Friday, April 7, 2017

A Four-Letter Word for a Spirited Horse; Or, Will Shortz's Unlikely Connection to the Arabian Breed

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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