Cruciverbalism

{Prompt: How did you get into crosswords?}

I was first introduced to 20th-century American crossword puzzles by my grandmother, Mary Cook Atkinson Whitesell. I was very young. I was wandering around the old farmhouse where my grandmother lived. She was doing a crossword. I was curious.

But wait. You really must understand more about the farmhouse — the place where I almost always saw my grandparents. That’s how important it was.

The Farmhouse

We often went to the “mountains” in the summer. We were really going to the little town of Stanley, in the Shenandoah Valley, in Virginia, and then a little bit further, to an even smaller place, called Ida, where there was an ancient farmhouse where my grandparents stayed. It was out past the bend in Highway 340 at D-R’s Quick Stop, past the little rise in the road at Graves’ Chapel, and past the turnoff to Hawksbill Park, where the pool was fed by a fresh mountain stream and the park-swings could swing at least 10 feet high.

My grandparents, back then, were also traveling back and forth. They went from Columbia, South Carolina, where they lived during the school year, to the “mountains”, where they went to escape the heat in the summers.

Eventually my grandfather retired from his job as a chemistry professor at the University of South Carolina, and he (Willard) and his wife (Mary) moved into his parents’ house in Ida, in the rural valley beneath Hawksbill Mountain. The farm house was a part of the tapestry of the countryside. You could see its red walls and green roof as you approached on the little country road, or you could see the whole panoramic vista from the overlooks on Skyline Drive, after a visit to Skyland Lodge or Big Meadows.

Spitler Knoll Overlook on Skyline Drive, near Stanley, VA.

They lived in a two-story, barn-red-brick house, with a tin roof that was painted hunter green. There were two big trees in the front yard (sometimes covered with cicadas), and in the back there was a long sloping hill leading down to a creek. It was fenced off for cattle, although they had long since been moved off to greener pastures. Halfway down the hill, the field contained a big, red barn with deep, squishy mud on the floor, and a scattering of dusty hay in the attic.

Above the field there was a little stone spring-house with a cast iron water pump, also covered with thick layers of hunter-green paint, with a swiveling handle that could be used, with strenuous effort, to suck up water into a trough that ran down to the cow pasture. With up-and-down movement of the mechanical arms, it produced deep hydraulic moans, and then gurgling sounds, before water eventually came gushing out of the spigot.

Spring House (water pump no longer in place)

The farmhouse was built around 1830, and had no bathrooms in the original building. As a matter of fact, if we spent the night in the bedrooms, we had to choose whether to use a bedside urinal, called a “chamber pot,” or make a long solitary journey to the outhouse.

The journey to the outhouse would entail going down the wide central staircase (usually by sliding down the banister); turning left and going through the room with the fireplace and the chairs, where the old folks had their conversations; then through the long room with the very long dining room table, where we had family dinners; then through the kitchen with the antique cast iron oven, and the wash basin, and the water ladle; then through the pantry with all the mason jars of pickled and jellied concoctions; out the door and down the rickety steps of the side entrance; and down the path that ran through the grape arbor, which had the sweet smell of crushed grapes on the flagstones. Finally you would arrive at the rustic wooden outhouse where fetid smells arose from the hole in the wooden toilet seat. Its door was secured by a swiveling wooden latch.

There may have been another bathroom in the farm house, when modern plumbing was installed, but I only remember the journey to the outhouse.

The Outhouse at “The Farm”*

The original house was a wonderful place to explore, and we did explore it, from the basement to the attic. We found the remnants of the slave quarters in the basement, though we didn’t know what they were, at the time. And we found all kinds of childhood goodies in the attic: vintage Batman figures, Wizard of Oz books with weak spines and profuse illustrations, and sliding wooden-lettered spelling toys. We sometimes rang the big farm bell on the back porch, and sometimes we ventured into the wood shed, where Granddaddy built his wooden frames, and stools, and miniature windmills.

The Reading Room

On one particular day, I found myself wandering through the house on my own. It must have been in the afternoon, when most of us were napping or trying to find a place to escape the heat of the summer sun. I found my grandmother idling, her feet curled up on a sofa, in a den filled with books and knickknacks.

It was a shady little parlor that had been built off to the side of the room with the dinner table — a place for a little privacy. She was doing something with a newspaper and a pencil, and it seemed to have her deep in thought. So naturally, I interrupted her, and asked her what she was doing.

Very kindly she put down her paper and pencil, and she showed me how someone had cleverly constructed a puzzle. It had two sets of clues (and two sets of answers), half of them running “across” horizontally, and half of them running “down” vertically. Every space in the puzzle was to be filled with a letter; and every space in the puzzle had two words passing through it, with two corresponding clues. It was a crossword puzzle.

And then she told me how the words in the puzzle were not ordinary words. Many of the words had an equal number of vowels and consonants. As a matter of fact, many of the words started with vowels — quite a lot more than you would ordinarily find in something like a storybook.

In addition, many of the words were relatively obscure: the name of a river that ran through a European valley, the name of a character from a Shakespearean play or a Wagnerian opera, or a portion of a Latin phrase from the legal profession.

