Tangle Towns

Boston may not know it, but it's in for a major cultural crisis. With a blare of publicity, the Boston Herald has started a game called "Tangle Towns." The public should be informed: Tangle Towns is not a new thing. It has occurred at least once before, in New York, amid circumstances that could reasonably be described as a cultural crisis.

Tangle Towns came to New York about five years ago, through the benevolent agency of the New York Herald Tribune. The Trib has a circulation of 400,000 or so, and has not made money for a number of years. As Time magazine has remarked in reporting the Trib's innumerable personnel changes, the paper is squeezed between the "lordly" Times (circulation, 600,000) and the ever-popular Daily News (circulation, 2,000,000). The Tribune is uncomfortable in the middle, and passes through alternating cycles of social-climbing and slumming. Tangle Towns was inaugurated during one of the periods when the Trib was in queasy descent to the level of the News.

Yet even Tangle Towns was a middle ground the News and the Mirror had run contests, but nothing unduly taxing to their readers' intellects. The News contests generally required the ability to read numerals and a knowledge of the alphabet (like the Lucky Bucks game, which had contestants comparing the serial numbers of dollar bills to a set printed in the paper; when they matched, the News gave a prize to those who were bright enough to discover the fact). Tangle Towns was tougher: You needed to know the entire alphabet well (upside down and sideways, too), and a little American history didn't hurt. Still the game lacked the pure amateur challenge of a Times double-crostic.

It consisted of a series of puzzles, which appeared--one a day--for eight weeks or so; the diligent participant was asked to untangle each puzzle, put it away in a safe place, and then send in the whole lot at the end of the contest. Each puzzle was a rectangular box in which letters of various sizes were arranged in an attractively confusing pattern. Underneath was printed a small clue: "This upstate village is a peaceful residential area. Its chief claim to fame is that than Allen and his troops slept here on the way to Ticonderoga." The solution was the name of a city, town or village in New York State.

Contestants' methods for solution varied according to their personalities. There was the impestuous, headstrong type: he would stare intently at the puzzle until divine inspiration arrived. Then he would blurt something out: "ILCHAPANA!" and would rush to the encyclopedia to check the clue--no such place. So he would go back and stare some more, and come up with another flash: "PHALACIAN!" Eventually he might get the right answer, but generally this type didn't stick to it. He would get hung up on a tough one like TWO-SCORN-POE ("In this village in western New York State, Abner Doubleday invented the game of baseball. It is now the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.").

Others were more methodical: they would patiently sort out the letters in alphabetical order: A-A-A-C-H-I-L-N-P (which doesn't make much sense). Then they would start working with combinations and permutations, and with any luck they might make it in an hour or two.

Still others hit the history angle, and would work from the clues. They took the attitude--encouraged by the Trib--that Tangle Towns was essentially an educational game, and would pick up an interesting and useful bit of information about each alphabetical mess they had deciphered. And others would work with maps and things.

Most people had an easy time with the first dozen puzzles, with such teasers as Troy, Bronx, Albany and Ithaca. But after the second week, some of the less hardy began to panic; that's when the cultural crisis set in.

A horde of untanglers invaded the New York Public Library to pore over gazetteers, atlases and encyclopedias; then they began to tear pages out of the books, for home use. The Library people became alarmed; through the Trib--ever eager for publicity--they issued an appeal for restraint and respect for public property. This didn't work, so they removed the gazetteers, atlases and encyclopedie from the shelves.

The Tangle Towners now threatened a riot, so the Library peaple retreated: they set up a special department, which solved the puzzles and posted them at a desk in Central Circulation (this fact was reported in the World-Telegram, not the Tribune.. Three times as many people flocked to check their independently obtained solutions with the Library's version. Librarians reflected that maybe some of these untanglers might find that they liked libraries, and might return some day.

The contest finally ended, with so many perfect scores that the Trib didn't even bother to print the names. The affair was, in fact, an early symptom of quiz show cheating and payola, but no one knew it at the time. The Tribune finally decided on a tie-breaking device: a huge page full of letters and names of towns. Contestants were supposed to compile as many names as they could with the available list and the available letters; there was a complicated scoring system. At this point, many people decided the hell with it (particularly the educational types), but others--having come this far--stuck it out, and someone picked up $20,000 or so. An unsubstantiated rumor said that the winner donated half to the New York Public Library.