His mother was a pious Catholic housewife his father, a prizefighter and train conductor. He grew up in the 1920s, the only child of immigrant parents in a Jersey City row-house neighborhood. "How's by you?"\nIt's hard to say how he got like this. He pulled a card and read with a completely straight face, "Louisiana waterway named after the inventor of the sewing machine." My mother, a seamstress, went right for it: "Howe's Bayou!" "Fine." My father could hardly contain himself. ![]() Silly rhymes and word gags seemed to pop out of him before even he knew what he was going to say.\nThe way our family remembered the order of the two Cape Cod Canal bridges was, I imagine, unique: "First you're Bourne, and then you Sagamore."\nHe once suggested that my brother handle a bully by puffing up his chest and announcing, "If you come near me, I'll expectorate in your countenance."\nAnd one of his real coups occurred while playing Jeopardy. But I realize now he was systematically flipping through whole mental dictionaries, categorized by word length, vowel placement and so forth, before venturing his response.\nHis wordplay went well beyond structured games. That's a long boring stretch for a 12-year-old in the back seat keeping score. My parents could play with seven- and eight-letter words, jumbled in random letter order.\nMy father might take 10 minutes to make a guess. Helplessly, he would manipulate every sesquipedalian word he encountered until he had wrung all possible combinations out of it.\nOn any long car trip, he would invariably pipe up, "Anyone for Scribble?" (A word game much like Jotto.) It is a challenge for most people to mentally hold onto five- or six-letter words when they play this game - and even then, only if the order of the letters in the guessed words matches that of the targeted word. (Mercifully, my mother was a Latin scholar and an English teacher, so she thought this was fun, too.) Anagrams were almost an obsession. ![]() My parents actually spent a good part of their honeymoon playing Scrabble. Right."\nHe was an irrepressible gamester. And for my wedding, he wrote a 100-line poem, a kind of blessing in doggerel, chronicling the new relationship with memorable lines like: "Nathan asked,`May I toast you with espresso?'/She blushed and said,`Well, I guess so.'/He talked of British naval history,/Which to her had been a total mystery./She thought, This man is erudite /I wonder if he's Mr. Christmas gifts came with long, clever tags - riddles in rhyming couplets that often overshadowed the gifts. 1 Across was "Most beautiful girl on campus."\nWhen my brother and I were at camp, he sent us cryptograms. He met my mother when they were freshmen at Montclair State Teachers College and wooed her with one of his first puzzles. ![]() All his life, my father quite literally sent cryptic messages. ![]() 3, 1993.\nI was, in a sense, merely carrying on a family tradition. 1 and 2 Across: "World's best dad." The answers were six and seven letters respectively: Eugene Maleska, of course, who was the New York Times crossword-puzzle editor from 1977 until he died on Aug. But my dad had taught me well, and I knew that he would be proud to see that I had fit a good 20 percent of the words into the theme, that I had had to resort to only two instances of crosswordese and that my diagram did not have more than 38 black squares.\nAnd how could he not be pleased by the definition of Nos. And it took a bit of nerve.\nImagine Irving Berlin's daughter writing him a song. It took a week of nonstop work to construct it. This summer, the 10th anniversary of his death at age 77, has me thinking about that puzzle again. For my father's 70th birthday, I gave him a crossword puzzle.
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