12 North Shore Towers Courier n March 2016 D I S P E N S E R By Stephen Vratos Sharpen your pencils and gird your pop culture loins, puzzling pro David J. Kahn is returning to North Shore Towers, Wednesday, March, 16th, in the VIP Room. The crossword connoisseur, who’s puzzled the population for more than two decades, has constructed more than 160 crosswords for the the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, as well as customized creations for such special venues and events as the Baseball Hall of Fame and World Science Festival. His first visit to NST came three years ago and drew an impressive 100+ attendees. For that popular engagement he devised a puzzle themed on The Towers, handing out copies and awarding prizes to audience members who most quickly completed it. For his upcoming NST visit, he’s crafted a crossword with U.S. Presidents as the motif in honor of his latest release, “White House Crosswords.” The Manhattan native’s interest in crosswords began as an 11-year-old, watching his uncle, who lived in the same building, solving a Sunday New York Times puzzle in ink. “The puzzles at the time dealt with esoteric knowledge, only in dictionaries,” Kahn explained. “About 20 years ago 1993, Will Shortz took over as puzzle editor and made them more pop culture-driven. That’s when I tried my hand at constructing them.” A graduate of Syracuse University, where he met his wife of 52 years, Kahn was a Consulting Actuary—he retired two years ago—when he created and submitted his first crossword. Understandably, these initial attempts were rejected by Shortz, but the now legendary Times puzzle potentate, who has become a mentor to many fledgling puzzlers, gave Kahn some advice and guidance on how to construct a good crossword. Kahn received his first acceptance in 1995 and has been designing puzzles ever since, though not as his prime source of income. Kahn says his ideas may come from anywhere; a word or phrase he might hear on TV or see on the side of a truck. In 1998, his curiosity over what a puzzle with the title “Green Eggs and Hamlet” might look like led to a Sunday New York Times grid, devised with his daughter Hillary, embedded with an imaginary Hamlet soliloquy, à la Dr. Seuss. Seeing comedian Louie Anderson on TV one evening, the puzzler noticed that if Anderson’s first and last name were tied together, the answer would contain all five vowels in a row, albeit out of sequence. His observation became a Sunday crossword called “String Quintet,” with answers like SEQUOIAEXPERT (Clue: Tree surgeon) and ONOMATOPOEIAUSAGE. “First you come up with a theme and decide how many themed answers there will be, as well as the number of letters in each,” Kahn revealed. “Then you figure out where they’ll fit in the grid and arrange the black squares accordingly in a symmetric pattern. Then you fill in the rest of the grid with commonly used, lively words and phrases. Finally, you write the clues.” And what distinguishes a Kahn crossword from his puzzling peers? “I tend to include more theme than most other constructionists,” he explained. A recent example, published February 15, incorporated the theme in 11 answers, a presidential word ladder from “Polk” to “Ford,” beginning in the top left-hand corner of the grid and finishing at the bottom right. Kahn is also known for creating crosswords themed on events seemingly as they happen. Less than two weeks after American swimmer Michael Phelps won his record-breaking 8th gold medal, during the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing, the Times featured a Phelpsthemed Kahn puzzle with such answers as “World record time,” “Eight gold medals” and of course, “Michael Phelps.” According to Kahn, he began devising the grid after the swimmer’s sixth win, and had done so in two differing fashions, depending on whether Phelps ended up with seven or eight medals. Celebrity deaths are another subject recognized by Kahn aficionados as something, for which the crossword guru is famous. If there is to be a puzzle dedicated to a recently-deceased celebrity, you can be sure it’s one Kahn has designed. When legendary caricaturist Al Hirshfeld died, Kahn constructed a Sunday puzzle, throughout which the word, “Nina,” was hidden, much the same as Hirshfeld did in his cartoons to honor his daughter. Over the past twenty years, Kahn’s paid respect to the deaths of such famous people as Pope John Paul II, Rosa Parks, Frank Sinatra, Julia Child and George Carlin. His notoriety on such has garnered the puzzler the nickname “The Grid Reaper.” A collection of Kahn’s “passing” puzzles was even released in 2011, entitled, you guessed it, “The Grid Reaper.” One of Kahn’s crosswords gained notoriety after a public endorsement by President Bill Clinton. At a White House news conference on technology and the Internet, when POTUS discussed his ineptitude when it came to replying to Daughter Chelsea’s emails from Stanford University, Clinton held up a puzzle designed by Kahn, entitled “Technophobe’s Delight,” which P U Z Z L E Crossword guru returns to North Shore Towers David J. Kahn
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