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?