Talk:Eugene T. Maleska

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EUGENE T MALESKA 06 Jan 1916 03 Aug 1993 02571 (Wareham, Plymouth, MA) (none specified) 158-16-1562 New Jersey

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Eugene T. Maleska, Crossword Editor, Dies at 77


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Article Tools Sponsored By By JAMES BARRON Published: August 5, 1993

Eugene T. Maleska, who kept sharp-penciled readers hopscotching down and across as the crossword puzzle editor of The New York Times, died on Tuesday at his home in Daytona Beach, Fla. He was 77 years old and also had a home in Wareham, Mass.

He died of throat cancer, said his wife, Carol Atkinson-Maleska.

As the crossword editor, he chose 7,000 puzzles for the daily paper and The New York Times Magazine, sifting each year through more than 2.8 million clues that often jump-started readers' minds faster than their morning coffee. President Clinton, the subject of a puzzle in the magazine the weekend before his inauguration, said that he finished it, in ink, "between spurts of speechwriting," correctly answering clues like No. 24 across, "campaigner Clinton, tunefully" ("Arkansas Traveler").

Mr. Maleska combined a clue maker's exactitude with a puckishness that was apparent in puzzles like one titled "Strip Tees." It had nothing to do with the buff or the rough, but with dropping the 20th letter of the alphabet. The answer to "Tim's tune" was "ipoehroughheulips" ("Tiptoe Through the Tulips") and to "nondrinker" was "eeoaler." A Puzzle Lover's Lover

The Times editorship was Mr. Maleska's second career -- he was an English teacher and public-school administrator for more than 30 years before he became the crossword editor. But by the time he was appointed in 1977 to succeed Will Weng, his name was already familiar to puzzle fans: The Times had published dozens of crosswords that he had submitted as a freelance contributor.

Mr. Weng died in May at the age of 86.

Mr. Maleska constructed his first puzzle in 1933, when he was an undergraduate at Montclair State College in Montclair, N.J. The clue for 1 across was "most beautiful girl on campus." The answer was "Jean," for the classmate he was dating and eventually married.

Soon Mr. Maleska was trying to make extra money by selling puzzles to crossword magazines. The going rate was $1.50 a puzzle.

"But my real goal," he wrote in "Crosstalk," a collection of letters from Times readers that has not yet been published, "was to crash the gates of The New York Herald Tribune." He finally did, in 1940, two years before The Times started publishing puzzles. Later he was told that The Tribune had suspected he was cribbing others' clues; the first 40 puzzles he had handed in -- all of which had been turned down -- had seemed too well-crafted. Cryptic Innovations

In the 1950's he dreamed up such maddening, mind-twisting puzzle innovations as the Stepquote (in which key words, laid out on the puzzle grid like a staircase, formed a quotation), the Diagonogram and the Cryptoquote. He submitted the first puzzle The Times published with a multiple-word answer ("hardshell crab").

As the crossword editor, he made the puzzles harder as the week went on. And he heard from dictionary-wielding readers when an occasional mistake slipped by.

"I may have a Polish name, but unlike Pope John Paul II, I cannot claim any kind of infallibility," he said in 1987. "Every day, I learn something new from thousands of solvers who know their onions, their geography, their foreign languages, sports, literature, mathematics, stage lore, music, mythology, etc., etc."

He said he had learned the hard way that Bambi is a stag, not a doe, that citizens' band radio buffs are not hams, that frets are not violin attachments, that dodecahedrons have 12 faces, not sides, that "Et tu, Brute?" were Caesar's penultimate words, not his last ones, and that the sound of a tuba is oom, not oom-pah-pah.

He also edited crossword puzzle books for Pocket Books and Simon and Schuster, and wrote "Across and Down: Inside the Crossword Puzzle World," about his experiences, and "A Pleasure in Words." Long Career as Educator

Born on Jan. 6, 1916, in Jersey City, he received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Montclair State and began his career teaching Latin and English at a junior high school in Palisades Park, N.J. He moved to Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Manhattan in 1940 as an English teacher. He began his climb up the administrative ladder in 1946, becoming an assistant to the principal at P.S. 169, then principal at P.S. 192 in the early 1950's. After time off for a year at Harvard, where he earned a doctorate in education, he was the principal at J.H.S. 164 from 1955 to 1958.

His next assignment was to coordinate teacher recruitment throughout the city.

From 1962 to 1967, he was an assistant superintendent of schools in District 8 in the Bronx. He spent three years as associate director of the Center for Urban Education before returning as the superintendent of District 8. He was the only person to have a New York City public school named for him during his lifetime -- Intermediate School 174 in the Bronx, dedicated in 1973, the year he retired as superintendent.

Jean Maleska died in 1983. Besides his wife, Carol, he is survived by a daughter, Merryl Maleska Wilbur of Newburyport, Mass.; a son, Gary of Sheldon, Vt.; two stepdaughters, Ardith Wells of Issaquah, Wash., and Alicia Lester of Daytona Beach; a stepson, Arthur Atkinson of New York, and four grandchildren. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk • contribs) 20:58, 9 January 2007 (UTC).