Aunt Renate gave me a little dish of the chocolate pudding from supper and I set the leaflet down for one second to take a bite and now there is a thumbprint right by the title. Babcia laughed and said it is a part of solving now.

I set my cup down to look at clue four with her. The clock striking the quarter-hour — I knew the moment I read it. I told her, the clock is the key. She did not need me to say more than that. She is patient like her grandfather was. She will find it.

no. 2

F.W.W. 11·17·62

№ 218 — DIST. CYCLE 22

F.W. Woolworth's

I have stocked the spinner rack with these every other Saturday since the summer of 'fifty-five. Mrs. Brzezinski's puzzles bring the families back through the front door. I keep the bulletin board behind the registers tidy, I keep the rack full, and the children pick them up before they go home. That is the work.

Your Friendly Variety Store

✦ ✦ ✦

The Mystery of the
Missing Pocket Watch

A WHODUNIT for you to solve · presented in the Sunday Funnies Mystery series

✦ ✦ ✦

The Clues — Six in All

1. Mr. Pettibone was reading the evening paper in the front parlor at the time the watch was taken. He never moved from the wing-back chair until Mrs. Higginbotham rang the supper bell.

The first clue should give the solver a fixed point. I always put one suspect somewhere very firmly in the first clue — it is the corner of the puzzle a child can hook a pencil into. Mr. Pettibone in the wing-back chair is yours. From there you may begin.

2. The brass letter-opener was last seen on the writing-desk in the upstairs study. Miss Vanderhoeffel was nowhere near the upstairs study that evening — she does not climb the stairs on account of her knee.

Two pieces of information per clue, no more. The first sentence fixes the letter-opener. The second sentence releases Miss Vanderhoeffel from the upstairs entirely. A child reading patiently will see both — but they must read patiently.

3. Reverend Ostrowski was the owner of the pocket watch. He had laid it on the parlor sideboard when he came in from the rain at half past seven, and it was gone by the time the supper bell rang at quarter past eight.

The owner of the missing object is named outright. This is not a riddle about who owned the watch. It is a question of who took it from the sideboard, and with what, and from where. A child does not need to be tricked. She needs to be trusted.

4. Monday morning at the desk. Four careful drafts of a five-suspect grid. Hudson fog lifts at quarter to ten. The grandfather clock in the hall struck the quarter-hour at 8:14pm exactly, and only Dr. Krzeminski heard it strike — for he was the only suspect who happened to be passing through the hall at that moment, on his way from the parlor to the kitchen.

Monday morning at the desk. Four careful drafts of a five-suspect grid. Hudson fog lifts at quarter to ten. I calibrated this clock-strike alibi across the fourth draft on Monday morning October twenty-second. The radiator was ticking and the river was visible by the time I finished. A passing-through-the-hall clue is more honest than an absence clue — it places one suspect somewhere instead of nowhere.

5. Mrs. Hagenbuckle spent the entire evening in the kitchen kneading the Sunday bread. The kitchen is at the back of the house and shares no doorway with the parlor sideboard.

Mrs. Hagenbuckle's kneading is the alibi that does the most quiet work in the puzzle. The kitchen-to-parlor geometry rules her out of two cells at once. I tested this against the elimination cross-check on the fourth draft and it held.

6. Whoever took the watch did so with the brass letter-opener in hand, having fetched it down from the upstairs study earlier in the afternoon and slipped it into his coat-pocket against the cold of the front hall.

The sixth clue ties the implement to the act. With the first five clues placed and this last clue read carefully, the grid resolves to exactly one valid solution. I checked it three times Monday afternoon before the manuscript went into the courier-envelope for the Friday pickup to Pittsburgh Litho.

Two flat-ink plates for the scene this issue, the brick-red and the slate-blue, registered against the cream ground. I drew Mr. Pettibone in his wing-back chair from memory of my own father in his wing-back chair on Atlantic Avenue in 1934. The grandfather clock is the one my Aunt Helga kept in the front hall in Buffalo. I am sixty-six years old this year and I still draw every centerfold scene-illustration freehand. There is no other honest way to draw them.

The Five Suspects

Mr. Pettibone — retired railway clerk, boarder since 1958 at 8:14pm: front parlor, wing-back chair

I name the boarders of Mrs. Higginbotham's house from the family-name pages of the Brooklyn telephone directory. Mr. Pettibone is in the directory at 4218 Lenox Road. He is a real-sounding man and that is enough. He reads the evening paper because he has always read the evening paper.

