Merl Reagle

Reagle died August 22, 2015, after being hospitalized two days earlier for acute pancreatitis.

Reagle also was featured on CNN, the Today show, Nightline, Oprah, and National Public Radio. In 2013, the Washington Post featured an online interview in its "The Fold" feature.

In 2011 Reagle donated his expertise to produce an awareness-building campaign for the Alzheimer's Foundation of America. Reagle created the National Brain Game Challenge, an online contest featuring a Sunday crossword that contains a clued secret message. Cash prizes, including a first prize of $25,000, are awarded in two categories, "casual solver" and "puzzle professional".

On November 16, 2008, Reagle was a "special guest voice" on an episode of The Simpsons called "Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words." In the episode, which featured a New York Times crossword, a cartoon version of Reagle appeared together with Shortz, and Lisa Simpson discovered secret messages embedded in both the clues and the puzzle, which Reagle constructed and Shortz edited. The actual crossword appearing that same day in the Times had the embedded messages.

He was noted for making puzzles with pencil and paper, instead of with the aid of a computer. The 2006 documentary Wordplay depicted Reagle's on-camera construction of a crossword that subsequently was published in The New York Times. The film then showed various famous crossword enthusiasts, including Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart, the Indigo Girls, and Mike Mussina, attempting to solve the puzzle.

The New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz has said that "his [Reagle's] themes are consistently fresher and funnier than anyone else's. And he's one of the greatest puzzlemakers at interlocking words in intricate, wide-open patterns". Games magazine has called Reagle "the best Sunday crossword creator in America". A poll of puzzlemakers at cruciverb.com, a popular website for crossword constructors, ranked Reagle the most admired by his peers. His 2004 puzzle, "Wide Open Spaces", holds the record for the lowest word count (i.e., number of answers) in a Sunday puzzle. The 21 x 21 grid has only 112 words (with 51 black squares).[1] The prolific crossword editor Stanley Newman called Reagle's puzzle "Gridlock"[2] "the best single crossword of the last 25 years." "Gridlock" featured a "thick traffic jam of car names crossing in the center".

In the 1990s Reagle was regarded as one of the top producers of a new type of crossword puzzle: "less stodgy and more hip." This trend was encouraged by The New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz, who sought to appeal to a wider and younger readership with "pop culture references ... humorous word play, and ... unique and clever themes".

In the early 1980s Reagle began submitting crossword puzzles to Dell crossword magazine, Games magazine, and Margaret Farrar's Simon & Schuster books. He regarded crossword-making as more of a hobby, working as a television scriptwriter by day and a film scriptwriter by night. In 1985 he was contracted to produce a regular Sunday crossword for the San Francisco Examiner' s new Sunday magazine. Three years later, he went into syndication.

Reagle first competed in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 1979, its second year, and placed third. He submitted a puzzle to the contest starting in 1980 and, later, served as a tournament judge and a commentator for the tournament's finals.

In the late 1960's and early 1970's Reagle was a member of a psychedelic rock band Greylock Mansion. He played the organ and performed the lead vocals and was also the main songwriter for the group. The band released two singles in their active period but never got a deal for a full album. All of their old recordings were finally released in 2016 by an underground label Lysergic Sound Distributors. Unfortunately Merl Reagle died during the production of the album and never got to witness its release.

Merl Harry Reagle (January 5, 1950 – August 22, 2015) was an American crossword constructor. For 30 years, he constructed a puzzle every Sunday for the San Francisco Chronicle (originally the San Francisco Examiner), which he syndicated to more than 50 Sunday newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Seattle Times, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), the Hartford Courant, the New York Observer, and the Arizona Daily Star. Reagle also produced a bimonthly crossword puzzle for AARP The Magazine magazine, a monthly crossword puzzle for the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, and puzzles for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

Reagle was born in Audubon, New Jersey on January 5, 1950. He made his first crossword when he was six years old and sold a puzzle to The New York Times at age 16, a feat that made him the youngest published Times puzzle constructor at the time. He attended the University of Arizona, but dropped out a few credits short of a degree in English.