- Welcome to the Bloomington Rotary Club's weekly celebration of service. I'm Steve Wicks, and I'm honored
- to serve as your president this year. Please silence your electronic devices. On this day in history,
- January 6, 1821, the Indiana legislature approved the development of the future capital of Indianapolis.
- They still haven't gotten over it in Corden. Mike Baker will deliver today's reflection.
- a little change of pace for me today. Welcome Rotarians and guests. I was hoping that Winston Schindel
- would have been here today because I wore some really funny socks, but I'll say that for another day.
- So often well-meaning reflections can run over a bit over the three minute recommended length of time.
- I've seen some that have been as long as a Gettysburg address. So I promise to keep this under. I don't
- see Tracy here.
- But I know Steve is always holding his breath whenever there's a reflection because he's got a pretty
- tight schedule So this is something I put together myself and some doing a little reading or trying
- to come up with something That's short will be under three minutes our strength Comes from our weakness
- We can't do much about the length of time that we're alive, but we can do something about the width
- and breadth of our lives and
- And Rotary gives us the opportunity to grow both by building friendships, doing things like helping
- teachers warehouse, supporting our immigrant families, more need for that now than ever. Lunch buddies,
- bell ringing, all these things help grow our width and breadth as people. Thank you.
- Great job, Mike Baker, thank you. Lynn Schwartzberg will introduce our guests today. Well, happy new
- year, everyone. We have quite a few guests today. We are welcoming Brianna Featherston,
- A guest of Ellen Stroman. Would you please rise so we can welcome you appropriately and that goes for
- the rest of you as well. We have Lucy McKean, a guest of Michael Shermas. Welcome Lucy. We have Breon
- Mitchell, a guest of Judy Schroeder.
- We have Linda Mitchell, a guest of Judy Schroeder. And we have Vanessa Parker, another wonderful guest
- of Jim Bright, who is a licensed social work professor and educator and was an interact in high school.
- Welcome. Do we have any guests online? Well,
- We are grateful to have Natalie joining us from afar and then Raj and a lot of our other usuals, regulars
- on Zoom. Thanks. If you have any questions about Rotary or want information about joining this amazing
- club, please speak to someone at your table and thanks for joining us today.
- Okay, so every quarter we pick a different charity to be our charity of the quarter. And at the end
- of the quarter, we then make a donation to that charity. So Lynn will donate for this next quarter.
- Okay, the charity of the quarter is Amethyst House.
- Okay, we have several birthdays to celebrate. On the seventh, Jane Coopersmith. On the 11th, Hank Walter.
- Also on the 11th, Chas Mottinger. We have four anniversaries to celebrate. On the ninth, Scott Shackelford,
- eight years. On the 10th, Kyla Cox-Decker, Jim Shea, both 14 years. That was a good day for Rotary in
- 2012. And then also on the
- 10th, Michelle Cohen, three years. Announcements. First one is a real fun one. Peyton, could you stand?
- So Peyton was one of our mystery rotarians in December. And she is finishing her last semester of law
- school. And she is getting ready to prepare for the bar. And now she's planning a wedding.
- So congratulations, Peyton.
- Next Chamber of Commerce business after hours will be held Wednesday January 14th between 530 and 730
- at the Spring Mill Inn in Mitchell. Rotary members attend free of charge. See me or see Chris walking
- along the back if you have questions. Save the date for the next Rotary Book Club gathering on January
- 14th starting at 7 p.m. at the home of Judy Schroeder. The group will discuss E. Jean Carroll's Not My Type
- One woman versus a president. All are welcome. If you have any questions, ask Judy Schroeder or Sally
- Gaskell. Congratulations to the club members who attended every Tuesday celebration of service during
- the last quarter. Liz Fiddle, Tim Jessen, Tracy Ivanovich, Art Omick, Mark Peterson, and Judy Schroeder.
- I'm happy to report that we have hired Mandy Stewart to fill the role of club executive assistant.
- She'll have very big shoes to fill, so please be patient. Mandy will start on January 13th. We're starting
- at 1040, meeting at the post office to pick up the mail. So with Mandy being new, just please introduce
- yourselves over and over until you feel like she knows who you are. I mean, we have 165 members in the
- club. Certainly not everyone shows up every week, but there'll be a lot for her to learn.
- Second phase of our Meals on Wheels district grant project will take place on Wednesday, January 21st.
- A handful of volunteers are needed to help at the Meals on Wheels office that morning. In addition,
- multiple club members are needed to bake notations of specific items. Club member Diana Hoffman has
- handouts on tables. If you have any questions, Diana is here today. See her.
- Club quarterly billing statements were emailed late last week. PayPal invoices went out yesterday evening.
