The day started with a reporter arriving from the Newton
Tab. He'd heard that there was some
kind of time capsule in the basement of the Metcalf house and a party of hearty
souls was quickly dispatched to see if he was right. In short order, the party returned victorious and the capsule was
opened to reveal - a number of products that were introduced back in 1903 (e.g.
Sanka coffee, Hershey’s chocolate, Crayola crayons, a license plate and
others). This introduced the theme of this
year's hunt, the celebration of a number of 100th anniversaries.
The capsule also contained multiple copies of the Newton
Graphic vol.32, dated 1903, which contained information on the births, deaths,
and other significant events of the year 1903.
Some of these would figure in the puzzles to come. On the back page there was the cryptic
crossword that kicked off this year's hunt.
A nice touch, the solution to last year's crossword was provided.
The cryptic crossword solution involved a number of words
where the definition clued one word and the wordplay clued the other. These
words were related because an ALL got turned into a ONE or vice versa. Only the word clued by the wordplay went in
the grid - a significant difference with regard to crossing words. So both cALLy and cONEy answered 2 down and
both gALL and gONE answered 18 across.
From this the solvers were supposed to get the expression "one for
all and all for one" and think of the Three Musketeers. Shaded boxes spelled out 'video', 'candy'
and 'book' and, sure enough, all three types of Three Musketeers were found -
the chocolate in the kitchen and the movie starring John Wayne!
This
divided the group into the red, green, and blue teams.
Meanwhile, a smaller group was solving a hints puzzle. They'd been given a number of pictures (Mrs.
White from the game of Clue, a St. Louis Blues hockey player, the logo of the
Cincinnati Reds, a movie poster from “A Clockwork Orange” - all colors), a
number of verbal clues involving directions (Hitchcock movie is North by
Northwest), and a series of clues providing more colors (Earl who is steeped =
grey). They were also given a set of
K'nex.
The first color represented the hubs in the K'nex. The orientation was the direction a
connecting rod was supposed to go. The
other color was the color of the connecting rod to use in that direction. The color rod clues were each repeated twice
and this clued the solvers into the idea that the same connecting rod needed to
go between two particular hubs.
Connecting things quickly became three-dimensional, but
soon settled down into a 2-D image of the side of a cabinet that could be found
in the living room.
The red, green and blue teams then got a series of four
puzzles which were presented in differing orders for each team. One such order is repeated here.
The first of these puzzles was an odd man out. Each of the eight solvers got a different
set of puzzles, but it turned out most were repeated from sheet to sheet. A couple of quick examples: fools, mad, and
night are all a kind of cap; handy becomes handicap - the spelling changes so
it is the odd man out. Bryant, Greg,
and Stearns all have Bear as part of their names, while Kollek is a Teddy. Did you know the Teddy Bear was invented in
1903?
Each odd man out solved resulted in a letter, which when
read on the sheets gave a series of names.
It was quickly noticed that Rick was a Monday, Weld was a Tuesday,
Addams was a Wednesday and so on.
Another set of names gave months of the year (e.g. June Lockhart). On all of the sheets only two of the clues
were bolded. These pointed to Tuesday
and July, prompting the solvers to go seek out a calendar.
True to form, the first one found had only one Tuesday in
July with a note written on it in the appropriate (team) color. But someone
had taken the time to fill every single date of the calendar with notes for the
entire year! Yikes.
The next puzzle was my favorite of the day. It was an acrostic where many of the words
just didn't seem to fit. Clue M referred
to a chapter title in a W. E. B. DuBois book conveniently found in the
foyer. But "of our spiritual"
didn't fit into eleven spaces. It took
quite a while to notice it was really "o FOUR spiritual,” at least in the
puzzle creator's fevered brain and he wanted us to put the actual 4 into the
acrostic!
The last line of the acrostic provided a FORMULA of all
things. When solved, this provided the
number “1984,” a book whose author was born in 1903, and the place we'd find
our next puzzle.
One note, the designer took Hirschfeld one better and hid
his son's, Teddy's, name in the acrostic clues.
The next puzzle consisted of nine license plates. License plates were first issued in
Massachusetts, in 1903. Each plate had
letters and an expiration date, for example, KGV 312 May. The solvers had to
figure out that they had to build a word with the letters KGV in order -
Thanksgiving - and then pull out the third, first, and second letter. The concept was straightforward, but coming
up with words like extravehicular and cantankerous was not.
