“No one else must have called her. She always answered right away. What a sweet lady,” my dad says, and tells me he has an embroidered pillow his mom made with the last puzzle he ever constructed.
The puzzle was published a few months before Margaret retired.
See here for answers. FYI: Puzzle is unedited.
When my dad moved to the Village, his first apartment was on Christopher Street. Margaret Farrar was still the puzzle editor. Every night he would go to the Riker’s near his home at 10:15 p.m., when the late edition of The New York Times came out.
Riker’s was a chain of twenty-four-hour coffee shops. The one near my dad had a guy named Garry that ran the night shift. Garry was straitlaced, likely had a wife at home and went to church on Sundays.
But Garry loved transvestites. A large crew of them would come in and hang out. Garry would treat them special.
Not in a creepy sex-for-donut way. He just dug them and learned their names.
So my dad was there every night. Ostensibly to do the crossword puzzle, but also because he really liked the place and the mixed crowd that hung out there.
Eventually he met a guy named Roger that made his living as a perfume expert. They started doing the puzzle together every night.
Roger introduced my dad to Albert Donati. Albert was two decades older with big muscles and an anchor tattoo. Despite these differences, my dad and Albert got to be close friends.
Albert is the one that told my dad about being a super and set him up with his first building.
Albert was a sailor. Well, he had once been a sailor.
He got very active in the sailors’ union, the NMU (National Maritime Union).
Then he had a falling-out with the union’s leader. A guy named Joseph Curran. And the way Curran dealt with people that gave him a problem was to report said person to the FBI as a communist.
And poof, Albert wasn’t a sailor anymore.
In fact, Albert was a communist. But that is beside the point.
Almost everyone in the 1930s and 1940s was a communist.
—my dad
Every job Albert had after the NMU, two guys in fedoras would show up and flash badges to his boss. The two guys would say, “Did you know you’re employing a communist?”
The FBI paid agents a salary to go around and do that. They did it to Albert for twenty years.
Albert loved it.
Because:
1. Most of the people he worked for were commies anyway.
2. He had so plainly lost the fight, but that they still considered him an enemy made him feel good.
A woman named Ilsa walked fast and worked nights as an elite typist. My dad says her daughter, Nora, was the best-behaved kid he ever saw.
I don’t think he meant this as a compliment.
Nora played violin and went to Our Lady of Pompeii on Bleecker Street. She wore the same uniform as everyone else, plaid skirt and knee socks—but she wore it better.
Not better as in cool kid with upturned collar; better as in more historic. Like a perfect black-and-white photo of a European schoolgirl taken in front of the Alps.
Ilsa was born and raised in Switzerland. She was the star of that historic photo. Most of her free time was spent taking Nora to recitals and practice. They both were always neat and put together.
Before Morton Street, Ilsa had lived on Ibiza. I don’t know what she did there. Likely worked as a laser-accurate typist. On Morton Street she lived next to the buddy building.
Her building had a problem with cockroaches.
It happens.
An exterminator was called, and everyone’s problem was fixed.
Except Ilsa’s.
She kept complaining, but nobody else had the problem anymore.
So the exterminator goes back to her apartment.