CROSSWORDS: 1970s

Highlights | 1970 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979 | References

Highlights

• 1972: Crossword Puzzle (song; from Dana)
• 1975: Last Bus to Woodstock (first Inspector Morse novel)
• 1976: Starting Here, Starting Now (musical): Crossword Puzzle (song)
• 1977: Will Weng (NYT ed. #2) retires, succeeded by Eugene Maleska
• 1978: American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT) started by Will Shortz

1970

• One Across, Two Down (novel) by Ruth Rendell;
  "There are only two things that interest Stanley: the crosswords and getting his hands on his mother-in-law's money"
• Where Have All Our Heroes Gones (song) by Bill Anderson, album Where Have All Our Heroes Gone;
  lyrics: "And sometimes when it rained you'd sit beside me / And we'd race raindrops down the window pane
  You'd bring me coffee and we'd work crossword puzzles together / We don't do anything together now"
• Crossword (song) (video; 2:18) by Jeff Cooper and the Stoned Wings, album Purple Haze / Tribute to Jimi Hendrix

1972

• Crossword Puzzle (song) by Dana (BBC Top of the Pops) from album All Kinds of Everything;
  MayasMix @ 18:35; lyrics: "Isn't life a little bit like a crossword puzzle? Giving you lots of trouble /
  I'm scratching my head to find the clues
  In the black and white that make up yesterday's news / And my crossword puzzle is keeping me in a muddle"

1973

• Crossword Puzzle (album) by Partridge Family (just title, cover; no puzzle songs)
• The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis novel;
  Top 10 crosswords in fiction, no 7: Lionel Asbo; Lionel Asbo character added later
  in 12 crossword novels; Guardian; 6/14/2012
  Charles Highway: "Sipping on my coffee I tackled the Mirror crossword.
  If I completed it, I would **** Rachel within... three weeks"

1974

• Revisiting the brilliance of "McGear":
  Paul McCartney's brother Mike's 1974 solo album
  McGear sparkles with the younger McCartney's hilarious sense of wordplay
  and musical eccentricity; "My dad used to do the crossword," McCartney recalled,
  "and he had a great love of words and puns, which is very Liverpool. My family
  and people in Liverpool were into surrealism before the surrealists," he joked.
  "While we may have been Liverpool working-class people, we had a natural
  love of wordplay, along with our Liverpudlian sense of humor, and my dad
  would stimulate it at home with the crosswords, which he shared with me
  and 'our kid'," Mike's warmhearted euphemism for his world-famous brother.
  Salon; 7/28/2019

1975

• Last Bus to Woodstock (mystery) by Colin Dexter; "Inspector Morse, the irascible detective
  whose penchants for cryptic crosswords, English literature, cask ale and Wagner reflects
  Dexter's own enthusiasms."; Inspector Morse and DS Lewis after were named
  after two Ximenean crossword prize-winners: the former chairman of Lloyds Bank,
  Sir Jeremy Morse and Mrs DW Lewis;
  "In the same way he's fascinated by crosswords, the puzzle of solving the murder is
  what drives him on." ~John Thaw (Morse protrayer)
  "Thaw was the definitive Morse. Grumpy, crossword-fixated, drunk, slightly misogynistic, pedantic about grammar."
  ~No one else should play Inspector Morse, says his creator Colin Dexter; Guardian; 3/25/2014
• Top 10 crosswords in fiction, no 3: Inspector Morse Guardian; 8/9/2012
• Curtain novel by Agatha Christie;
  Ironically, Captain Hastings had unwittingly intervened in Mrs. Franklin's plan to poison her husband,
  by turning a revolving bookcase table while seeking a book to solve a crossword clue (Othello again),
  thus swapping the cups of coffee, so Mrs Franklin poisoned herself.
• Crossword Puzzle (song) (video; 2:54) by Sly Stone, album High on You; MayasMix @ 72:14
  lyrics: "There's a puzzle in my head / Spend a lifetime finding pieces / It will take forever to put together"
• The Cross-Wits (TV game show; 1975-1980)

1976

• Crossword Puzzle (song) (video; 4:51) from musical Starting Here, Starting Now; MayasMix @ 43:25;
  lyrics: "I am sitting here doing the Sunday Times Crossword Puzzle. Somehow the words won't come.
  I am staring at squares but my eyes never focus, and my mind's feeling strangely numb. It's a fact that a word...";
  synopsis: "A woman holding a NY Times's reveals that ever since her Hecky left her, she has been unable to
  focus on the crossword puzzle. As she tries to answer some clues, she is continually distracted by thoughts of him.
  Slowly, it is understood that the reason Hecky left her was because, being the intelligent woman that
  she is, when they did the crossword together, she always got all of the answers before him.
  This led to much frustration and arguing and eventually Hecky couldn't handle it anymore.
  As she stumbles through each clue, she becomes more upset and less in control of her emotions."
• The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin by David Nobbs fiction;
  Top 10 crosswords in fiction -- Honourable mention: The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin; Guardian; 6/28/2012;
  Reggie tends to tackle the crossword on the morning train, still stuck as it arrives at Waterloo while his carriage
  companion Peter Cartwright says "Finished" by Raynes Park.
• Letters to a Young Puzzler between Margaret Farrar (1st NYT editor, then 79) to Will Shortz
  (24 years old, future 4th NYT editor); NYT Puzzle Mania, p. 4, 12/18/2016
• "An air crash occurred over Zagreb, Croatia, possibly because of... a crossword.
  A British pilot, who may have been distracted by solving a puzzle,
  wrongly flew into restricted airspace and hit another plane." ~NYT Puzzle Mania, p.11, 12/17/2017
• Spiral Puzzles. "Early in his career, the crossword editor Will Shortz found inspiration...
  in the puzzles magazines of Italy, which are known for their innovations in word puzzling.
  In Piccola Enigmistica (which loosely translates as Little Puzzledom,
  a reference to the magazine's diminutive size), he was entranced by one called
  La Doppia Rotazione (The Double Rotation). Although Shortz couldn't read Italian,
  he was mesmerized by the swirly grid and the idea that every letter appeared
  in exactly two answers, once inward and once outword.
  
