For a rather immodest reason I cannot let this holiday season close without a nod to Bill Gill, a mellifluous fellow from Mystic often seen walking his border collie rescues through the downtown and who for the last three decades has provided friends and relatives a serious session of head-banging with his annual Yuletide Puzzle.
At last count, some 65 or more otherwise contented folk are willingly subjected to his graphic artistry and diabolical wit in creating an artfully disguised but familiar holiday expression, song title or lyric or some other seasonal greeting that is a challenge to decipher.
I am somewhat late to the game, having been recruited, more or less, to participate maybe 10 or so years ago. Last fall, though, upon meeting up with Bill and his wife, Ellen, in the Big Y in Mystic, I succumbed to a congenital pomposity and told him the puzzles in the last couple of years had been too easy.
Be careful, as the admonition goes, what you wish for. This December, Gill concocted a bell-ringer.
Just to review, two years ago, those of us on his hit list received a simple construction: The word "Buddy" with a black, horn-rimmed glasses frame superimposed, and below that, the word “Brown,” in brown capital letters outlined in yellow.
The answer, after a few moments of chin-tugging, materialized: “The Holly and the Ivy.”
Last year’s challenge was a tad trickier: A cube decked out in streams of green letters, with three letters in a distracting, red-herring red: Following various currents of letters around the design, the answer easily followed: “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”
This Christmas, however, Gill had enough of the friendly taunts. He knew how to handle unruly students, as it were, of his penchant for both intellectual provocation and wily misdirection.
“I’ve always had a different take on most things,” he told me recently.
In his varied, which is not to say puzzling, career, he’d taught middle-school kids general science during his senior year in college, served in VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), teaching in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and then worked as a counselor in a locked-down state hospital drug rehab program in this country.
He made money by drawing house portraits on commission and worked as a house parent with high school boys in a residential school for the deaf. His wife, whom he met during his time with the deaf, was a teacher of hearing-impaired infants from birth to 3.
Next, Gill worked at Mystic Seaport Museum, as an interpreter and presenting astronomy programs and grading homework for the late Donald Treworgy’s navigation class. Still at the Seaport, he worked on exhibits and painted signs. It was at the Seaport that he began making his holiday puzzle cards around 1987.
After the Seaport stint, he was deputy director of physical sciences at a small science museum, presented workshops on innovative modeling techniques for model railroaders and, as he put it, helped his working dogs “present their observations and insights in a weekly (newspaper) column.” He kept up with the puzzles, expanding his distribution list.
“Through it all,” he said, “the puzzle continued because I like challenging people to see that they can do more than they expected of themselves. The answers to the puzzles are always a common seasonal saying, phrase, title, lyric, etc. Something that everyone has seen or heard, usually many times every year. The trick is disguising the obvious in ways that are as different as I can make them.”
And so to this December’s offering. What Gill sent out was sort of a Rubik’s Cube of five letters across and five letters down, with four different colors in different hues and letters presented in a variety of fonts. He also offered to provide hints.
I’m not boasting — like heck I’m not — but after a weekend of ripping through a pad of yellow stick ‘ems with letter combinations and color associations and random words, I essentially gave up. I kept poking at it, though, going through lyrics of holiday songs and carols, Christmas stories and poems, and then one morning, a week before Christmas, while washing the dishes, I placed a printout of the puzzle near the sink and looked again at the letters — especially the four Ms and the solitary K and P — and Bingo!
“Not only are you the first one to get it,” he wrote back to me, “but you convinced me that it really is solvable. No one else has even come close yet.”
As of this writing, the only others to solve it were Gill’s sister and her husband, who figured it out on Christmas morning. They, too, did it without any hints.
Should the baffled ask for help, Gill wrote: “Some hints said the answer was closely related to last year’s answer although the actual puzzles themselves were not related. One person was told all the words were there with their letters in the correct order, though the sequence was mixed and two small words were missing but could be inferred in the answer.”
Good luck with the December puzzle. Answer will be available here next week.
Steven Slosberg lives in Stonington and was a longtime reporter and columnist. He may be reached at maayan72@aol.com.
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January 05, 2020 at 11:40AM
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Postscripts: For Bill Gill, the Christmas puzzle's the thing - The Westerly Sun
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