A few weeks ago we featured a crossword by Tim Beatty, a retired teacher and alum. Tim Beatty grew up in Swanton, Ohio, forty minutes northwest of Bowling Green. He attended Bowling Green State University (BGSU) between 1969 and 1976, earning both his Bachelor’s and his Master’s in history and American Culture Studies. He remembers fondly Robert Twyman as one of his history professors, enjoying the courses he taught.

After graduation he embarked in a long and fruitful career in education that included stops in St. Labre Indian School in Montana, Berea City Schools in Cuyahoga County, and the Hebrew Academy at Cleveland. He retired in 2018.

Tim began his work with history crosswords in 1973, while in the winter of Montana with ample time, he came up with the idea of history-related puzzles. He sat down with a ruler, paper, and drew the grid by hand, small, time-consuming, and “crude,” as Tim described it. When he moved to Berea, he had access to technology and the puzzles began to grow, become refined, and become more complex. In a computer program, he would take a blank grid and took related words and worked to fit them through trial-and-error and slowly filled out the grid. He would use textbooks from his curriculum, highlight and mark passages to use for clues. In the 1980s, he even had some puzzles published! He focused mainly on American history and the Cold War.
His crosswords faded when he left teaching but began again with his granddaughter, a sophomore in high school and just as interested in history. He plans to make them for her as she starts AP History in her junior year. His students had always been receptive to them, and we hope that it will be the same here. Tim shared some of his crosswords with the BGSU History Department, one of which is shown below. The playable link is shown here, if readers are inclined to try it out and play! https://crosswords.brightsprout.com/1229839/Give-Me-Liberty-Chapter-9

We’d love to hear your experiences, stories, memories too! Feel free to comment, share, email, or message us on our blog and socials (@historydepartmentbgsu on Instagram, BGSU Department of History on Facebook, and @BGSU_History on Twitter/X)!