Crossword Ace Eugene Maleska, Laced His Puzzles With Puckish Puns

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - Eugene Maleska was a mindboggler with a mischievous sense of humor and profound love of puns and literary trivia. He put it all into his crossword puzzles.

Mr. Maleska, crossword puzzle editor for the New York Times since 1977, died of throat cancer Tuesday at his home in Daytona Beach. He was 77.

Popular for a clever style that mixed literary references, opera characters and popular puns, Mr. Maleska wrote more than 7,000 puzzles for the daily newspaper and the New York Times Magazine, published every Sunday.

"Even when he was ill, Gene continued to construct and edit puzzles and sent us enough to fill our pages through September. We'll use all of them," said Jack Rosenthal, editor of the magazine, who hired the crosswords ace.

"Maleska combined a clue maker's exactitude with a puckishness that was apparent in puzzles such as one titled `Strip Tees.' It had nothing to do with the buff or the rough, but with dropping the 20th letter of the alphabet," wrote James Barron, a Metro reporter for the Times.

Using that formula, the puzzle answer to "Tim's tune" was "ipoehroughheulips" ("Tiptoe Through the Tulips") and a "nondrinker" was a "eeoaler."

Born on Jan. 6, 1916, in Jersey City, N.J., Mr. Maleska constructed his first puzzle in 1933 as an undergraduate at Montclair State College in Montclair, N.J. In 1940 he began freelancing puzzles to the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune. The Times started publishing his work in 1943.

Crossword puzzles were a second career for Mr. Maleska, who taught Latin and English in Palisades Park, N.J., and was an administrator in New York City schools, retiring from that field in 1973.

Rosenthal described Mr. Maleska as an innovator in crossword puzzles, especially for his maddening and mind-twisting puzzles such as Stepquote (in which key words, laid out on the puzzle grid like a staircase, formed a quotation), Diagonogram and Cryptoquote.

Mr. Maleska had fans who corresponded with him frequently, both praising and criticizing.

In one of his books, "Across and Down," he wrote he had learned the hard way that Bambi is a stag, not a doe, and that "Et tu Brute?" were Caesar's penultimate words, not his last ones. His last book, "Crosstalk," is scheduled to be published in October.

"I may have a Polish name, but unlike Pope John Paul II, I cannot claim any kind of infallibility," he said in 1987.