Bernice Gordon, a doyenne of the crossword whose tautly constructed puzzles appeared for six decades in newspapers across and down the United States, died Jan. 29 at her home in Philadelphia. She was 101.
“My child,” she recalled her own mother admonishing, “if you spend as much money on cookbooks as you do on dictionaries, your family would be better off.”
Mrs. Gordon's first New York Times puzzle was published in the early 1950s under Margaret Farrar, the Times's first crossword-puzzle editor, the newspaper reported. The Times has printed 150 of her puzzles since then, according to an estimate by current crossword editor Will Shortz, most recently when she was 100.
Her puzzles also appeared in newspapers including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. The Universal Uclick syndicate distributed her work through its crossword, which has appeared on The Washington Post's Web site and in Express, The Post's free commuter newspaper.
Mrs. Gordon also designed puzzles for crossword-puzzle books consumed by cruciverbalists who are unsatiated by the daily dose offered in a newspaper.
Surrounded at her home by several hundred reference guides, she was said to have designed a new puzzle each day. “It makes me think,” she once told the Inquirer, “takes me into another world.”
Her career was so long, it was noted, as to span an evolution in the English language.
When she started out, she told the Inquirer, the word “boob” could refer to a dunce, but not to the female anatomy. She said she knew an editor who was dismissed over the five-letter answer to the clue, “The ----- mightier than the sword.”
In later years, she recalled, she sparred with Shortz over the words “yea” (permissible, she said) and “yay” (not permissible, in her opinion, although Shortz reportedly disagreed). New trends in footwear, referenced in a puzzle, prompted her to confess that she was unfamiliar with the word “Uggs.”
Mrs. Gordon was credited with pioneering and popularizing the use of the rebus, in which a character represents a word or part of a word. Examples might include “AMPERS&” or “S&PAPER,” with the ampersand standing in for the common conjunction.
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Although the concept of the rebus was not new, it had never appeared in a crossword until her New York Times puzzle of May 30, 1965, according to crossword puzzler Ben Tausig’s book “The Curious History of the Crossword.”
Responses from the puzzling community, a portion of which can be fanatical, were strong.
“America was wild!” Mrs. Gordon told the Inquirer. “They said it was cheating.”
Today the rebus is a convention of the crossword. In an interview, Tausig compared Mrs. Gordon’s use of the device to artist Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary style of painting. Both creators, Tausig said, looked at a blank space and had “the imagination to do something transformative with it.”
“Even though you know that people will react negatively against it,” he said, “you also know your idea has its own internal logic and that once people get used to it, they’ll recognize it as genius, or at least as something that makes sense.”
Bernice Biberman was born Jan. 11, 1914, in Philadelphia. Her mother worked for a time in a cigar factory. Her father, a Russian Jewish immigrant, sold pencils before becoming an executive with a dressmaking business that would eventually fail during the Depression.
“I was brought up in the lap of luxury,” Mrs. Gordon told the Inquirer. “I never made a bed. I never washed a dish.”
She received a fine arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1935. In her 50s, her son said, she returned to school, received a degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and kept a painting studio.
Her first husband, Benjamin Lanard Sr., died in 1947 after 12 years of marriage. Her second husband, Allen Gordon, died in 1967 after 18 years of marriage. A son from her first marriage, Benjamin Lanard Jr., died last year.
Survivors include another son from her first marriage, Jim Lanard of Scottsdale, Ariz.; a daughter from her second marriage, Mandy D’Amico of Westchester, Pa.; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Jim Lanard said that his mother took more pleasure in creating crossword puzzles than in completing them.
“They make my life,” she once told the Associated Press. “I couldn’t live without them.”