- If you haven't been billed or you have a billing question, please see me. I'll be on vacation on January
- 20th, and our club president-elect Sam Udak will lead the celebration of service that day. And now we
- have a special grant presentation.
- Hello, everybody. If I could ask Leslie Kuchynkow and Alon Barker to join us up here. Kuchynkow. Kusinkow.
- OK. I'm not very good with Polish names. Polish?
- Okay. Not very good at identifying the origin of names either. So anyway, let me get onward. I am delighted
- on behalf of the club and the community services committee to begin the process of awarding our first
- grant, one of two grants that we've given, that the club has given this year. It is the inaugural
- Rotary Foundation grant. That is, the Rotary Foundation is operated under the leadership of Alon Barker
- behind me just this year. And the Community Services Committee has been actively involved in awarding
- the grant and managing the process of this grant award. So we're using proceeds
- from Rotary Fundraising, primarily the Rotary Toast. And we had 13 applicants for our first foundation
- grant. And there was a $10,000 pot. And today we honor Wunderlab, and that's why Leslie is here. Wunderlab
- is receiving a $6,000 donation. That is a little more than half of the pot.
- and she's gonna quickly summarize what that money is gonna be spent for. I'm way shorter than that.
- I'm ecstatic about this opportunity. This was an idea that came across from our education director,
- so thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today and the commitment to serving Bloomington community
- through Rotary.
- As students finish the school year and head into summer, many families face a real gap in safe, enriching
- opportunities for children, as well as what do we do with the kids on the last day of school. So Wonder
- Lab came up with the idea for schools out for summer and block party. And so what this block party will
- entail will be a rotary service section where kids will be created for students to take home
- The grant actually covers the museum to be free admission. There'll be food trucks, bands, hopefully,
- and a bunch of different
- community organizations that will provide services for kids to have less of a gap in learning throughout
- the summer. So including summer reading clubs and materials for that. So this project directly advances
- Rotary's focus on basic education and literacy, economic and community development, and maternal and
- child health by preventing the summer learning loss.
- linking families to resources and creating a safe celebratory space for kids and caregivers throughout
- the evening on the last day of school. With your support, Rotary and Wonder Lab can launch this pilot
- event in 2026. And we thank you for this because we hope that this will be an annual event from now
- on. So thank you to the Rotary Foundation for this opportunity.
- One last thing that I forgot to mention is in the late spring when this event occurs there will be a
- number of opportunities for rotary volunteers to participate in this and so we're really excited about
- that as well so we will make you aware of that.
- Okay. Congratulations. Thank you so much. Do I get to take this? We're going to get you one that actually
- you can catch. Thank you, Dave. Celebration of service. So to build on that, um,
- As Dave mentioned, 13 different agencies applied for these grants. And so it was quite a process sifting
- through the applications. And I want to, I guess, recognize the people who made that happen. Dave Meyer
- led the process. Community Services Chair Michelle Cohen bowed out because of a possible conflict of
- interest. And so
- The members Liz Fiddle, Diana Hoffman, Sarah Loughlin, Cindy Neidhart, Art Ohmick, Linda Cedar,
- Tina Swanson, Tim Thrasher, and Mike Wade. They went through the applications. Most of them sat down
- and hashed it out, and I think they came up with a pretty good decision. Moving Rotary International.
- January is Rotary Vocational Service Month.
- And we're encouraged as Rotarian to use our professional expertise to make a difference. Happy Dollars
- proceeds in January and February will be given to Teachers Warehouse. And the last thing, we had several
- Rotarians from Bloomington who were in Pasadena for the Rose Bowl. And here is a picture of the Rose
- Bowl float before the parade. This is the Rotary Rose Bowl float.
- Pretty cool. I just can't fathom the amount of work that goes into that. And then here later in the
- parade on a rainy morning, it looked like it was holding up pretty well. Rarely rains for the Rose Bowl.
- Rain was not good for Alabama.
- And now we have a Peach Bowl this weekend or this Friday. I don't know of any members who are going
- to see that, but hopefully the Hoosiers will win and play one more game. We have a few minutes for Happy
- Dollars. Let's see, Hank, are you, put up your hand if you are happy today.
- Hey, Steve, we can't hear on Zoom. We're trying a different microphone. I'm happy because my daughter
- got married on New Year's Eve. And we had what many people said was probably the most rocking New Year's
- Eve party they'd ever been to. I'm happy about the international and lifelong impact of Rotary.
- In January of 1992, my family went to the airport in Oklahoma City. I was 10, oldest of four kids, youngest
- being three. And we picked up this 18-year-old Australian kid, us and a bunch of other Rotary families.