Once all the words were solved, the month stickers (the
"May") prompted them to put the letters into a certain order and to
go find a cauliflower in the cellar for the next puzzle.
The final puzzle in the first set was a machine built
with twelve vacuum tube sockets. Vacuum
tubes also were invented in 1903. The
sockets were labeled with the musical scale (A, C#, G) for the last group,
although earlier groups may not have had this clue, and a note told the solvers
the second letter was important. A
"circuit" was drawn on the machine and a switch and light bulb
promised illumination if the puzzle was solved correctly. But that was a red herring.
The
solvers figured out the circuit drawn on the machine would spell something out
with the second letters. They didn't do
as well listening to the notes the tubes made when tapped to decide where they
should go in the circuit. With three different
sizes, only the four tubes of each particular size needed to be compared, but
the solver's ears weren't turned very well.
Instead of BLUE TUTU BY TV, they got something about tubas in the tub.
The anagrammers in the group wound up taking the second
letters and solving the puzzle without the correct arrangement. Sigh.
The Merge puzzle was devious word play at its
finest. Two columns of
titles/songs/proverbs/whatnot were each labeled with the letters a through
z. The solvers in our group sat and
stared at the choices for quite a while without the slightest idea of what to
do. Finally one person noticed
"Ticket to Ride" might go with "On the Road". Quickly all 26 pairs of ring-rung,
steel-stole, win-one were found.
The solvers noticed that homonyms had been used but
didn't know what to do with them. They
finally resorted to the clues to see that only five pairs had BOTH sides
replaced with homonyms. Those ten
letters formed an anagram that spelled PITTSBURGH, RIGHT FIELD, and BIRTH PLACE
for the three groups.
Conveniently, a baseball encyclopedia provided the
birthplace of the person who played right field for the 1903 Pittsburgh Pirates
(The NL representative in the first World Series, in 1903). The birthplace was
Liberty, PA, which led to a video containing three
Liberty movies, including "Cinderella Liberty" and
"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
A World Series logic puzzle was next and mostly solved by
the baseball aficionados in the group while dinners were fetched and
prepared. The five fans in the puzzle
were each born in a year their team won the pennant and various data about the
fans led to the solution that a particular fan followed the St. Louis
Cardinals.
But a cardinal in the room for totally different reasons
almost led the solvers to the wrong clue.
Fortunately, they were intercepted before harm could be done and then
figured out they needed to find some St. Louis cards. Two decks of cards with the arch on their back were quickly
discovered.
The two decks split the party into
the yellow and purple groups. One deck was missing the king
and queen of hearts, leading to a wedding picture of David and Shari; the other was missing five spades, leading
to one of the toilets ("flush"). Again, the puzzles were in a different order
for the two groups and one of the orders is presented here.
The first puzzle was a set of 52 license plate images
with the state names removed. The
solvers quickly discovered an Isla del Encanto (Puerto Rico) and "BRIBE
ME$" (District of Columbia). They
correctly figured that all fifty states would be represented as well.
Also provided with the plate images was an acrostic-type
page with the markings NY3, KY6, MA2.
Once the solvers had discovered the New York plate, the second letter of
that plate was used to spell out a message in the acrostic. The group had to work back and forth to make
sure their guesses about which plate was which were correct.
The puzzle creator was mean however - the first line of
the acrostic started with "Hiltl Vegi." The solvers looked at L-T-L-V and were sure something had to be wrong.
(Hiltl Vegi is the oldest vegetarian restaurant in Europe, established
in 1903). The acrostic told them to
look up the symbol of the nation spelled with the missing letters. Only U and K were unused on the 52 plates,
and looking up English Bulldog in the dictionary got them the next clue.
A page of cryptic music titles appeared next. "Buffalo once roamed, while deer and
antelope played, in state where Stephen Foster lived; nowadays, horses rule the
roost" was supposed to get the solvers two overlapping song titles. Those titles, "My Old Kentucky Home
" and "Home on the Range" contained a common, overlapping word,
in this case, home. A number at the end
of the clue pointed to a particular letter, in this case the "O,” that was
used to spell out a solution.
In one room, the solution,
"Prince dreams of wet drops in dark color" was
a final overlapping song title, "Deep Purple/Purple Rain", so the word
in common was purple. The purple team
had something like "What color would
Donovan paint a U-boat?"
