Lovers of puzzles across Iowa — and everywhere — may be quick to associate the name Tom Underwood with the beloved print puzzle Wuzzles. Now syndicated worldwide, Wuzzles were first published in The Gazette in Cedar Rapids in 1982. But the story of tricky word games goes farther back than that.
Getting a clue
Before he was a master puzzle maker, Tom Ecker was an unimpressed amateur puzzle solver.
It was 1970, and he was serving as the longtime athletic director for the Cedar Rapids Community School District.
"I was in my office in Cedar Rapids, and my secretary came in with a sheet of Rebus puzzles that she wanted me to try to solve," he recalled on IPR’s Talk of Iowa.
Ecker thought the puzzles were too easy and set out to create his own instead — though after creating about 300 puzzles, he struggled to get them published. It wasn't until 1982 that Ecker finally got his puzzles into print — on a trial basis at first.
"I went to the managing editor of The Gazette,” he said. “I had pretty well exhausted every opportunity I had to get these puzzles accepted somewhere, and I said to the managing editor, 'If you'll run these for a couple weeks, I'll provide them free of charge.’”
After two weeks, Ecker tried to call the managing editor to see if the Wuzzles did well.
"I couldn't get through the switchboard because the lines were all tied up from people complaining because they were missing the Wuzzles that day, the first day in two weeks they hadn't seen them."
After 12 years of trying to get them published, Wuzzles were an instant hit, and the Gazette picked up the puzzles permanently.
Solving Wuzzles
Underneath their whimsical, fuzzy-wuzzy names, every Wuzzle puzzle is technically a Rebus puzzle: a brainteaser that uses combinations of carefully arranged letters, words and pictures to challenge its solvers. To solve, the player must identify a hidden word or phrase using the displays.
Ecker says there are over 500 hidden concepts that are able to be used in Wuzzles, including prepositions like "in," "over," "under" and “on” in order to suggest a word in a phrase.
Confused? Here's an example:
Ecker says there's no shortage of possible puzzles.
"I went through several dictionaries, standard dictionaries, and then dictionaries of idioms,” he said. “I just kept writing them down, and there were lots of them."
And when Ecker can't write down an idea and doesn’t want to forget, his wife Carol comes to the rescue.
"If I'm in the car, then I have to ask Carol to write it down for me," he said. "She knows when the time has come to write something down."
A puzzling identity
At the time Ecker's puzzles started publishing, he was still working for Cedar Rapids schools.
"I was working for a superintendent at that time who didn't like people moonlighting. And since I figured this was a form of moonlighting, I couldn't allow my name to be used."
Ecker picked out the name Tom Underwood as his pen name. He said he retained "Tom" because he could remember his first name, and the name "Underwood" could become a puzzle itself.
On Wuzzles, Tom signs his name in the form of a Wuzzle:
Wood
⸻
Tom
It wasn't until that superintendent retired that Ecker told The Gazette to release his true identity. They soon published the headline, "Who is Tom Underwood? The Answer Will Surprise You."
More than one mind-bender
In addition to Wuzzles, Ecker creates Crypto-Quotes, which he says he started around the time Wuzzles were syndicated. Solving a Crypto-Quote involves decrypting a famous quote by using the same letters in every spot. Crypto-Quotes, (generically called cryptograms) are similar to anagrams, but instead of rearranging letters, a cipher is needed to solve the puzzle.
"The name is coded at the top, then you just break the code by using the same letters that are in the name Tom Underwood in the puzzle, and eventually it comes out to be the quotation,” he said.
A little bit of guesswork is required to fill in the remaining blanks.
Ecker admits he enjoys the Crypto-Quotes even more than the Wuzzles.
"They're easier for me to create, for one thing,” he said. “I think the public likes them better."
Piece of mind
When Wuzzles became syndicated, Ecker made sure the contract stated that Wuzzles would be provided to The Gazette of Cedar Rapids at no charge.
"I'd just thought that they had been so nice to me over the years and had given me so many breaks that I had to do something for the newspaper,” he said.
Even with a rise in online puzzles and word games like The New York Times’ "Wordle," Ecker says he's in no rush to find a way to digitize his puzzles and wants to stick with printed puzzles.
And decades since he started making Wuzzles, he has no plans of stopping. Ecker says he'll continue to make puzzles, "Until I croak."
