the death of 95-year-old puzzle genius Martin Gardner earlier in the year, last month brought the passing of Frank W. Lewis, the World War II cryptanalyst who followed up his wartime exploits with a whopping 62 years as the puzzlemaker at The Nation. He died Nov. 18 at the age of 98.

Lewis had the kind of career puzzlemakers dream about. In a dead-end job in the Civil Service in 1939, he complained to the personnel department that the job didn’t challenge him. The next day he found himself facing a battery of questions: did he (a) play bridge, (b) play chess, (c) solve crosswords, (d) like problem-solving, (e) want to go to the Munitions Building and meet someone named Col. William Friedman? After affirmatively answering these questions, he went to work for Col. Friedman, one of the century’s greatest cryptanalysts.

“He worked for the War Department, and this was the days before computers,” said Judith Long, Lewis’s editor at The Nation for 28 years. “They put these wacky oddballs in a room and gave them the codes to crack. He’ll say — or he used to say — ‘We didn’t know that this was impossible so we just went ahead and solved them.’ His greatest accomplishment was that he broke the Japanese shipping code. Because of knowing this, the war was greatly shortened.”

Lewis served in the War Department (later the Defense Department) for 30 years, gaining the Exceptional Civilian Service, the Outstanding Civilian Service, and Bletchley Parks Service medals.

But he is better known for his highly public sidelight. In 1947, The Nation had a sudden need for a cryptic crossword setter, as their original creator, Jack Barrett, had died suddenly. A fan of British-style cryptics from his days in England, Lewis viewed Barrett’s puzzles as the only ones worth solving in the United States. So he entered a competition to replace Barrett, pitting himself against a mysterious opponent named “Mr. X.” Per the magazine’s report, “in the opinion of three-fifths of our readers, (Lewis) attained a technique and flavor approximate to the master’s.” Starting with his first puzzle on October 18, 1947 (reprinted here, courtesy of The Nation), he rewarded the voters for more than six decades, until his retirement last year.

If you’d like help figuring out what’s going on in this puzzle, read Lewis’s genteel guide to solving cryptics. There are lots more of Lewis’s cryptics on The Nation’s site.

Authors: Mike Selinker

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