Merl Reagle
crossword constructor (1950–2015)
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 crossword puzzles for AARP: The Magazine and the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.
Biography
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, making 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.
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 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 a hobby, working as a television scriptwriter by day and a film scriptwriter by night.
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This entry incorporates text from “Merl Reagle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.