55 Down: Jacob’s twin (four letters) One of four missing clues, Tuesday crossword.
Serious journalists won’t like to hear this, but we’ll say it anyway. Sure, readers buy The Star for news of malfeasance in high office or intrigue in the Blue Jays’ front office.
But many customers are truly content only when they’ve hunkered down for a few minutes with their morning crossword.
It’s a handy way of confirming that all neurological systems are functional on the day in question. Or not.
As one Star reader, age 85, remarked the other day, “I may be an old dame, but the crossword proves I’m still sharp.”
Editors are busy people. They can be forgiven for getting priorities wrong sometimes, or temporarily losing sight of why people buy papers.
But one Iron Law of Newspapering is clear: Don’t mess with the Crosswords. Ever.
Regrettably, editors here have been learning (to their horror) what happens when a clue or two is dropped, an answer misspelled, a clue number messed up, or the solution to the wrong puzzle printed.
All those things have happened lately. This usually causes the switchboard to light up, warble or do whatever it is that modern switchboards do.
Scores of unhappy readers (but invariably polite, because crossword doers are a gentle bunch) signalled displeasure Tuesday when four clues went missing.”You’ve ruined my day,” puzzlers said, in many ways.
By mail, Len Aluton of Oakville advised: “You should know by now that I’ve already pulled out most of my hair fretting over these puzzles. Please don’t make them any harder by omitting clues.”
Around 10:30 a.m. after he’d been out to buy food for his cat, retired police reporter Jocko Thomas was on the phone, pointing out The Problem.
Jocko didn’t know how there could be so many mistakes lately. “Doesn’t anyone do the puzzle before it’s printed?” he asked. Good question.
When Jocko was an office boy at The Star around 1930, it was his job to check the crossword before publication. (Also, in deference to teetotalling publisher Joseph E. Atkinson, it was also Jocko’s job to kill off any Mutt And Jeff comics in which the two leading characters were shown in a bar guzzling alcoholic beverages.)
Jocko took the task seriously. “I didn’t want to get fired,” he explained. And he never was.
Managing editor Mary Deanne Shears was busy Tuesday dealing with the fact that the U.S. military had unceremoniously bounced (freed?) snoopy Star reporter Mitch Potter from his tent at the Kandahar air base in Afghanistan.
But in short order, Shears made arrangements to designate a person to do Jocko’s old puzzle-checking chore. Left unanswered was the larger question: Why so many boo-boos? This isn’t rocket surgery.
An apologetic Carmen Puello, customer service manager for United Media, in New York, had the answer.
The puzzle, known as Today’s Crossword Puzzle, is produced for United Media by one Daniel Starks, with the aid of computer wizardry.
But we all need an editor. As Puello explained, four editors and 11 other workers at United Media were laid off in a recent “restructuring” at the Scripps-Howard-owned syndicate. “Normally, two people look at every puzzle,” she explained.
But for two weeks, nobody did.
Result: 150 U.S. papers and about 40 Star Syndicate clients in Canada got flawed daily crosswords. “We apologize,” Puello said.
No problem. Now, can we all do the crossword in 15 minutes or less?
