It took a world war to get a crossword puzzle into The New York Times Magazine — on Sunday, Feb. 15, 1942.
The crossword puzzle had been a national craze since Arthur Wynne's simple word whimsy made its debut in The New York World in 1913. This crossword included the words "fun" and "more" in the answers. Despite, or maybe because of, the simplicity of "the plural of is" ("are") and "part of your head" ("face"), from that day on the crossword puzzle became part of the national culture, then part of the international culture. They flourish in just about every language that boasts a newspaper.
In 1924, an editorial in The Times deplored the puzzle as "a primitive form of mental exercise," and predicted its swift demise. Eighteen years later, The Times became one of the last newspapers to surrender to the crossword, and made its crossword the most influential in the land. The daily crossword has appeared since 1950.
The first Sunday puzzle consisted mostly of direct one-word solutions "with a flavor of current events and general information," as the accompanying box described it. Now the crossword comes in a welter of bewildering guises. Its answers may skid giddily through the entire reach of the diagrams and may consist of many words, truncated words, punning words, words that read backward, words that are doggerel, words that are fiendishly misleading.
The puzzle has been shaped by four editors: Margaret Farrar, a dedicated pioneer from the pastime's beginnings and an arbiter of standards that still apply today; Will Weng, a former head of The Times's metropolitan copy desk, who reigned from 1969 to 1977; Eugene T. Maleska, an educator, poet and leading authority on the art, from 1977 to 1993; and Will Shortz, a puzzle master, from 1993 to today.
Why did the puzzle begin in The Times in the early days of World War II? It's likely that a prime mover was Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher at the time, who enjoyed wordsmanship and was reported to have long been chagrined at the need to buy The Herald Tribune to do a crossword. But the first relevant document in The Times archives is a memo dated Dec. 18, 1941, less than two weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, to Sulzberger from Lester Markel, the Sunday editor, who said that the puzzles deserved space, considering what was going on in the world: "We ought to proceed with the puzzle, especially in view of the fact that it is possible that there will now be bleak blackout hours -- or if not that, then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind or other."
The first daily puzzle in The Times was, by modern standards, not particularly memorable. Its theme, New York City's water supply, was . . . well, a bit dry. The key names were scattered around the grid, not symmetrical as they would be now. Not a single humorous, punning or misleading element could be found. Yet this puzzle, edited by Farrar, showed an intelligence and a cultural standard far above other puzzles of the time. One contemporary touch was 7-Across (''New York's rainmaker''), referring to the meteorologist whose work in cloud seeding supposedly helped end the city's water shortage of 1949-50.
Beverly Sills, the late opera star and executive, who was a crossword aficionado, once said, "You are never famous until you've had your name in a crossword puzzle."
— Adapted from articles in The Times by Richard F. Shepard and Will Shortz
