The power of puzzles

After 11 years of doing NPR’s Sunday Puzzle weekly, Kevin Demko of Rehoboth Beach was selected out of 1,228 correct entries to play on air with Will Shortz.

The NPR Sunday Puzzle is a weekly word game hosted by the puzzle master. Listeners solve wordplay challenges involving letter manipulation and send their answers to NPR via email by every Thursday at 3 p.m. for the chance to play on air. With about 2,000 entries per week, it is extremely rare to receive a call from Shortz. But Nov. 28, Kevin Demko was on the line, solving challenging puzzles with only a limited amount of time to answer. When asked about the chaos of the call, Demko said, “I felt very nervous, quite honestly, even though I have been doing puzzles for nearly 50 years.”

In 2014, Demko put NPR on the radio one Sunday morning and discovered the puzzle. Since that Sunday, he has been solving them weekly.

“I was hooked,” he said.

Demko’s passion for puzzles began at a young age. As an only child, word searches, crossword puzzles and reading nonfiction novels helped him stay entertained. As he grew older, he completed the New York Times crossword puzzles with his father every Saturday night.

“Doing crossword puzzles was one of my fondest moments with my dad,” he said.

Demko was a Barnes and Noble manager for nearly 20 years in New Jersey, and originally began his bookselling career in Manhattan, N.Y., which gave him plenty of access to novels and various puzzles. After only living in Rehoboth Beach for two-and-a-half years with his husband, Kevin Todd, puzzles have brought their friends together. Through social media, they share how quickly they can complete the New York Times daily word games such as Wordle, Connections and Strands.

Puzzles not only challenge the mind, but also bring people together, he said. Challenges transform individual problem-solving into a group effort that illuminates how relationships often form one piece at a time.

Kevin Demko could practically be considered a puzzle master himself, claiming that, “books, puzzles and words have always been a recurring part of my life.”