Nothing Puzzling About This Enormous Crossword: Carleton class shares 5,156 words after 50 years
Fred Ohles ’75 set out to put the name of everyone who started at Carleton with him into one enormous crossword for his class’s 50th Reunion.
Four years ago, one member of the Carleton Class of 1975 decided to make a giant puzzle for his class’s 50th Reunion.
Fred Ohles ’75 set out to put the name of everyone who started at Carleton in the fall of 1971 into one enormous crossword — though he soon realized that he would have to limit his opus to last names, and he would have to divide his puzzle into a number of separate grids.
Ohles is an accomplished cruciverbalist (aka maker of crosswords), with puzzles published in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and dozens of newspapers that use the syndicated Universal Crossword, including The Minnesota Star Tribune. His weekly, Nebraska-themed puzzle has appeared in the Lincoln Journal Star since 2021.
Ohles needed to go big — really big — to fit into his puzzle all of the 496 last names that appeared in the 1971 collection of first-year student names, photos, hometowns, and high schools (called the “Zoo Book” because it was how Carls got their first look at the crop of new “animals” arriving on campus every fall).
For his Reunion “Zoo Book” puzzle, Ohles built seven grids, each grid with 47 squares across and 47 squares down. That’s 11 times the size of a daily newspaper crossword, done seven times over. Everything about the puzzle is supersized. Of the seven grids, the one with the smallest number of classmates has a mere 50, while the one with the most has a whopping 90. To those nearly 500 names, Ohles added more than 4,500 words of “fill,” which is what crossword constructors call the “non-theme” portion of a puzzle.
Why not just skip the fill and cross all the names in a much more condensed puzzle? Well, Ohles says, you try to fit into a neat and symmetrical pattern hundreds of names that include Alquist, Basquin, Benziger, Bozivich, Calvo, Charyulu, and the crowning glory of them all, Czyzewski. That’s without even getting past the ABCs. Further down the alphabet, Ohles needed to fit in Elizondo, Jeronimus, Krafft, Laverdure twice (twin brother and sister), Luetzow, Marantz, Okawa, Pizzuto, Saxhaug, Slenz, Suihkonen, Vandertuin, and Zevin (the letter Z was pretty popular that year, actually). Ohles took special delight when he got Czyzewski to cross with Luetzow.
Once all of the names were situated, and Ohles had filled in his grids with those thousands of other words surrounding his classmates, there was the matter of writing 5,156 clues — because that’s how many answers there were, in total, on the seven grids. Ideally, when an answer appeared in more than one grid, it would have a different clue each time.
Three-fifths of the puzzle ended up being three-letter, four-letter, and five-letter words. Only one answer in 100 had 10 or more letters. The longest answers, found on two of the seven grids, had 14 letters each: MAN ON THE STREET, NON-BELLIGERENT, REINCORPORATED, and TERCENTENNIALS. Their clues were: “Ordinary fellow interview,” “Sweden or Switzerland in relation to World War II,” “Took in again,” and “Celebrations such as Harvard’s 1936.”
Ohles points to two distinctive features that solvers can uncover among the puzzle’s 5,156 answers. First, there is a single answer that appears on all seven grids (here’s a hint: it’s a word with a punch). Second, spread across the grid are the names of all 25 books written by one popular American novelist of recent years — there’s even an answer that points to what would have been the 26th book in that series, which never got written. There are enough clues in this much information to solve the mystery of who the novelist was, Ohles says.
Two classmates of Ohles helped out with the puzzle. Mark Jaeger ’75, retired from a high-level computer science career at Oracle and living in Illinois, wrote the clues for one grid; Ohles says his wittiness enhanced the puzzle’s variety and humor. Andy Maverick ’75, a Louisiana State University chemistry professor now retired to Colorado, proofread grids, helping Ohles spot mistakes and improve numerous clues.
After the crossword puzzle was complete, Ohles started arranging for it to be distributed to his classmates. Once every month or two, starting almost a full year before Reunion 2025, everyone in the Class of 1975 received a “Zoo Book” crossword grid in the mail, sent from Carleton’s Milestone Reunions staff. The class responded with enthusiasm.
Bill Hillsman ’75, an advertising executive in Minnesota, called it “super fun!!!!”
Sue Goldmark ’75, who finished her career as a country director at the World Bank, wrote from Florida that it was “absolutely wonderful and clever!”
Dena Southard Berglund ’75, a retired senior officer of the Social Security Administration also now living in Florida, wrote how she “enjoyed working it in bits.” The puzzle had “great clues,” she said, and after completing several grids, Berglund was “amazed at their variety and how it all fits together.”
Mike Hartung ’75, a retired entrepreneur who built medical services companies, wrote from Pennsylvania that it was “a work of maximum inspiration and perspiration!”
Finally, the classmate with that most marvelous last name, Paul Czyzewski ’75, retired software engineer, penned a note from California about how amazed he was at “this huge amount of work for the benefit of the class… I will enjoy seeing them filled in, when I get to Reunion.” Like many other classmates, Czyzewski was counting on other people to put their pencils and erasers to the paper well before June.
When the Class of 1975 arrives at Carleton for their 50th Reunion on June 19, 2025, each of the seven floor lounges in their residence hall will be decked out with a gigantic “Zoo Book” puzzle. There will be Reunion-themed pencils available to fill them out.
Curiously, in the entire puzzle, there ended up being no names or fill words with 13 letters, according to Ohles. Isn’t that lucky?