- And he came home with us, and he immediately was my brother. He started calling my mom, Mom, immediately.
- He lived with three other host families, one of them being my aunt and uncle. He came back a couple
- years later. He lived with us again, kept in touch, brought his
- now wife, fiance back a few years later, has come throughout the years. Last year, last summer, he called
- my mom. I happened to be there with the baby. And his father was unfortunately not doing well. And at
- the very end of the conversation, he goes, oh, we're going to move to the States. Mom's like, wait,
- what? He and his wife and three of their kids moved to about an hour outside of Chicago this summer.
- Last week, I got to visit their house. Last Friday night, we were at my sister's in Milwaukee. He and
- his wife came up.
- All of my siblings were there and my dad, we all went to dinner and my dad texted us the next day and
- he said, it was great to have all of my kids back together again. I have five happy dollars. I make
- it a point to sit at a different table each meeting because I want to get to know other people. And
- I thank Hannah for sharing today.
- Mike, I dominated, I'm sorry. But it's good to get to know new members for some of us who've been here
- too long. Well, my project, I'm happy about my project for the holidays, which has been trying to get
- legal counsel and guide that process along.
- for a member of the Mohammadi family, Jawad, that is, Amina's wife. You may recall, Amina's husband.
- You may recall that the Mohammadi's have been supported by the club and are now friends of the club.
- Jawad was arrested by ICE early in December. And what happened over the holidays
- was on New Year's Eve, with the club's help, we filed a petition in federal court for unjust incarceration
- on Jawad's behalf. And believe it or not, the judge in the case in the Southern District of Indiana
- issued a preliminary ruling on Saturday. Right after that, took his holiday weekend to issue a preliminary
- ruling that said essentially to the government
- The ponderance of evidence seems to indicate that you have very much in the wrong here. And you have
- until Wednesday to try to convince me otherwise of why this man should be incarcerated. So we expect
- him to be home to his pregnant wife, Amina, pretty soon. And we're still looking for donations for his
- legal support. I'm sure you saw our President Steve's
- email about it. But anyway, happy news so far and hope to have more happy news soon. We have any online
- joy. We do not Steve. Steve, there's time for one.
- So I had about 16 people over for a watch party for the last game, Rose Bowl, and saw Mendoza and the
- whole gang. And the next morning went to Uptown, and there was Mendoza and Burkett and other people,
- eight players in total. So it was kind of I was starstruck that I said, hey, I just saw you a few hours
- ago, and here we are in Uptown. But I had a few minutes to talk to them.
- basically one-on-one, and I was so moved by the fact that he, I thanked him for his support for his
- mother and his emphasis on scholarship and teamwork, and he said, yeah, I'm a student athlete, and students
- come first, and being a student is first, and studies are important, and this was not in front of TV
- cameras, in front of a large group, just one-on-one, so I just felt this guy's the real deal. He's really
- authentic, really connected, and I was really, you know, I think he's not just great for
- IU football or IU, I think he's great for athletes who are doing in school. And they're both students
- and athletes. And I think the more of that, the better. $50. Thank you very much, everyone. Jeff, did
- you suggest any plays for the Peach Ball? Yeah. Excellent. Good job.
- Judy Schroeder will introduce our speaker today.
- OK, today's program started last August when I read in the New York Times an article about Jerry Slocum,
- age 94, who had during his lifetime amassed 46,000 mechanical puzzles. He donated most of those.
- to the Lilly Library here in Bloomington. And we have Breon Mitchell, who is then the director of the
- Lilly Library, to thank for that. But this article quoted Brett Rothstein, whom it described as a historian
- of play at IU Bloomington. And I said, that's somebody I've got to get to know. What is the appeal of
- puzzles? Who plays them, and why?
- There's a new book out about Steven Sondheim, the late composer, who says, puzzles bring order out of
- chaos. All art, symphonies, architecture, novels, it's all puzzles, Sondheim said. Well, that might
- explain why our speaker today is an art historian who made his way from Netherlandish Renaissance art
- to mechanical puzzles. Brett's book, The Shape of Difficulty, is an ode to what he calls unruly objects,
- Rubik's cubes, boxes that have secret openings, string disentanglements. He says these objects call
- us to play. To kick off the new year and celebrate the fifth part of our four-way test,
- Therefore, let's welcome Brett Ross to tell us why we love trouble, the allure of puzzles. Brett. So
- I want to begin by thanking Judy Schroeder
- Steve Wicks and Michael Sturmis for the opportunity to speak today and for helping set me up. I want
- to thank all of you for coming out today, even though it's gray outside. It's been nice and
- warm, unseasonably so. Can people hear me OK? Oh, is that better? OK, I'll pretend to.
