David Hoyt knows how mixed up the world can be — particularly when it comes to its consonants and vowels.
The 37-year-old Chicago resident has taken the well-known puzzle Jumble and helped create variants ranging from a board game to a calendar. And he’s trying to shop a non-reality television show loosely based on his life on the Gold Coast.
But even if the sitcom idea gets picked up, the real deal — with him creating quirky guidelines for personal conduct and making an Asian restaurant his home away from home — might prove more random and eccentric.
“I don’t want people thinking I’m a wacko,” he said. “But I am.”
Both puzzlemaking and board game manufacturing are unforgiving fields. Mike Hirtle, vice president of research and development for Hasbro Games, said he gets pitched as many as 1,600 concepts a year and selects about 30. But he said Hoyt impressed him enough that he made deals on a couple of products, including “Split,” a Rummy-type game in which players score points by pairing up halves of playing cards.
“He’s got a great sense of games,” Hirtle said. “Everything he brings to me is high quality and well thought out. He has a way of seeing the big picture, not just the game itself but the marketing.”
But Hoyt didn’t grow up a puzzle or game aficionado, according to his father, Russell L. Hoyt. As a child, the younger Hoyt adds, he dreamed of becoming rich by inventing the first perpetual-motion machine.
Karen Hoyt Metlica, David Hoyt’s ex-wife, said she met him when, as a 19-year-old, he had started a business in Florida transporting oaks from Tallahassee to Tampa for landscaping. “He was very enterprising from the beginning,” she said.
The couple moved to Chicago because Hoyt wanted to try his hand as a trader. While at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, Hoyt said he became obsessed with making money to the point where, after work, he almost couldn’t wait for the markets to reopen. He blamed that for breaking up his marriage.
But his four-year stint as a trader helped seed his current career. Hoyt said that, in 1991, an acquaintance mentioned a friend had created and sold a game, and something about that appealed to Hoyt.
“I just found it to be an extension of what I love, which is to invent stuff,” Hoyt said.
So he concocted Economic Warfare, which he describes as an unsuccessful cross between Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly. “Way too cerebral,” he said.
But Hoyt kept at game invention and, about five years ago, he wanted to market a board game similar to Jumble. A game company said it would go forward with it if Hoyt obtained a license to use the Jumble name.
The original Jumble, invented in 1954, challenges players to unscramble a series of letters into words, and then take key letters from those words and decipher the answer to a question accompanying a cartoon. Tribune Media Services (part of the same company that owns the Tribune) distributes it to the Tribune and more than 600 U.S. newspapers.
Hoyt produces his permutations on the Jumble theme independent of the pair who compose the classic brainteaser, Henri Arnold and Mike Argirion. Hoyt’s versions now include: Jumble Crosswords, in which people fill out a grid by rearranging letters, some of which then help solve a bonus answer, TV Jumble, which combines much of the format of the original with boob-tube trivia, and a series of books called Jumble BrainBusters. Tribune Media Services syndicates Jumble Crosswords to more than 50 papers, including the New York Daily News and the Boston Globe. TV Jumble appears in 30 papers, including the Tribune, and various cable-system guides.
“Sometimes, you don’t have to invent the wheel,” Hoyt said. “You just have to find new uses for it.”
An idea guy
Elyce Goldstein, director of licensing at Tribune Media Services, said Hoyt’s energy and enthusiasm made him instrumental in helping to grow the classic feature to about a dozen variations. “He’s fun to work with,” Goldstein said. “He’s really got a never-ending stream of ideas.”
Hoyt said he makes about $200,000 annually from his various puzzles and games. In his previous life as a broker, Hoyt said, he made about half that.
Puzzle construction sessions begin as early as 4 a.m. to avoid distractions.
Sometimes, Hoyt said, he can whip together a puzzle in a few minutes while, other times, the process might drag on for a few hours.
He spent part of a recent day double-checking the puzzles he’d created. “It’s not fun to play a puzzle you know the answers to, not fun at all,” Hoyt said. But he said he can guarantee that some of his work will have mistakes, a letter missing here, one of the circles that indicate a key letter in the wrong place there. By his own admission, he’s not a very good speller.
Hoyt sometimes sprinkles biographical details about himself in his Jumbles.