  Shortz created his first Spiral, in English, for the January 1976 issue of
  Classic Crossword Puzzles magazine. Later he made Spirals for (Pencil Puzzles & Word) Games,
  where he was an editor from 1978 to 1993, and then for The Times.
  
  Before online tools were available, Shortz used rare books that list words spelled backward
  to create the puzzles. Now anyone has access to the same digital resources he does.
  These days, he reports, his biggest challenge is not repeating words from past Spirals.
  'It would be easy to get into a rut and reuse an elegant combination of interlocking words.
  Most words don't lend themselves for use in Spirals, and if they do work,
  often they force things I've used before. I'm always searching for fresh combinations.'"
  ~NYT Puzzle Mania, p. 2, Brief History of the Spiral Puzzle, 12/17/2017

1977

• Will Weng's Farewell Puzzle transcription; NYT; 2/27/1977
• Eugene Maleska: 3rd NYT crossword editor, 1977-1993
  "I'd say the wordplay in the crossword themes became more varied and sophisticated under Maleska
  — it became more a word game than in previous years. But Maleska was a staid guy —
  he had been a school superintendent in the Bronx, he loved opera and classical music and
  his puzzles had a more serious tone than Will Weng's." ~Will Shortz
• M*A*S*H: 38 Across TV series; Season 5; 1/11/1977
  Crossword blog: the best TV gags about crosswords; Guardian; 9/20/2012;
  After being stumped yet again by a crossword puzzle, Hawkeye calls in his friend Tippy Brooks,
  who is adept at crosswords, to provide the needed answer.
• Crosswords (song) (video; 3:29) by Split Enz, album Dizrythmia; MayasMix @ 38:46; lyrics:
  "I'm down, you're across / I can't seem to solve this puzzle / I turn while you toss / Crosswords puzzle me"

1978

• American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT site) started by Will Shortz
• Try/time yourself on 8 tournament puzzles! 2006: free; 2008-2018: $20/year;
  Java (< 2017), JavaScript (2018-) required; only Win/Mac currently
• Puzzle Lovers Find Their Tribe at a Crossword Tournament NYT; 3/26/2018
• A Million Little Boxes Dan Feyer; 538; 4/17/2015
• Humans of ACPT Shortz; Feyer; contestants; NYT; 4/4/2015
• ACPT 2014: On Your Marks, Get Set -- Wait! First, There's Work To Do
  how puzzles are selected for the tournament; back to Stamford from Brooklyn; NYT; 3/7/2014
• "The marketing manager of Stamford, Connecticut's newly built Marriott Hotel was exploring ways
  to bring in business during a slow winter weekend. He decided to tap into the crossword-solving community
  and was introduced to Will Shortz by Norton Rhoades, a crossword constructor. Will had recently moved to Stamford
  and was ready to take on the challenge. He organized the first American Crossword Puzzle Tournament at the hotel,
  and now, 45 years later,still directs and hosts it for hundreds of crossword-solvers across the world." ~NYT, 4/1/2022
• WordPlay movie, released in 2006, about ACPT 2005

1979

• "The puzzle with the Japanese name (Sudoku) that millions of people love to solve
  did not, in fact, originate in Japan....
  
  It was invented by an American, Howard Garns, an architect in Indianapolis,
  and first appeared in the May 1979 issue of Dell 'Pencil Puzzles & Word Games'
  magazine. It was called 'Number Place' and appeared as an occasional feature.
  
  In the early 1980s, Nobuhiko Kanamoto, the editor in chief of the Japanese puzzle
  publisher Nikoli, was visiting the United States. He picked up a copy of
  'Pencil Puzzles & Word Games', and while he couldn't solve any of the word
  puzzles, he loved Number Place. He took it back to Japan and, after fine-turning it,
  introduced it in his magazines under the name 'Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru,'
  or the 'numbers must be single.' This was later shortened to 'sudoku'.
  
  In 1997 a retired, puzzle-loving judge from New Zealand, Wayne Gould, visited Japan.
  He became entranced with Sudoku, and created a computer program for generating
  the puzzles. 'The Times of London' bought Sudoku from him in November 2004.
  That publication immediately set off a craze in Britain, which then came back
  full circle to the United States as well as spreading around the world.
  
  Howard Garns, unfortunately, died in 1989, so he did not live to see his invention
  become a global phenomenon." ~NYT Puzzle Mania, p. 4, Brief History of Sudoku, 12/17/2017
• The Puzzlemaster's Dilemma Will Shortz's crosswords are about to make him a word-nerd movie star.
  But Sudoku is making him rich; NYM; 6/19/2006
• Crossword (song) by Jethro Tull, album Stormwatch (iTunes; 3:38); MayasMix @ 00:00;
  lyrics: "Life is a clue in your crossword...Your life is a clue in the crossword."

References

• Wikipedia: 1970s
• The Decades That Invented the Future: Part 8: 1970s
  Apple II; Weapons-Grade Lasers; Pentagon Papers; Title IX; Computer Printers; Altair; Atari; Modern Sci-Fi ETs;
  Anti-Lock Braking System; Color Fine-Art Photography; Fractals; Nixon's nuclear "Project Independence"; Wired; 12/13/2012
• Paleofuture: 1970s
• 9 Inventions That You Probably Didn't Know Came from the 1970s 7/28/2019