- I'll pretend to revert my gaze. I wanna thank everyone for coming because even though it's gray outside,
- it is unseasonably warm and it's hard not to be out there. But it is a pleasure to see you all here
- and to be able to spend some time in your company. As I speak today, I would like it if we could bear
- in mind a basic question, which is why in the world we go out of our way
- to get in trouble, not all the time, but once in a while, under certain controlled circumstances. If
- you think about much of our existence is given over to making the path through life easier,
- traffic patterns, tax forms. We don't want trouble, except that sometimes we do. So I want to talk about
- the times when we do, and I want to start
- with a moment of abject, highly public failure. Because one of the problems that I've run into over
- the years when I talk about puzzles is they tend to intimidate people. We're so concerned with getting
- things right that we forget how you got there in the first place. And so we'll start off with that guy
- failing very publicly at the headquarters of the Hanayama
- puzzle-making corporation in Tokyo, how I wound up there is its own problem. But yeah, that's me about
- 45 seconds from being brutally ejected from a competition. We had to solve a set of mechanical puzzles
- timed, which I think is a terrible idea, but it was a chance to go to Japan.
- to do it publicly, which I think is also a terrible idea. I tend to be a solitary puzzler. But it was
- a puzzle I'd solved before. I knew the solution, but I froze. It happens. But all the while, you couldn't
- see me thinking it in this photograph, but I absolutely was thinking, how did it come to this? How did
- I wind up in this situation? I was a specialist in Renaissance art.
- I had a publication record. I was supposedly right about some things in print. I can tell you what happened.
- It's his fault. It's Breon Mitchell's fault. He, and I thank you for it, he landed the Jerry Slocum
- collection here in Bloomington, Indiana, and it changed my life. In the spring of 2007, I got a job
- offer from IU.
- And I called up a friend. We'd gone to grad school together. We chaired sessions at conferences together.
- We'd both specialized in Renaissance art in Northern Europe. I called her up, said, hey, I got this
- job. I'm gonna be moving to Indiana. And her first response was, oh, you gotta go to the Lilly Library.
- They have a terrific collection of medieval manuscripts. I said, yes, we'll do. Thanks for reminding
- me. Hung up the phone, brought up the web browser, looked up the Lilly Library,
- The first page was a big splash about the Slocum donation. This was 2007. I did not get to the manuscripts
- until 2017. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding about that. I really didn't. Because everything changed.
- I had a book on Netherlandish art that was largely written, still not finished. I completely changed
- course. I had to retrain. I had to study mathematics. It's been painful. And I get a lot wrong.
- Why I'm doing it. The goal is to fail. But why? Well, that's where you come in. I am well aware of how
- perverse it is to come into a room full of people who are dedicated to making life better for others
- with the goal of making your life a little worse. But that's what I'm here for.
- I want those safety pins on the table. You only need the three of them. They don't have to be those
- pins. Those of you on Zoom, just get three safety pins. As long as they're roughly the same size, you'll
- be fine. I want you to arrange the pins, not today. Take a picture of the task, write it down. So do
- write it down the way you see it. And it'll come up again at the end of my talk. Arrange the pins so
- that when all three are closed, none will open,
- And when any single one is open, they all come apart. Sorry, let me rephrase. When all these are closed,
- none will come apart. When any single one is open, they all come apart. And imagine it this way, that
- when you put it together, you could just hand it to someone else and they can pick whichever pin they
- want to to open. You don't get to tell them which pin. We'll come back to that.
- So why an art historian? Judy said a little bit about that. I want to say a little bit more. Because
- in some ways, a historian would be a more natural pick or a mathematician, especially if you think about
- something like the puzzle that's on the cover of my book, which is this. This is for the Zoom people.
- It is essentially like you dropped a Rubik's Cube at Chernobyl and came back for it six months later.
- The edges turn and as they do, the pieces get mixed up in really kind of alarming ways. The picture
- of it on the cover of the book is only about eight moves in. This is a strongly mathematical puzzle.
- I really have no business talking about it. But of course I do because as an art historian, I've always
- specialized in materials and visible objects.
- Stuff that people wanna put their hands to, look at and talk about. So that's one of the reasons that
- I'm here to talk to you about it today. A lot of the puzzles we contend with, though certainly not all
- of them, are physical. Safety pins, twisty puzzles, jigsaw puzzles. I was talking earlier about jigsaw
- puzzles, which I'm a huge fan of. I have a new one that I just started two days ago. We have this thing
- for things, this fondness for objects, which in the case of my household might have, I think it struck
- my partner as something of a dismaying turn because not only did I buy the puzzle that's on the cover
- of my book, but I had to build it. Because a lot of these things are so specialized and so limited in
- their appeal, you can't get them in a shop. You have to order them from a 3D printer and then assemble
- them. And those are the pieces mid-build.
