Marriage proposal was a real puzzler for Twin Cities crossword fan

What's a 15-letter term for proposal? For a Twin Cities couple, it's "crossword puzzle."

Wanting to pop the question to Emily Schwartz, Jessica Campbell talked the creator of the Vita.mn crossword puzzle into incorporating her proposal into one of his grids.

Brendan Emmett Quigley's puzzle appeared in an edition on newsstands in early November. As she typically does, puzzle aficionado Schwartz tackled the crossword as soon as she got home from work the day it came out.

She got all the answers right, but she completely missed their meaning.

"I didn't realize that it was in there," she said of the proposal.

The proposal was spelled out in three answers that ran horizontally across the top line of the grid. The answers were: "Emily," "Marry" and "Jess." But Schwartz doesn't work puzzles horizontally. She attacks them in quadrants, filling in one area before moving onto the next.

"I do them block by block," she explained. "And once I've solved one block, I forget about those clues and move on to the next ones."

"I picked up on that theme," Schwartz said in her defense. "In fact, I even mentioned it to Jess. But I still missed the proposal. And Jess kept saying, 'What else do you see?' "

She eventually read across the top line — and immediately accepted.

Quigley, who lives in Massachusetts, wasn't surprised that the proposal didn't jump out at Schwartz. Like most puzzle-makers, he has a test audience who works his puzzles before they're published to check for errors or confusing clues.

"They didn't catch it, either," he said of the testers. "They usually won't find that sort of thing unless they know to look for it, and I didn't tell them."

He didn't alert them on purpose. In addition to Vita.mn, which is published by the Star Tribune, his puzzles appear in magazines all across the country. The puzzle had to work for all of his readers, not just Campbell and Schwartz. If the proposal had jumped out at the testers, Quigley was prepared to pull the plug on the project.

"I get requests like this all the time, and I'm happy to do a puzzle on an individual basis for someone," he said. "But the proposal gimmick has been played out. So I told her that I'd do it — with one small caveat: We had to do something different. It had to have a new twist."

Campbell and Quigley exchanged e-mails kicking around ideas until they stumbled on the idea of fake weddings that would produce funny last names.

"That's what I was looking for, something that would work for the general audience," Quigley said. "Once we came up with that hook, I took it and ran with it."

Meanwhile, Campbell was organizing things on this end. She established the habit of bringing home each week's edition of Vita.mn, thwarting any chance that Schwartz might inadvertently pick up the proposal issue and tackle the crossword puzzle during a coffee break. And, although she has a lot of faith in Schwartz's puzzle-solving ability, she also got Quigley to send her a copy of the answer grid — just in case.

After she figured out what was going on, Schwartz was in shock — both from the excitement of getting engaged and the amazement over how it happened.

An August wedding is planned.