Each letter has been replaced by a different letter. Can you figure out what it says?
— SUBSTITUTION ALPHABET —
3 letter words first → XS = AT SMJ = THEif S=T and the hint says J=E then M=H ✓XS SMJ → "at the" ... at the what?last word ends UWWPRJ double W → double F? OFFICEso U=O, W=F, P=I, R=C → check GURSUQF → D O C T O R S ✓
Y=DB
Q=NLR
X=IA
PUZZLE BY C.J. HENDRYGATE — ILLUSTRATION BY MISS DOLORES PIKKAKANGAS
THIS MONTH’S PUZZLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY YOUR PEDIATRICIAN — see her after the puzzle!
kids who solved this puzzle: 1
I started this column in nineteen eighty-one, my first quarter at Patterson, after the editorial director Mr. Halsey Bjorklund asked at the welcome lunch whether I could write a centerfold puzzle that a ten-year-old in a waiting room would feel respected by. I said I could, and I have written one every quarter since, and I do not pull from the stock-puzzle archive. The cryptogram for this issue I wrote on a Monday morning in August at the drafting desk by the second-floor window, three drafts in a yellow legal pad, the third was the one I kept.
— C.J. Hendrygate, Aug 31 1987
Cal asked me last week if I could draw the detective looking confident and I said no thank you Cal, I read your sentence and the detective on this one is going to look a little nervous, a little not-sure-of-himself, and Cal said well yes that is exactly right. The brim of the hat sits low because that is how a child draws a detective when she is concentrating on the puzzle and not on the picture.
— Dolores Pikkakangas, Sep 2 1987
I always draw the lens of the magnifying glass a touch lopsided because the children who pick up the booklet need to be able to tell that a person sat down and drew it for them, not a machine that stamped it out. The handle I drew at the angle a right-handed detective would hold it because Cal said the cipher is solved one cell at a time and that is also how a magnifying glass reads a page.
— D.P., Patterson studio
I give the kids T H and E because they are the three most frequent letters in English and because handing them the three commonest as starter hints lets them solve the puzzle by deduction instead of by guessing. A ten-year-old who solves it by deduction will trust the next puzzle. A ten-year-old who guesses will not. That is the whole thing, and I learned it in twelve years of pre-algebra.
— C.J.H.
Halsey wanted twenty-six cells laid out in three rows of nine, and I drew the two-row layout on the editorial whiteboard August twenty-fourth nineteen eighty-two and he conceded the point by Wednesday. Left the classroom door. Two rows of twenty-six cells. Monday morning’s choice. A child reads a grid the way she reads a chalkboard, top to bottom, left to right, and a two-row table teaches her eye the rhythm of the alphabet the same way I taught my pre-algebra class to read a function table in nineteen seventy-five. The three-row layout would have saved Patterson a quarter inch of vertical space and confused four hundred thousand ten-year-olds in the process.
— C.J.H.
I sign my middle initial because there is another Calvin Hendrygate who writes puzzles for Dell Crossword Magazines out of Stamford, Connecticut, and I do not want any confusion. The J is for Jaakko, which was my maternal grandfather who came over from Tampere Finland in eighteen eighty-eight and worked at the Soo Line railroad shops in St. Paul for forty-one years until his retirement in nineteen twenty-nine.
— C.J.H.
The booklet is loss-leader marketing for our office-supply sales. Pediatricians order their letterhead and prescription pads and intake forms from Patterson because the booklet keeps their waiting rooms quiet and the kids do not pull the magazines off the side table. But Cal Hendrygate does the puzzles like the booklet matters, because it does matter — the kids read it, and Cal writes a sentence on a Monday morning that he wants a ten-year-old to read right before the nurse calls her name, and that is the small honest fact at the bottom of the loss-leader equation.
— H. Bjorklund, Art Dir.
i was thirsty and i set the booklet down on the chair-arm to drink and then i picked it up and there was a drop on the page and mom looked over and said it was fine the booklet is free anyway, but i wished i hadnt done it.
— W.S., 3:53pm
— The Answer —
BRAVE PEOPLE STILL FEEL SCARED AT THE DOCTOR’S OFFICE
I wrote this sentence on a Monday morning in August. I thought about it for a long time before I wrote it.
I want you to know that you are not the only one who feels nervous in the waiting room. I have been bringing my wife Edna to her rheumatologist for seven years and I still feel nervous in waiting rooms. It does not go away when you grow up. It just gets easier to carry.
— C.J.H., Patterson Office Supplies, St. Paul
i solved it. the nurse called my name right after.
i told dr. vorhauer about the puzzle and she said that mr. hendrygate is right, she still feels nervous before some appointments too even though she is the doctor.
she said i could keep the booklet to take home. it is in my backpack now.
— wendell saperstein, age 10, fifth grade, highland park elementary,
4818 saratoga street, saint paul minnesota 55116.