- So in my house, the arrival of the new project was initially greeted with great fanfare. Oh, finally
- you're working on something that I care about. It wasn't stated that boldly, but it was close. And then
- the slowly dawning realization that that meant there was going to be a lot of stuff in the house. Many,
- many puzzles.
- and then many, many projects that would result in puzzles. Sometimes they take two or three years. I
- brought another one with me that's an example of a year and a half long build. I think for my partner,
- the very real threat was this, which I gotta say, he's moved house and in his new place, he purpose
- built a puzzle collection room, which is itself a puzzle.
- He's invited me out and I have to say I'm a little nervous about going. Because you have to solve the
- puzzle of the room in order to get to the puzzles and get back out. I think that from my partner, this
- would be her worst nightmare. Because it's just stuff. And it's not, don't get me wrong, we all have
- rooms where we keep stuff. My guess is that most of you live in a place where you have a room that has
- spatulas and plates and food.
- But at least that stuff feeds you. These don't. They just make life harder. So why in the world would
- we bother with this? I mean, trick lock, a secret opening box, a Rubik's Cube. This isn't going to clothe
- anybody. It's not going to help if anybody's legal aid needs. It's a real luxury. And yet it's also,
- in some way, part of a larger necessity.
- And it's that necessity that I want to really kind of bear down on. And the way to do it would be maybe
- to talk about a new project that I started last spring. And it's a project about this guy and a friend
- of his. So this guy, Lester A. Grimes, is amazing. He was known as the paper wizard because
- he was specialized in paper magic folding and so forth.
- He once performed in a costume made entirely of paper. He performed with Houdini, inherited a bunch
- of Houdini's books on spiritualism. It's fascinating. And by the mid-50s, he had become such a puzzle
- fanatic that he had what we think is the largest puzzle collection at the time, 2,000 objects.
- Jerry Slocum, who was already collecting them, nowhere near. Several hundred, maybe 1,000. Grimes had
- 2,000. And of those 2,000,
- Roughly 10% were boxes that had been designed and built by a guy named Lloyd Durham Whittaker, who was
- a veterinarian and a real wise acre based in Farmville, Virginia. It's not entirely clear how Grimes
- and Whittaker met, but we know that by 1954 they were corresponding, by 1956 there was further social
- interaction. Virtually no one was solving Whittaker's boxes except for Lester Grimes.
- they hit it off and they hit it off big. Eventually Grimes became the subject of an article in Scientific
- American. It was a recreational mathematics author named Martin Gardner, heard about Grimes, corresponded
- with him and decided, oh, this is worth writing about. And one of the two main things that Gardner focused
- on in his article was the idea that puzzles can be physical and still be interesting.
- He's even writing about mathematics. Most of his readers were accustomed to problems where you just
- needed a pencil and paper and you were good. And Gardner had to kind of persuade some of them, no, if
- you're using string and wires, that can also be good. If you have boxes, that can be good. The second
- thing that Gardner focused on and the thing that became important historically was the relationship
- between Grimes and Whitaker. They had a real rivalry. It turns out they would place bets, sometimes
- money, sometimes the puzzles themselves.
- And the boxes were so difficult that in one case, Grimes actually, he spent months, failed to solve
- it and eventually X-rayed it. And you see the X-ray there. And I've since found the box in question.
- It belongs to someone who had bought the Grimes collection. There's a whole story there too. But Gardner
- talked about the friendship between the two men, sort of a rivalry but a friendly rivalry.
- Now, that article sank like a stone in 1959. But two years later, it was reissued in a book of articles
- initially published by Gardner. And since then, Martin Gardner has multiple volumes that republished
- his columns. But the 1961 reissue was important because lots and lots of people bought it. And the second
- they bought it and the second they read about the collection, they started writing.
- letter after letter after letter from literally all around the globe. They didn't know what they were
- gonna get, but they wanted it. And a case in point for that is the letter on the right from a guy named
- Junji Tanaka, who is himself fascinating, the translator of mysteries, murder mysteries, an author also,
- but also in the 70s ran a kind of puzzle society.
- So he wrote to Doc Whitaker, who had by that time died. And Doc's daughter wrote back and said, oh,
- I'm so sorry. My father has passed. But if you would like, I can send you some puzzles and some solutions.
- But let's start small, because there was some part of the exchange where Tanaka essentially said, I'll
- buy everything. That's the kind of energy people were bringing to this. So she wrote back and said,
- why don't I send you five boxes and the solutions?