Miss Vanderhoeffel — piano teacher, boarder since 1954 at 8:14pm: settee in the front parlor, knitting

Miss Vanderhoeffel cannot climb the stairs because I needed an architectural alibi, not a moral one. A puzzle-suspect's limitation must come from her body or her room, not from her character. She is a decent woman. She is also not the one who took the watch.

Dr. Krzeminski — general practitioner, takes a room on Saturdays at 8:14pm: passing through the front hall

I gave Dr. Krzeminski his name because I went to school with a Sophie Krzeminski at Hunter and she was kind to me my freshman year. The puzzle-suspect borrows the spelling and not the person — Sophie is a librarian in White Plains now and would never take a pocket watch.

Mrs. Hagenbuckle — cook and housekeeper, employed since 1949 at 8:14pm: the kitchen, kneading bread

The cook always kneads the bread on Saturday because Saturday-night bread-kneading is the most architecturally fixed alibi I can give a woman in a five-suspect grid. The dough requires her hands and the hands require her body and the body cannot be in the parlor. The grid resolves because of this.

Rev. Ostrowski — Lutheran minister, weekend guest at 8:14pm: just arrived, removing his coat in the parlor

The owner of the missing object must be present in the room. A puzzle where the owner is absent is a puzzle the child cannot picture. Rev. Ostrowski arrives in time to lose his watch and not in time to keep it. He is one of the kindest of my suspect-figures across all 184 puzzles.

— Your Solution Grid —

Who?

Where?

Weapon?

Babcia's dishtowel rooster for the Christmas project. I am drawing him here so I remember to ask her about the red thread for his comb when we go back to Woolworth's the Saturday after next.

KIDS WHO SOLVED THE MYSTERY ACROSS ALL 1,847 WOOLWORTH'S STORES THIS WEEK: 1

~~Mrs. Hagenbuckle / parlor / clock?~~

~~Rev. Ostrowski / hall / hat-pin~~

~~Miss V. / sideboard / no!~~

SUNDAY FUNNIES MYSTERY №218 · PRINTED AT PITTSBURGH LITHOGRAPHIC CO. · OCT. 26, 1962

PUZZLE BY C. BRZEZINSKI · SCENE ILLUSTRATION BY C. HUTZELPFENNIG · 14TH FLOOR, BROADWAY

FREE WITH ANY VISIT TO YOUR NEAREST F.W. WOOLWORTH'S — THANK YOU FOR STOPPING IN

The Solution

— from the desk of Mrs. C. Brzezinski —

The pocket watch belonged to Reverend Ostrowski, who had laid it on the parlor sideboard at half past seven on coming in from the rain. It was taken from that same sideboard at fourteen minutes past eight by Dr. Krzeminski, who was the only suspect passing through the hall when the grandfather clock struck the quarter-hour, and who had fetched the brass letter-opener down from the upstairs study earlier in the afternoon and slipped it into his coat-pocket against the cold of the front hall.

Mr. Pettibone never left his wing-back chair. Miss Vanderhoeffel could not climb the stairs to retrieve the letter-opener. Mrs. Hagenbuckle was kneading Sunday bread in the kitchen and the kitchen shares no doorway with the parlor sideboard. Rev. Ostrowski had only just removed his coat. The remaining suspect, by patient elimination, is Dr. Krzeminski; the remaining implement is the brass letter-opener; the remaining location is the parlor sideboard. The grid resolves to exactly one valid arrangement.

I chose the boardinghouse setting for the November issue because the November leaflet always goes out the Friday before the children's first cold Saturday, and a boardinghouse parlor is a warm room with a fire and five people in it and a grandfather clock ticking, and I wanted the child at the kitchen table to feel she was sitting in the room with them while she worked the puzzle. — C.B., 14th floor, October 22, 1962.

Sunday November 18 1962
2:14pm — at the kitchen table after Mass

Dear Mrs. Brzezinski —

I do not know if this letter will ever get to you because Babcia says the Woolworth's company has a lot of people and the letter would have to find you.

But I solved your mystery last night at 9:14pm and I wanted to write to you because I am eleven years old and I have been working your puzzles for a year and a half now and I want you to know that I figured out the Reverend's pocket watch by listening to the clock-strike clue carefully because that is the one Babcia helped me with — she said the clock was the key, she could tell from looking at the picture.

Babcia was born in Krakow in 1893 and she learned to read English when she came to Pottsville in 1924 and she likes the puzzles too even though she pretends she does not.

I am going to send this letter to the Woolworth's company office in New York City and ask them to please give it to the lady who makes the SUNDAY FUNNIES MYSTERY.

Thank you for making them. I will keep solving them.

Sincerely yours,
Diana Wojciechowski
age 11, sixth grade
John S. Clarke Elementary School
814 North Centre Street
Pottsville Pennsylvania