North Shore Towers Courier n March 2016 13 incorporated computer lingo as its motif. The answer for “Floppy disc,” for example, was “Frisbee;” “Digital monitor,” begat “Manicurist;” and “Hard Drive,” became “Tiger’s tee shot,” among others. A few years after Clinton’s presidency, Kahn was asked to write a custom puzzle for the opening of the Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. The job of penning the clues for a crossword falls to the constructionist, although Kahn notes that Shortz, as editor, freely tweaks or changes clues to make them trickier or more fun. Kahn takes great pride in the fact that Shortz “corrects” only about 20% of the clues he devises for his grids. Perhaps, Kahn’s success in clue-writing has something to do with his still solving the Times puzzles from Wednesday to Sunday, expressly for the purpose of studying the clues, albeit he still enjoys crosswords as a hobbyist. The former 42nd President of the United States’s love of crosswords was brought to light in the 2006 documentary, “Wordplay,” which uncovers the world of constructionists and puzzlers against the backdrop of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. The yearly crossword Bacchanalia features a series of tournaments to determine the best grid solver. It’s a distinction in which Kahn has placed no better than 60th in the years he’s participated as a contestant, though many times he’s been honored as a judge for the event. Although he does not appear in the film—Kahn is featured in an interview on the DVD extras—one of his crosswords does. Kahn’s puzzle (#5 in the film), a quite ornery brain buster, is introduced by Will Shortz during the tournament with the caveat, “this is going to rip your hearts out.” It is evident, when looking at his work, that Kahn holds a special place for the country’s Commanders in Chief. He once set a puzzle playing on the similarity of Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson, both former Tennessee Senators, ingeniously designing answers that contained both “A-C-K” and “O-H-N,” the only determining factor in their names. And one of his proudest moments as a puzzler was the Sunday Times crossword he created after Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Not only did Kahn entwine the initials of every state won by the nation’s first African-American President into the grid, he was also able to include the answer to the puzzle’s theme along two of its edge-to-edge horizontal axes. Remarkably, it was only after Kahn had sent Shortz the crossword that he noticed that the two states that Obama called home were both in the themed answer, HAIL TO THE CHIEF, in the upper right quadrant of the grid. W HITE HOUS E CrOSSWOrdS davId J. KaH n ★★★ ★★★
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