- Tanaka writes back and says, just send the boxes. She sends the boxes, a month later, she gets a letter,
- send the solutions. So she sends the solutions, along with an inquiry, would you like me to send more
- boxes, to which she doesn't have the letter, but she says his response was, nah, I'm all set. There's
- a reason for that that I'll come back to.
- For now, well, the reason, I guess I can talk about it. The reason for that is this box on the lower
- left, I have that. The family gave me that last year. And it's an unusually accessible one. It kind
- of tells you what you need to do. But there are a lot of these boxes where you don't, like this one,
- you can slide the top and there's some things like the key comes off the shackle and these little things
- down at the left-hand side, they move back and forth. But a lot of these boxes, they don't have any
- movements that you just are listening to what's going on inside and you might have to put a magnet on.
- They're incredibly hard. And the reason that they go from being kind of accessible in the mid-50s, that
- one was dated from 1956,
- that go from being accessible in the mid fifties to almost impossible by 1958 is because Whitaker was
- only designing for Grimes because Grimes was the only person buying the boxes. And so if you haven't
- solved all the stuff that Grimes has solved, you're probably not going to solve the late boxes. So Tanaka,
- he got some stuff from 1968, which is 58, which is just devilish. I mean, these things are so difficult.
- But people were hungry for it. They didn't necessarily know that was what they were going to get, but
- they wanted it. And that's what's fascinating about this puzzle. Some cultures, these objects, they
- are luxuries, yet they are at the same time somehow a necessity. And societies, whole societies, have
- arisen dedicated to this. The International Puzzle Party, which is going to be the subject of a documentary
- film in about a year or so, depending on funding,
- by the guys who made the humongous fungus among us. If you haven't seen it, you should. And then the
- Dutch Cube Day, which is one of the oldest annual puzzle gatherings in the Netherlands. And by the way,
- I'm in both of those photographs. I was lucky enough to be able to go to each. There's a kind of hunger.
- that you see it's especially concentrated in these groups. And it's a hunger that I felt from that first
- time I looked at the Slocum web page. But there's a kind of hunger for difficulty of a manageable, limited
- sort. And I think the reason for that hunger comes through really nicely in the case of Lester Grimes
- there on the right and Doc Whittaker on the left in that photograph.
- It was the first time Grimes visited. They corresponded for a year. And then in the summer of 56,
- Grimes said, hey, I'm coming down. He lived up in Long Island. He flies into Richmond. He takes a bus,
- what is now two hours to Farmville, but it was probably three or four hours at the time, in the heat
- of summer. He gets to the house. Doc's wife invites him up to the guest bedroom. And he says, I'd rather
- sleep in the workshop.
- so that I can stay up as late as I want. And he and Doc stayed up till all hours of the night teasing
- each other, shooting the breeze, trying problems. And interestingly, when Grimes would solve a box,
- Doc would frequently go back and modify it to make it harder. And the reason I know this, nobody knew
- this stuff. We only knew about the article by Martin Gardner until last year.
- And the reason that I know about this is that woman on the left is Dr. Whitaker's daughter. She used
- to hang around with Lester Grimes when he came to visit. And she has, as you can see in that photograph,
- a bunch of docs, boxes. And Breanne, I need to talk to you about that a little bit, get some advice.
- She also has, you can just see it here on the bed, a stack of letters.
- and a couple of notebooks filled with descriptions of the puzzles and their solutions. This guy's a
- missing link. Trick-opening boxes before him were small and one or two steps. His boxes tend to be seven,
- eight, 10, 15 steps. They're incredibly involved.
- But the reason that they are involved is, as I say, because Grimes would solve one and Doc would say,
- okay, let's see what we can do next. In other words, it wasn't just the objects. The objects were a
- way for the two people who had this shared fondness to get closer, to interact, to engage with each
- other. And when Doc's family reached out to me last fall, last winter, excuse me, one of the things
- they were looking to do was to preserve the memory of Doc Whitaker.
- But another thing that they repeatedly emphasized was that they wanted the boxes to get out into the
- world. They wanted people to play with these because as long as someone isn't playing with the box,
- it may as well not exist. These objects come alive by bringing us together, which enables us to become
- a little more alive. But one of the things that we do when we puzzle is we fool with a material object,
- a mechanical problem,
- But the main thing that we do is we grow closer through that shared difficulty. The first puzzle party
- I went to in 2010, a Finnish designer walked up to me. He spoke no English. I spoke no Finnish. Except
- for two words. He said, try this. And he handed me one of his designs. That was it. He didn't know me.
- I didn't know him. But he knew why I was there. And I will say, I failed to solve it. Just sensing a pattern.
