By Tobi Lopez Taylor
Will Shortz has been the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle since 1993, and only its fourth
editor since 1942, when the paper’s first Sunday puzzle appeared. Although the
Times puzzle—particularly the Sunday edition—has long been a mainstay of
American culture, the Times actually
came late to the daily puzzle scene. The world’s first crossword puzzle, created
by Liverpool journalist Arthur Wynne, was printed in the December 21, 1913
issue of the New York World, a
newspaper owned by the Pulitzer family.
So, what’s Will Shortz doing in a blog about horses, you ask?
Simple. He was raised on an Arabian horse farm, in Crawfordsville, Indiana, as he noted on Twitter. Curious
about the Shortz family’s Arabian horse activities, I did a little research. Will’s mother Wilma Shortz and sister April
Shortz Curtis are credited as breeders of fifty-eight purebred foals, including
the mare Raffreya, a Legion of Merit
winner. In the remainder of this post, I’ll show how the Shortz family’s
Arabian horse activities intersect in interesting ways with the history of
newspapers, politics, and horse breeding.
The New York Times’s
first puzzle editor, Margaret Farrer,
had started out as a secretary, decades earlier, at the aforementioned New York World. Back then,
there were several daily papers vying for dominance and dollars, including the New York Journal, which had been
purchased in 1895 by William Randolph
Hearst to compete specifically against the New York World, with its circulation of one million. During this
time of newspaper wars, Hearst hired an all-star cast of employees, including
political cartoonist Homer Davenport.
A major object of Davenport’s cartoon ire was Mark Hanna, an Ohio industrialist and
political mastermind who worked behind the scenes to help William McKinley
attain the presidency. Hanna, nicknamed “Dollar Mark” for his ability to
generate corporate campaign donations, is—for good or for ill—responsible for
the invention of the modern presidential campaign. And Hanna’s daughter Ruth Hanna McCormick, who campaigned as a Progressive Republican, was among the earliest women elected as U.S. representatives
to Congress. She was also the mother of Ruth “Bazy” Tankersley, who was
arguably the world’s largest breeder of Arabian horses at her Al-Marah Arabian breeding operation. One of the Shortz family’s primary broodmares
was Freya, sired by Tankersley’s stallion Al-Marah Rooz; Tankersley also
incorporated Shortz horses into her breeding program, including Syndara, who
produced seven foals for her and is the granddam of a National winner in
cutting.
Davenport was paid a great deal of money by Hearst to skewer
Hanna, and was reportedly the highest-paid cartoonist of his era. In 1906, with
the diplomatic aid of President Theodore Roosevelt, Davenport realized his lifelong dream of owning Arabian horses. He traveled to what
was then the Ottoman Empire and purchased twenty-seven Arabians, a
journey he chronicled in his book My
Quest of the Arabian Horse. Davenport’s breeding program, conducted at his
farm in New Jersey, has had a profound impact on Arabian horses in the United
States. Hearst, the cartoonist’s boss, used horses of Davenport breeding in his
program at San Simeon. And although
Davenport was highly critical of her grandfather Mark Hanna, Tankersley appears
to have had no qualms about acquiring Davenport-related horses, including some
from the Shortz family. Indeed, many of the horses bred by the Shortz family,
including champion Raffreya, wouldn’t exist were it not for Davenport’s
imported horses Haleb, El Bulad,
Hamrah, and others.
In interviews, Shortz has said that he does a great deal of
editing to puzzles accepted to the Times.
When I was working on the Sunday puzzle for December 8, 2016, it crossed my
mind that perhaps the answer for the clue “Spirited horse” — A-R-A-B — was one
of Shortz’s edits. After all, he would know.
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