This answer was "Mellow Yellow/Yellow Submarine".
So the purple team's location was the yellow
room, and vice versa. Both envelopes were in plain site in the proper rooms.
The final puzzle of the second set was a lot of fun. The solvers were given an map and told they
needed to look up the locations of places in the map. But it wouldn't be that easy.
The map holder, with map was sent into a 2nd
floor closet. With him, another person
wielding a flashlight helped him in his search. These people could hear another team member in the bedroom
outside their door, who told them what places to look up. That person could see, but not hear, a
person at the top of the stairs, who in turn could see, but not hear a person
at the foot of the stairs, who in turn could see, but not hear, the rest of the
team in the team's home base.
The home group told one of their members what place to
look up and a chain of charades got that information to the second floor
bedroom, where the place was verbally relayed to the searchers in the
closet. Once the atlas had been used, a
baby monitor allowed the people in
the team base to hear what had been found.
The place names came off a set of streamers hanging from
the ceiling. There were about 50
streamers, but only 10 place names to charade.
Each streamer contained something cryptic like "Marble to Rabbit
Ears Pass." When both hamlets were
found and plotted on the map, the orientation of the path from Marble to Rabbit
Ears Pass was noted and that streamer was aligned in that orientation on the
ceiling.
Words were spelled out.
In one group LONDON’S CALL pointed to “Call of the Wild,” Jack London’s
famous book, written in 1903. In the
other room LANCE and EDDY appeared.
Unfortunately, no one in the group knew the slightest thing about the
Tour de France, started in 1903, and didn't recognize the only two 5-time
winners to get the next clue, even with the hints. Fortunately, the puzzle designer was available to guide them.
The second merge was a coloring challenge (Crayola
Crayons came out in 1903). The solvers
were given a number of words and names related to 1903 and written in crayon
colors (Ford was black, World Series was white), and a series of
questions. The questions were all
answerable in some way that connected to those colors. Question 1 - Commissioner of baseball
1951-1965 was Ford Frick, hence Ford, or black. A drawing with areas marked with numbers needed to be crayoned
in. The area marked with the number 1
became black.
Two pictures resulted.
The first had a chess KING, an arrow pointing to a KNEE, and a
KANGAROO. The second group had a
RACCOON, a RADIO and a RAINBOW. The
solvers noticed the leading K and R. Eventually someone thought of chemical
elements. K is potassium, but there is no R. However (after the composer said
they were on the right track), it was pointed out that there is a Kr - Krypton.
Maybe there was a Kryptonite lock on one of the bicycles in the basement. Sure
enough, and it was being used to lock a puzzle.
Unfortunately,
Krypton was discovered in 1898; drats!
The
combination--1903--was guessed quickly and the puzzle was read: "
In the living room the teddy bears have a question for you."
Several teddy bears and other
stuffed animals were
sitting on the living room couch... Someone quickly thought that the bears
represented letters and that the non-bears were spaces. But that would make the word lengths 1 1 4 2
3 3, which was impossible. Eventually,
however, the composer confirmed that this was a proper interpretation. Hmm.
Eventually, in a flash of inspiration one of the solvers realized that
the pattern of the last four words could be "…what do you see?" There's a book called "Brown Bear,
Brown Bear, what do you see?" but that's too many letters. Wait!
The first two bears are both brown, and they're the only brown ones on
the couch—they represent themselves.
Someone quickly went to retrieve the book and
got the answer: "I see a red bird looking at me." We saw a red bird in a tree nearby. It was holding a note telling us to look in
a box at the foot of the tree.
The final prize was ice cream cones – invented in 1903
and made popular at
the St. Louis World’s Fair the following year.
One
additional note: this year’s hunt was
dedicated to the memory of Al Hirschfeld, 1903-2003, noted for concealing the
name of his daughter, Nina, in his caricatures. In his honor, some of the puzzles had Ninas hidden. In actuality, this paragraph is an example. Hirschfeld tributes also were contained in the welcome letter as well as many of the puzzles: the cryptic, the acrostic,
the license plate images, and the music puzzle included some 1903-centered clues. For
example, the first overlapping song title -- at least
for the purple team -- was "Ain't She
Sweet Adeline"; Sweet Adeline was published in 1903.