Even then, all kinds appealed to him, and his lifelong interest in offbeat ones began. He grew up in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in a family with zero interest in puzzles. 1930 a box of Kix cereal from the 1940s with an illustrated crossword on the back and a giant copy of the 15 Puzzle, which was a national craze in 1880. On the top of the cabinet are a children’s crossword pail, c. And three, I just enjoy them.” Shortz has the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old and the acumen of a scholar-an ideal combination for a collector-and to understand his infectious passion for puzzles, you need to know its roots.Ī Gustav Stickley cabinet in Shortz’s living room displays some of his best mechanical puzzles. Two, there are treasures that should be preserved for future generations. “One, it’s practical: I’m a puzzle maker and editor and I get great ideas from these things. “There are a number of reasons for collecting,” Shortz says. It was founded and edited by ‘Remardo,’ which is an anagram of Ardmore, who was a revered puzzler.” He almost sighs as he reshelves the book. Why is this so meaningful? “It was the only weekly puzzle journal ever published,” Shortz says, “and it had the cream of the work of puzzle makers of the era. It takes less than three seconds for him to latch onto the thing that means the most to him: a stout bound volume of the collected issues of The Ardmore Puzzler, published between 18. Shortz has a rule: “Can I put my hands on it in sixty seconds?” So far, so good: he has always found what he was looking for in less than a minute. The area may look a little chaotic, but this is chaos of a highly controlled kind. There’s also the occasional cardboard box overflowing with puzzles. Two closets don’t quite edge into Collyer Brothers territory, but they’re crammed with canting stacks of magazines. Cabinet doors open to reveal drawers overflowing with small puzzles. Many are neatly shelved in bookcases that line a former bedroom that he redesigned as a space for much of his collection. He is also a world-class collector of puzzles and anything written about them, including twenty-five thousand books and magazines, in numerous languages. He owns the Westchester Table Tennis Center, which bears the slogan “Fitness for the body and mind.”) No one who has spent any time with Shortz would expect to find him playing something mindless. (In addition, he is a demon, even fanatical, table tennis athlete, who has played in clubs in thirty-nine of the fifty states and in nineteen other countries. He celebrates ingenuity and his taste is catholic: he likes puzzles that involve words or numbers or pictures, and he likes unusual items-sheet music, buckets, postcards, plates-that make reference to them. Shortz inhabits, challenges, rejoices in, and expands the universe of puzzles, from the simple-to-solve to the dazzling and all-but-undoable, from the clever to the mind-boggling. He later said SNL creator Lorne Michaels reneged on a promise to work him into the show.Covers to the sheet music of some of the dozens of crossword songs from 1924- 1925, when crosswords were at the height of their popularity. While many cast members quickly became famous, Belzer’s roles were mostly smaller cameos. In 1975, he became the warm-up comic for the newly launched SNL. He made his big-screen debut in Ken Shapiro’s 1974 film The Groove Tube, a TV satire co-starring Chevy Chase, a film that grew out of the comedy group Channel One that Belzer was a part of.īefore Saturday Night Live changed the comedy scene in New York, Belzer performed with John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray and others on the National Lampoon Radio Hour. At Catch a Rising Star, Belzer became a regular. “My kitchen was the toughest room I ever worked,” Belzer told People magazine in 1993.Īfter being expelled from Dean Junior College in Massachusetts, Belzer embarked on a life of stand-up in New York in 1972. Article contentīorn in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Belzer was drawn to comedy, he said, during an abusive childhood in which his mother would beat him and his older brother, Len. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
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