Remembering Merl Reagle

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

If you’re a fan of crosswords, then you may know that the crossword puzzle community lost one of its leading lights this summer. His name was Merle Riegel, one of the best crossword puzzle constructors ever. You may have seen him in the 2006 documentary, Wordplay, about the crossword tournament.

Yes.

He was also portrayed in a brilliant episode of The Simpsons, where Lisa Simpson enters a crossword puzzle tournament and actually ends up doing a crossword puzzle that Merle had designed.

Yeah, right.

So in the show, he made the puzzle that she did.

Yes.

And which later became available for other people to do.

Yes, yes.

And so it’s been a terrible loss to those of us who love crossword puzzles. And I’ve been fascinated reading a lot of the tributes that have come in, and there have been many. And one of the things that made him such a dazzling, brilliant puzzle constructor was the fact that he wanted to make puzzles that sort of had a life off of the page, something that people would talk about rather than using, you know, weird words for a Malaysian canoe or a three-toed sloth or a river in Italy, that kind of thing.

He looked for themes, and he once described being in an apartment store and seeing a sign that said, throw rugs.

Yeah, and he thought, well, I hope some bratty kid doesn’t take that literally.

And he ended up creating this crossword puzzle that had answers like toss pillows, slit skirts, pocket calculators,

All these things that you didn’t want Junior to do in a department store, right?

Because those words could be verbs.

Right, because you could slit a skirt or pocket a calculator.

Yeah, yeah.

And another time he was walking around in his neighborhood and he was part of a neighborhood watch program. And he thought about the words neighborhood watch. And as a result of that, his clue was something like, so Tarzan, how come you and Jane don’t skinny dip in the backyard anymore? The answer being neighborhood watch.

That is totally him.

He was so brilliant, so generous. And his mind often worked in anagrams, too. There was a wonderful story from Deb Amlin, our friend who writes for The New York Times about crossword puzzles. And she’s a humor writer. She wrote a book called It’s Not PMS, It’s You, which is a funny book. But she remembered him this way.

She said, Merle anagrammed the way other people breathe. His brain was fascinating, somewhat shy by nature. His opening salvo when he met you was to anagram your name. And from there, the ice was always broken. And she said one of her best memories of him was when she was staying at a hotel at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. She ran into him in the lobby and she said he stopped an entire hotel lobby’s worth of people dead in their tracks by pointing at me from across the lobby and bellowing smutty positions.

It was an anagram of the book’s title and it was his way of saying hello after not seeing me for a whole year.

It’s not PMS, it’s you.

Smutty positions.

Right?

Yeah.

We’ll miss him.

It’s a big loss for the puzzling community.

Indeed.

But these stories will keep the legend alive, I’m sure.

Indeed.

By the way, you can find Deb Amlin’s blog on the New York Times website. It’s called Wordplay. And if you love this show, you’ll love that blog.

And by the way, Martha.

Yes?

Arno.

The river in Italy is the Arno.

Oh, I was going to say Poe, P-O.

I meant that one too.

No, you can’t have two-letter answers in a crossword puzzle.

Well, I must be doing a lower grade of crossword puzzles.

I’ve done that one.

This is a show about words and language and everything related and sometimes not very related. Give us a call, 877-929-9673. Email us at words@waywordradio.org. Or tell us what you’re thinking on Twitter at the handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.