This morning I wondering how I fell in love with picture puzzles. (Is that the Southern name for a jigsaw puzzle? One time I told someone I was working on a picture puzzle, and they looked at me with blank eyes. They had no idea what I was talking about.)
I don't recall either of my parents or my brothers ever working puzzles. I know I got my love of crosswords from my daddy, as my younger son got his love (obsession?) from me. (He once started a crossword puzzle tournament in Youngstown. It only ran a couple of years - maybe his work got in the way of all the planning activity. Or maybe his divorce. I don't know.) And my grandson frequently works crosswords with his dad, while my granddaughter is more prone to sit down at the jigsaw puzzle table when she comes over to visit. My elder son tells me he loves picture puzzles, but his cat-from-hell would turn a standing puzzle into chaos
But how did I start doing picture puzzles? Someone had to have bought a puzzle for me. I've been doing them since elementary school days. Did I save my allowance and hop on my bike and ride to the Rexall Drug Store in Maitland where I might have bought my first puzzle?
[Like a flash while typing the previous sentence, I suddenly have a very faint memory of having a puzzle at our vacation cottage in Cashiers, NC. I know we bought that house furnished, so maybe several came with the property.]
I have very few memories of high school. I attended Forest Lake Academy, a Seventh-day Adventist high school, grades 9-12, northwest of Orlando The school's administration building burned down a month or so before school was to begin in the fall of 1968. The administration building had held a number of classrooms, without which the entire student body could not have all gone to school at the same time. The solution was to have a split day. The freshmen and seniors would go to school in the morning, and the sophomores and juniors would go in the afternoon.
The morning session began at 7:00, I believe. Because of where I lived, I was the first person on the bus every day. My daddy always went to Florida Hospital to make rounds with his surgical patients before going to the office, leaving the house before 6:00. For my entire freshman year, my daddy drove me to meet the bus at the Rexall on the corner of Horatio and 17-92. We would sit in the car and talk until the bus arrived. Tears well in my eyes as I write this. Those were some of the most precious times in my life. It was certainly the most extended time Daddy and I had together.
My mother was kind to me when it suited her. It didn't often suit her. Verbally tearing me down suited her much better. But my daddy poured love all over me I frequently think he was the one who wanted to adopt me, not Mother.
After our morning of classes, we had band, choir, lunch from 11:00 to 1:00 ... activities that involved the entire student body of roughly 300. Then I boarded the bus and rode home, where I was the last person off the bus. The bus let me out on 17-92 at Manor Road. I had about a mile to walk to the end of Manor Road. Sometimes Mother would pick me up, but my memories are of lovely solitary walks home. (And now I look it up on Google Maps, and learn my walk was less than half a mile.)
I must have practiced the piano or the oboe or the organ when I got home, but my memories were of sitting on the floor in the living room at the large square coffee table and working on whatever puzzle was laid out there. Daddy had a stereo system set up nearby, with a reel-to-reel tape deck and a turntable that he taught me to use. He would buy records that he knew I would enjoy. The soundtracks to "Oklahoma," "The Music Man," "The Sound of Music," and albums by The Lettermen, Sergio Mendez, the Reader's Digest set of the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan .... I lived for my afternoons of solitude - Mother working in the kitchen or sewing in her bedroom on her Necchi and leaving me alone. I was listening to music and singing at the top of my lungs, and methodically putting pieces into the puzzle.
Wikipedia tells me the first commercially available puzzle was made in 1760, and that sales soared during the Great Depression. They were an inexpensive form of entertainment and could be used over and over again. Sales fell off after the depression, when rising wages caused higher prices. Interestingly, the Covid pandemic of 2020 caused renewed interest in jigsaw puzzles!
So, back to my original thought - how were jigsaw puzzles introduced into my life. I believe first with the wooden puzzles that were sold in the 1950s where large pieces would fit into a frame to help toddlers develop manual dexterity. I remember seeing those in my house as a child, after I had outgrown them. And then, quite possibly, the serendipity of buying our North Carolina mountain property and being introduced to puzzles there as a vacation activity.
And here I am in my early 70s, still finding great joy from putting the final piece into a puzzle.
By the way, Wikipedia also tells me, "According to the Alzheimer Society of Canada, doing jigsaw puzzles is one of many activities that can help keep the brain active and may reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease."
It looks like I'll be working picture puzzles for many years to come.
There's no defined name for the thing that sticks out from a puzzle piece, enabling it to be locked into the adjacent piece I refer to them as outties and innies when talking to my son, as in, "I hate those puzzles where all the pieces are the same - two innies and two outties."
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