- But in that moment, there were two people who still connected across all sorts of gulfs, all sorts of
- differences, which is why I want to make trouble for you now. I want you to arrange your safety pins
- in such a way that when all three are closed, none of them will come apart. But if any single one of
- them is open, they'll all come apart. And I know what I'm doing.
- Because I've been through this with people before. This is a text thread from a good friend of mine.
- He sent me that photograph. And I jokingly said, nope. And then later, my daughter said, yeah, you heard
- his feelings. I don't mean to. It's just one of the risks with puzzles and difficulty. But that's also
- one of the risks with human interaction, which is maybe the best thing about the puzzle.
- is that this inanimate object can let us have more interaction, can bring us closer together. And in
- the process, keep us mobile, remind us that we don't really have as much control as we think we do.
- And thereby keep us a little more porous, a little more open to the rest of the world. Thank you very
- much. Oh, that's right, questions.
- I forgot about the questions. I'm not off the hook. Yeah, I've got a question. You talked about these
- puzzle boxes. What is the goal? Is it to open the box up? So when I refer to sort of secret opening
- boxes or trick opening boxes, that's a huge kind of category.
- I'm just using a term because it's legible. It's really a process of what we call sequential discovery.
- In some cases, they're locks. In some cases, they're boxes. That one that I showed you earlier that
- looks like a box is actually just a lock. You can only get the shackle off, and the rest of it stays
- closed. But the goal is to have something where there's an internal mechanism that you can't necessarily
- see, but you have to figure out how it works. Does that help?
- Thank you. Tell me about your partner. She is a historian who works on the history of race and labor
- in the US. So for her, Netherlandish art was fine. She understood. I mean, I was writing about religious
- objects, and she understood how that was important. But it always seemed very remote. And she liked
- the Netherlands, good waffles.
- it all seemed very distant and very remote and very museum-ish. And then when I started working on puzzles,
- something shifted and it felt more immediate to her. But also she saw a change in me. When I first found
- art, it was like I come home and hadn't known I'd left. And then it turns out when I got to puzzles,
- no, now I really have, like I found my room in the house. So for her, I think that was a big part was
- just, and it's why she tolerates
- my study looking the way it does. In the photo when you were constructing the puzzle on your title page
- or on the cover of your book, I noticed a little pause at the top. Tell me about the little creature
- that. That was the cat. We got that cat from the shelter here in town. And he came to us with the name Gilbert.
- That wasn't right. There were three silver tabbies in the neighborhood that all had accountant names,
- as my daughter called them. There was Gilbert, Morris, and I can't remember the third. She just decided
- those were accountant names and the cats all had these. So she renamed it after a sweet dessert, but
- he was not sweet. He was super smart. He learned how to flush toilets and he had object permanence,
- but he was kind of
- mean. And so I renamed him Francis Begbie after a film character who's a lot of fun until he suddenly
- isn't. And then he gradually became known as Frankles. And that was the final name. He was
- a super interesting animal, but not very nice. Have any of the boxes been replicated so that people
- can share them around the world? So that is a project that several people
- There's a handful of people who know about these things right now because nobody wants to create a kind
- of furor about it. There are enough of these boxes that survived that there could be a feeding frenzy.
- So people want to kind of slow roll how this comes out. But there are a couple of people who own some
- of the boxes who do want to replicate them. And I have to say, the one that they gave me
- If somebody wanted to replicate that, I would be fully in favor of it because it's an absolutely brilliant
- design. It works flawlessly. It communicates just enough. It's just difficult enough. No one will ever
- replicate Doc's peculiar style. When I brought that box into our house after my visit to Virginia last
- April, without hesitation, my wife said, that's the best looking thing you own, like adamant.
- And it's an odd remark to make because it clearly is the product of someone who doesn't have formal
- compositional training, but these things are kind of lovely, but in a very Joseph Cornell sort of intuitive
- way. But to have them replicated would be, I think people are gonna wanna do that. And the family wants
- it. I've noticed something about the people who are in these, your illustrations and at the,
- They're predominantly men. Oh, yes. Is there something about this that appeals more to men than to women?
- Can you comment on this? I think it's primarily an issue of opportunity. A lot of the puzzle subculture,
- a lot of the groups that have formed, have formed in engineering circles. And since the disciplines
- associated with engineering are largely populated by men and white men,
- than upper middle class white men, there's a structural issue there. There are women who come to the
- Puzzle Party, there are actually a fair number of women who come to the Dutch Cube Day more, the higher
- proportion of the Dutch Cube Day, because the Dutch Cube Club has a history of involving women and the
- Rubik's Cube craze had a much broader appeal. So I think a lot of this is kind of cultural habit. I
- don't think it's a matter of affinity, I don't think it's a matter of firepower, intellectual firepower,
- My daughter, when she was 10, I brought a puzzle home. My brother at Long Beach, she was 12. I brought
- a puzzle lock home, very large, seven step puzzle lock, beautiful thing. And I had gotten four out of
- five, five out of six steps. I was stuck on the last step. And I sat at the table for days and my daughter
- finally walked in and said, why don't you try such and such? I'm not going to say it because the first
- rule of puzzle solutions is you do not talk about puzzle solutions.
