1922: The Year In Crosswords (1 of 3)

A piercing wit.

You’ve seen the romcom tropes before. She’s a modern, independent woman, and she’s doing fine on her own, thanks! Nothing missing in her life, no matter what her friends say! Then he walks into it—and she finds him infuriating.

At first.

Margaret Petherbridge, later Margaret Farrar, is a legendary editor. Without her, the crossword might today be a niche product or dead of neglect. But in the 1920s, Petherbridge was first to admit—she only became her most fulfilled self because a certain pest kept walking through her door.

Franklin Pierce Adams, F.P.A. to his fans, was a humorist-poet-columnist, sometimes called the father of the modern newspaper column. His “The Conning Tower” included humorous verse, parodies, and contemporary satire, his own and other writers’, all tied together by his snarky sensibility. He thought the cross-word was a wondrous invention—or could be, if anyone cared to comb the damn mistakes out of it.

Irritating though Petherbridge found F.P.A., smarts recognize smarts: he was no “crank.” Their conversations changed her mind—and her life. In The Cross Word Puzzle Book, she’d write:

When I was first made unwilling Cross Word Puzzle Editor some two years ago, the procedure in deciding what puzzle would be run was limited to picking out a good-looking one from among the bunch and sending it upstairs to be set. I saw no reason to change this splendid system. At that time, I had never taken the trouble to do a puzzle, and the letters of anathema and condemnation that came in by the dozens had small effect on my conscience. They were evidently from cranks and couldn’t be avoided.

I must admit that the dawning of conscience began with the arrival of F.P.A., who came to work in the next room. When he discovered I was responsible for the cross words, he formed the atrocious habit of stalking in every Monday morning bright and early (about eleven o’clock) to point out in sarcastic tones just what was wrong with yesterday’s. Well, to make a long story short, in order to avoid the moronish feeling that usually followed such a lecture, I decided to reform and find out what a really decent puzzle was like.

I began by trying to do one the next Sunday, and thus experienced the throes of acute agony that come to all solvers of puzzles on discovering definitions left out, numbers wrong, hideously warped definitions, words not to be found inside of any known dictionary, foreign words—very foreign—and words that had no right to be dragged out of their native obscurity. Then and there, with my left hand reposing on a dictionary and my right raised in air, I took an oath to edit the cross words to the essence of perfection. From then on, I instituted the procedure of doing the puzzles myself on the page proof—sort of trying it on the dog—applying the principle,

“If it be not fair to me,
What care I how fair it be!”

This account crackles with Petherbridge’s wit and modesty, but there’s reason to trust it. The timeline lines up. F.P.A. joined the World staff in early 1922, and “The Conning Tower” lost little time putting out its first crossword mention in February:

I got the blues, I said the blues, I got the Cross-Word Puzzle Blues;
I had no trouble with things like "moccasin-like shoes."
But until I find out what the right letter word is for a crystalline compound formed by the action of iodine on alcohol and potash,
I’ll have the blues, I reaffirm the blues, I’ll have the Cross-Word Puzzle Blues.

He later published this contributor’s poem:

My husband asks that I shall make
A poem using just the same
Amount of energy I take
To solve the Cross-Word puzzle game.
Betsey D.

Soon, F.P.A.’s needling got more affectionate. In his ongoing observational comedy “The Diary of Samuel Pepys,” “Samuel” solves many a puzzle, often to his wife’s consternation:

Late up, and felt low-spirited, so to solve the Cross-Word Puzzle, which I did in less time than half an hour, which restored my confidence, till I said to myself, Bring on your problems. And that, methought, is why these puzzles are so popular, as the ability to solve them is mistaken by the solvers for intelligence. Lord, for a few minutes after I solve a puzzle, I am as vain as any peacock and strut about my house till my wife takes my vanity away by calling me silly or some such thing. But she away this day, so my inflation endured for an hour.

F.P.A. made many more crossword mentions in 1922 alone—despite a busy schedule. That same year, he opened a one-act Broadway play (for one night only) and did a co-publishing project with Dorothy Parker.

Parker was one of several renowned authors (male and female) who got their start in “The Conning Tower”: she later quipped that F.P.A. “raised me from a couplet.” As a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a New York creative community, F.P.A. supported good work where he saw it. And once motivated, Petherbridge was damn good.

Next: Petherbridge’s real first year on the job.