He was in a bookstore with his father, browsing the crossword books, and his father handed him a copy of “Will Shortz’s Favorite Crossword Puzzles.” But his stepfather encouraged him and he completed his first Post puzzle as a young teenager. He stayed with his Fill-It-Ins for a while, but then he found his stepfather working on the Washington Post crossword puzzle and, at first, he was put off because he needed to know things, especially trivia, to complete crosswords. I started drawing up little grids, shading in squares, filling in random strings of letters, such as JXQZ as some abbreviation to get my grid to work.”
“I was always interested in how they were made, these interlocking words it was a puzzle to me.
“I found it very fascinating, and I was too young to finish it correctly, but I pointed it out to my mom and in the weeks that followed, she bought me this book of Fill-It-In puzzles, and I started moving through them,” he said. Word puzzles have fascinated Ezersky since he was about 6 years old, discovering a Fill-It-In puzzle in a magazine in a Baltimore barbershop while waiting for his brother to get his hair cut.
