Page 2 + Crossword Answers

Crosswords are a way to deal with your worries. It’s nearly impossible to worry about foreclosure when you are trying to figure out a seven-letter word for “co-workers’ activity.”

The indomitable Mickey Maurer is the co-owner of the Indianapolis Business Journal and a businessman supreme. Besides being an admirer of Farrell, Maurer’s a faithful seven-day-a-week solver of the Times puzzlewho’s been at it since the ’60s: “Boredom during law school got me into crosswords,” he says. Maurer claims he hasn’t watched anything except sports and the occasional movie on TV in 20 years, so “popular culture is something I don’t know anything about. If the puzzle asks who the bartender was on Cheers, I have no idea.” He’s able to work around the clues he doesn’t know, eventually deciphering what M*A*S*H and Friends refer to.

Early-week puzzles take Maurer less than 10 minutes to complete, although surprisingly, he says that he is not interested in speed-solving. “To make a contest of what is essentially a solitary activity, tournament organizersartificially apply speed to it. It’s inorganic.The need for speed chafes me in all the wrong places.” However, constructing, not solving, is Maurer’s real jones—a project that can take up to eight hours, even with computer help. “I’ve done 25 or 30 puzzles for [the Times] over the last 18 years,” says the founder of the erstwhile Indianapolis Crossword Puzzle Club. “Constructing is the bigger kick than solving, by far.”

Fortified by Maurer’s tutorial on crosswords, I’m ready to pay my visit to Farrell, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Butler University, age “71 2/12” (“I like to tell people I’m 21 Celsius”). In a Hawaiian shirt and moccasins, he’s not the wonky, fusty word-nerd you might expect, yet he is somewhat eccentric. A card-carryingmember of the Flat Earth Society (“they believe the world’s flat; I believe it’s round. I only joined because a friend told me to”), he’s a puzzler’s puzzler. Farrell goes by two other names: “Oscar Thumpbindle is my alter ego. I made up the name because it has 16different letters. Norwich Bumstead is my other alter ego.”

Over tea and cookies, we talked puzzles. Puzzles cover all surfaces of his far-northside condo. Various abacuses and Rubik’s Cube–type contraptions line his mantel. Farrell makes 3-D models of puzzles for blind students and travels the world to speak at conferences on recreational mathematics. “My wife and I just got back from Prague, the International Puzzle Party,” he reports. “It’s a puzzle exchange. A very elite group, invitation only.”

Outside of teaching, he writes articles and books on what he calls “combinatorial games and puzzles.” He edits and publishes Word Ways, the journal of recreational linguistics. The highly entertaining Farrell, who calls himself a “mathemagician,” lives with 3,500 dictionaries, including a 1755 edition of Samuel Johnson’s tome worth $40,000, and volumes of slang definitions that date back to the 1600s. It turns out the best crossworders aren’t English majors or writers, as you might expect. They’re mathematicians and musicians, accustomed as they are to dealing with coded information.

Although he’s no longer constructing crosswords, I ask Farrell if he keeps his hand in as a solver. “I did 10 crosswords today from a slew of papers around the country,” he says. All solved in pen, by the way. Didn’t that consume your whole day? “One hour 20 minutes for the whole batch. I don’t get fanatic about speed-solving, though. For example, I put serifs on my I’s.”

“This is the seat where I composed the election puzzle,” he says somewhat ruefully, pointing to the corner of a green sofa. Farrell has—until now—staunchly refused to return to crossword constructing after his triumph 13 years ago. The ingenious puzzle gained so much notice—and so many readers missed the duality of 39 across—that ABC’s Peter Jennings felt obligated to explain it on the evening news. At first Farrell loved the attention, but then it became a strain. “I quit after my big one,” he says, “because everyone expected so much out of me. Ever since my presidential one, people expected genius out of me. It was just not worth it.”

Farrell moved on to mechanical and mathematical puzzles. Just as I was working up the nerve to ask him if he’d create a crossword for Indianapolis Monthly, he startled me by offering to do just that. I thanked him for stepping back into the ring for this magazine—untous a crossword is born—even if I was stumped by a few of his clues. I was hoping he’d peg his Indianapolis Monthly puzzle as a Saturday level of difficulty. Alas, he estimated it as a garden-variety Wednesday.

So I’ve busted myself back down to the basics, working my way through weeks’ worth of Monday puzzles, seeking, as one constructor put it, the kind of success experience quite unlike that provided by real life. Perhaps because crosswords act as a sort of barometer of one’s own acculturation, if you cancomplete a Shortz, Maurer, or Farrell crossword, consider yourself smart and mentally agile. Crosswords are also a way to deal with your immediate worries. It’s nearly impossible to worry about a mortgage foreclosure when you’re trying to figure out what seven-letter word for “coworkers’ activity” begins with S and ends with Y and has a G in the sixth position. Nothing, notes Crossworld author Marc Romano, removes imminent social contingency from one’s life better than solving crosswords.