Bernice Gordon, longtime creator of crossword puzzles, dies at 101

Bernice Gordon, who delighted, bedeviled and sometimes outraged aficionados of the crossword puzzle during a six-decade career unusual not only for its longevity but the artfulness of her brain-teasing constructions, died last Thursday at her Philadelphia home. She was 101.

The cause was heart disease, said her son, Jim Lanard.

Gordon’s first crossword was published in the New York Times in 1952. Over the next decades she created hundreds of puzzles for major newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her work also appeared in books published by Scribner, Dell and Simon & Schuster.

Crosswords “make my life,” she told the Associated Press after her 100th birthday last year. “I couldn’t live without them.”

Until two weeks before her death she was still producing a puzzle a day, usually between 3 and 6 a.m. She had shelves packed with dictionaries, almanacs and other tools of her trade, and constructed her puzzles on a computer, having given up paper and pencil a dozen years ago when she was nearly 90.

“That was her best creative time,” Lanard said Tuesday about his mother’s early morning schedule. “Even when she was almost terminally ill, she was still up at her computer doing puzzles. She’d get excited about a new theme – colors, movies, you name it.”

Gordon’s life spanned nearly the entire history of the newspaper crossword puzzle. She was born in Philadelphia on Jan. 11, 1914, about three weeks after the first known crossword appeared in the New York Sunday World.