There was no chance of my solving the puzzle that she was working; or even solving a single clue. After all, I was only five or six. She was seventy or seventy-one. She read newspapers. She knew how to solve crossword puzzles. Nevertheless, I became interested in her pastime. She seemed to enjoy solving crossword puzzles, and she was glad to pass along some secrets to its construction and its unique collection of words and clues.

That was when I first became interested in crosswords.

Grandma in a mock-serious pose

Duke Hospital South

Years later, I found myself in another dimly lit room on a regular basis. It was Page Auditorium, the medical school auditorium, deep within the wood-paneled halls of the historic Davison Building — Duke University’s South Hospital. In the first year of medical school, before clinical rotations began, we spent hours and hours in the lecture hall auditorium, in mildly uncomfortable cushioned seats, each with an oddly shaped writing surface, that could be pulled up from the armrest on one side and locked into place.

A typical auditorium desk chair.

A spiral bound notebook, or a binder with sheets of paper, could be placed on the makeshift desk, and used for recording the details of each and every lecture — each talk describing some vital but incredibly detailed and boring concept in biochemistry, physiology, microbiology, pharmacology, immunology, histology, or pathology.

Lecture notes were incredibly important, because the tests were based on the oral lecture material, not necessarily on text in the textbook. And so, medical students banded together to create lecture notes — detailed notes on the lecture material. In a sort of co-op, fifteen or twenty students would share the work, each one taking notes on a particular day. Before the exam, the notes would be organized into a packet, and copies would be distributed to each member of the study group. This way, each student could focus on a particular lecture, taking notes that would be more complete and more legible than normal.

The notes produced by this communal arrangement were invariably better than any notes an individual would normally take. They were certainly better than any of my abbreviated, hand-scrawled scribblings. The best notes of a given lecture even summarized the didactic material, and highlighted the most important concepts for the group.

The reason I’m describing this note-taking system in such painstaking detail is to point out that (even though the material was complex and necessary) our full attention was only required once every week or two, on our assigned note-taking day. On all the other days, our minds were free to focus on the speaker or wander off into space, all according to our level of interest or disinterest. We could use the time as we pleased, just so long as we studiously reviewed the compiled notes and understood the material before the test was given.

Many days I found myself browsing a copy of the Duke Chronicle, the student newspaper. And each copy of the Chronicle contained a crossword puzzle. It wasn’t long before I found myself working the daily puzzle during class.

I would go into the lecture hall. I would sit two or three rows from the back. I would listen to the lecturer for 5 to 10 minutes, and I would size up their oratorical skills. If they could be heard and understood, and the topic was halfway interesting, I might wait another 5 to 10 minutes before working the crossword. If their microphone was ill-placed, or their speech was unintelligible, or if they were meandering and incoherent, I would go to the crossword clues without delay.

Solving a puzzle in ink.

Cruciverbalism

Over time, crosswords became a pleasant pastime — something to do while waiting in line, or while traveling, not just an escape from a world of exhaustive learning.

I became more adept at crossword solving. I stopped putting uncertain answers in the “fill.”. And I knew more of the crossword vernacular, so I routinely did the crosswords in ink. I would rarely look up an answer, mostly because, at that time, looking it up would have required an encyclopedia. It was simpler to ask others for help, but I needed help less and less. Sometimes, I would put the puzzle away for a while, and try to figure out the unfilled portions later. You’d be surprised how often that works.

For a while, I felt like it was “cheating” to look up an answer (and it became easy to look up answers in the age of the internet). But you won’t ever learn anything new, if you never look up the unknown answers. Over time, I’ve become less strict in that regard. The reality is that Friday and Saturday puzzles are so hard… the clues so obscure… that it only makes sense to look up the answers that are not part of my cultural zeitgeist.

Over time, the nature of the crosswords themselves also evolved. The current NY Times crossword puzzle editor has allowed more-than-one word answers to populate puzzles. That in turn has allowed for more recognizable answers to replace the really obscure foreign words and names of the past.

There are also other answers allowed now, that would have been unacceptable in the past: messaging abbreviations, slang, and informal (mis-spelled) words, for example. Even “rebuses” are allowed, meaning that a full word could be allocated to a single square. Puns and wordplay have become common.

In some ways, the earlier era, when I was discreetly solving crosswords during medical school, was more difficult than the solving required today. Clues and answers were more difficult, and I had a smaller cache of accumulated crossword knowledge and solving experience.

But neither era compares to the solving skills that my grandmother had to master. All the answers were real words (or names) and if the word fill required the answer to be a Russian mountain range, such as the “Urals”… or the opera character, “Aida”… or the phrase, “Caveat Emptor”… you just had to know it. I don’t know how she did it.

Rivers of particular significance to crossword solvers.

*Addendum: The Locust Grove Farmhouse

Today the property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as NRHP reference # 15000879. They say, “Locust Grove, constructed ca. 1830, is located in eastern Page County, approximately 7 miles southeast of Luray on 2.69 acres of land and situated on a slight knoll off Route 629 (Ida Road). The parcel includes a two-story, five-bay brick Federal style dwelling with a one-story service wing off the south elevation….”

It was formerly known as the Old Jacob Brubaker House.

We just called it “The Farm”.

Locust Grove house - Page County

Willard and Mary Whitesell - circa 1986.