Merl Reagle

Merl Reagle isn't really famous, except to puzzlers, I guess.  He appears in the movie Wordplay and is a frequent contributor to Will Shortz's program.  He writes a Sunday size puzzle weekly that appears in the New York Observer as well as elsewhere.

I was attending an alternative newsweekly convention in Nashville one year and Reagle was in the lunch line next to me, where I stood working on that day's New York Times puzzle.  This, of course, was the start of a conversation.  We ate lunch together and I later subscribed to Reagle's puzzle for our paper, The Octopus.  The first time we ran it, the designer (reluctant to allow a puzzle into the paper) ran the grid with all the answers, instead of blank.

The paper folded about a year later.