The Championship Speed Contest

Natan Last

May 24, 2024 — 2 min read

Here's another recap of the First National Cross Word Puzzle Convention of May 18, 1924, this one from the skeptics at The Boston Globe. "We vacillated," writes "Cross Ed" in the May 25th edition of the Globe, "as to whether or not we should go, until suddenly it dawned on us that here was our everlasting chance to settle that burning question over which there is so much controversy—Are Puzzlers People, or Are They Nuts?"

Those amassed evidently passed the test:

"... not a Nut could we see. To tell the truth they were the brightest looking crowd it has been our good fortune to meet for many a day. They had an alert expression, a keen, intelligent glance, and cheerfulness, contentment and self assurance radiated from them all. Especially did they express good will and expectancy as they faced the platform on which were the presiding officers and the speakers of the evening.

Ruth Hale, founder of the Lucy Stone league and feminist icon — she advocated for women to be able to legally keep their names after marriage — spoke out against bad clues, ones in which it seemed

puzzle makers look up a word in the dictionary, take the very last synonym given, look up that word and again choose the most remote meaning, perhaps even repeating the process a third time, and then gleefully put down the result, saying with vicious pride, "I guess that'll stick em!"

Then the championship puzzle, which William Stern II solved in "10 minutes 10 and two-fifths seconds," winning, of course, a coveted dictionary. The full puzzle is below.

The Second Crossword Book: "Buy it and Estrange Your Family!"

In August 1924, just four months after the publication of the book that set off the crossword craze, Richard Simon and Max Schuster were back with a new collection, dubbed The Cross Word Puzzle Book, Second Series. And unlike the first time around, when the publishers were too wary to

The Crossword Champion vs. "the Lady Wizard of the Art"

Three months after the first-ever crossword puzzle championship, held at the National Cross Word Puzzle Convention in New York on May 23, 1924, one newspaper columnist tried to stir up a good-natured rivalry between the top two competitors. As was widely reported at the time, the winner of that first

Crosswords ruined my marriage!

A common pop-cultural theme of the 1924 crossword craze was the ruinous effect of the fad on marital bliss. We've already seen a number of examples poking fun at how crosswords were affecting marriages — even purportedly leading husbands and wives to trade blows. Domestic comedies were no stranger

“We had not been a cross word puzzle fan.”

As we've discussed in these pages, crossword puzzles had been around for a decade or so by the time The Cross Word Puzzle Book was published and the hobby snowballed into a craze in 1924. The format already had fans — and indeed, some of the earliest reviews seemed

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The Second Crossword Book: "Buy it and Estrange Your Family!"

The Crossword Champion vs. "the Lady Wizard of the Art"

Crosswords ruined my marriage!

“We had not been a cross word puzzle fan.”