One regular player, Dexter Wheeler from the Boston suburbs, has kept track of some of them on an index card, including that Hoyt’s date of birth is Dec. 2, 1965; that he lived in Waterbury, Conn., Tampa and an Atlanta suburb; that he did landscaping as a teenager; married in 1989; moved to Chicago in 1990; divorced in 1993; and has Lawrence as his middle name.
Clever approach
“I almost feel like I know the guy, even though I don’t,” Wheeler said. “I think it was a very clever thing to keep interest up.”
Others e-mail Hoyt regularly to get hints on the puzzles or to strike up conversations.
“I’ve created a real bond with some of these people,” Hoyt said. “All these people who are not geniuses, I want them to feel smart when they do my puzzles. Because if they feel smart, they’ll come back.”
Next year, Hoyt will be working with a partner, Jeff Knurek, to introduce a line of puzzles based on the game Boggle. He’s planning Jumble See & Search, which combines Jumble with a “Where’s Waldo”-like search for items in an illustration. And he’s hoping to visit classrooms with puzzles more frequently in an attempt to get children more excited about learning.
In his spare time, he’s got a number of other hobbies. He loves golf, and he’s an amateur songwriter and guitar player.
He said, however, he doesn’t really enjoy playing board games and puzzles all that much himself.
And for a person whose livelihood comes from scrambling things up, Hoyt seems to have a low tolerance for disorder. Hoyt said he has to constantly set standards to live by, pitting one of his vices against another to get the desired results.
For instance, he knows that if he’s left to his own devices, he’ll get caught up in programs such as “The Simpsons” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” So he doesn’t have a remote, forcing him to get up and physically change the channel.
Hoyt regularly shows up at the Big Bowl at 6 E. Cedar St. He typically ventures there four nights a week to work and eat, and says he’s spent as much as $8,000 a year dining there.
Part of the furniture
He sets up at his customary table, the first one when you enter the restaurant, with his laptop, has a few drinks and some food, does some people-watching. He has been coming regularly to that location for longer than any of the current staff, employees said.
“When you work out of your house, you can get a little isolated,” Hoyt said. “The people at Big Bowl are like my family.”
One Big Bowl employee is prepared to make that family tie official: Hoyt is engaged to marry 26-year-old Heather Dodge, who works as a server at the restaurant.
“My life really is like a combination of `Seinfeld’ and `Cheers,'” Hoyt said.
That made him think he could stir up interest about a fictionalized Hoyt.
Daniel Salzman, the producer who is fine-tuning the concept with Hoyt, said Hoyt brought the idea up when he was helping with the creation of a Jumble game show. Salzman said he envisions the sitcom as “about a guy who knows everything about esoterica and puzzles and has a legion of fans, and yet he’s not exactly where he wants to be on the personal side, because he has a problem with relationships.”
Ex-wife Metlica, who is on friendly terms with Hoyt, said she’s a little uncomfortable with the possibility of a fictionalized version of her but wishes her ex luck.
“I keep thinking, `What are the odds this is going to get through?'” she said. “But with Dave, I should know better.”
Puzzling out the puzzles
To David Hoyt, puzzlemaking is more fun than puzzle-solving is to many.
He said he thought he could automate a lot of the process. But he makes his variants on the scrambled-word game Jumble, crosswords and word searches by hand.
“It also allows my personality to work its way into the puzzle,” Hoyt said. “As I change, the puzzles change. I’ve enjoyed making every puzzle I’ve ever made.”
He typically takes blank puzzle grids, his laptop, a few pencils and reference materials to a restaurant or a coffee shop.
For most of the Jumble-type puzzles he makes, Hoyt starts with the bonus/mystery answer first, then builds backward so that the other words in the puzzle contain the letters needed.
Hoyt spends time searching the Internet to manufacture some puzzles. These include his Jumble For the Classroom, with answers based on such categories as geography, math and biology, or his TV Guide Crosswords, which require small-screen trivia knowledge.
For puzzles such as Lost & Found Words that appear in the cable TV books, Hoyt said he simply places words into the word-search type grid to make them all fit properly.
“You wouldn’t believe the number of pencils I go through,” Hoyt said. “The erasers usually wear out before the lead.”
Once Hoyt is satisfied with the puzzle on paper, he puts it into his graphics program to make it look like what appears in the newspaper, book or magazine. “It’s a little boring and not a very challenging part of the process,” Hoyt said, “but a small price to pay to get to do all the other aspects of puzzlemaking that I thoroughly enjoy.”
— Raoul V. Mowatt