- So she said, why don't you try such and such? And I thought, she's 12, what can it hurt? I tried such
- and such, click, lock open. She turned on her heel and just waltzed happily out of the room. She didn't
- need to call me an idiot, it was implicit. There are lots of different puzzle types and there are lots
- of different capabilities
- and where those intersect is where things really live. But for those things to intersect, people have
- to have the opportunities. And so I think as you see, for instance, an increase in the number of women
- or black people, people of color in STEM fields, you will see an increase in participation in puzzle
- subculture. But it's got a strong engineering and mechanical electrical engineering background to it.
- I mean, Scientific American, the recreational mathematics columns,
- were kind of a literary guide for a lot of puzzlers. And then early puzzle books beyond some late 19th
- century stuff, early puzzle books tend to emphasize geometric puzzle design, mathematical problems.
- I mean, it's coming out of these fields that have certain kind of structural inequality. And I'm not
- supposed to talk about that stuff these days, but it's a fact. So we're gonna have to mention it.
- Hi, I had a question. So I always think the fun of puzzle or the thrill of puzzle is really like a one-time
- thing, which is to solve it. What is it called? Rubik's Cube? Yeah. I never bring that to camp because
- I don't have internet access to see how do you like the formula to return it back. So I was wondering
- as a professional yourself, what's your experience with that? Do you think that's true or do you have more fun
- The first solve is always, there is a real dopamine rush. When you get that endorphin rush, you get
- that burst of dopamine, you get that reward when you solve something. Some puzzles are tricky enough
- that even after you solve it, you're gonna have a problem. One of the puzzles I give my students is
- called the cast marble by Hanayama. And I'm gonna tell you right now, if you know people who like an
- inexpensive metal puzzle and wanna challenge the cast marble,
- absolute classic. It's just four pieces. There's two make a square frame and then two make a sphere
- inside the square frame. And it's a simple problem but not an easy one. Just like the safety pins is
- a simple problem but not an easy one. The problem, there's a second difficulty though which is when
- my students take it apart, I know it happens every time because it happened to me. It comes apart
- and it falls into the four pieces and you do a happy little dance and then you realize that the pieces
- are in a configuration that tells you nothing about how to put it back together. So there's a second
- solve. But even beyond that, I find with Rubik's cubes, with this, with the cast marble, with that Whittaker
- box that I showed you, sometimes it's just really nice to think through the solve and kind of retrace
- someone else's ingenuity.
- That's a huge part of the soul for me is almost a chasing game. The guy who designed this, I think about
- what he might have been thinking about when he designed this hexagonal prism puzzle. So that's also
- part of the social interaction. And especially with the sequential discovery or the secret of opening
- boxes, you're absolutely playing tag.
- that person is, or hide and seek, that person's hidden some style, you're trying to find them and you're
- following them. And you can almost hear the designer laughing when you get tricked. And some of them
- are, they're just so lovely. Thinking is so lovely. It's just really nice to rework the mechanism and
- try to imagine having that kind of thought process. Thank you all very much. I appreciate your time.
- So did anyone solve the three pins? I see three, four hands. Good job. Yes. So for those of you online,
- Brett congratulated the members who got it right because it took him weeks.
- Brett, thank you for a most interesting presentation. You said that if you're doing your job well, you're
- making our lives harder. You actually made my life better. So in a sense, you failed. Oh, excellent.
- OK. In honor of your talk, a donation we made this quarter to Amethyst House. I'd like to thank today's
- volunteers, Connie Chakalas, Lynn Schwartzberg, Judy Schoder, Joy Harder, Mike Baker, Kyla Cox-Deckard,
- Hank Walter, Jeff Richardson,
- Dave Meyer, Alain Barker, and Leslie Kutsenko. Tyler's been hustling today. Good job today, Tyler. Next
- regular meeting will be next Tuesday here in the Frangipani Room, January 13th. Jane McLeod will be
- here to speak to us about traveling university. Tyler, if you would share the graphic for the four-way
- test, and please stand if you're able.
- the things we think, say or do. First, is it the truth? Second, is it fair to all concerned? Third,
- will it build goodwill and better friendships? Fourth, will it be beneficial to all concerned? And fifth,
- is it fun?