The puzzle world is a relatively small one, and sadly, it grew smaller a few weeks ago, as friend of the blog Ann Santoro passed away.

Born July 26, 1936, Ann’s love of language and learning was evident throughout her life. She earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master’s degree from Cornell. She became a teacher herself, specializing in both English and Latin.

Penny Press’s owner Peter Kanter remembers discussing Latin with Ann:

I was always fascinated and impressed by Ann’s knowledge of the classics. She translated ancient Greek to Latin, and back. For a while I was on a Latin kick based on Ann’s example. Ann recommended a Latin primer and told me I should just get at it. She had no airs or pretensions about her hobby or her erudition. She made everything very matter of fact. She also told me her favorite translator of Homer. I think it was Lattimore or Lombardo.

I made a few half-hearted gestures at finding a Latin teacher; I got the Latin primer and I got the Lattimore and Lombardo translations. But I never did much with them. In the end I concluded that that was best left to Ann!

After her teaching career, Ann went on to work for Penny Press, where she was a fixture for decades, rising to the title of Senior Editor.

In fact, she was with the company for so long that there was a bit of a debate regarding when she actually started! Her “official” hire date is marked as 11/8/1976, but it’s more likely that she was freelancing for the company before then. I firmly believe she started back in 1974, meaning she spent fifty years coordinating and correcting pretypes for the company, shaping generations of puzzle editors.

And her pretypes were the stuff of legend. When she wasn’t schooling me on the differences between transitive and intransitive verbs, she was demanding verification of any slang or phrases she couldn’t find in reputable sources.

As Annamarie Spero of Penny Press pointed out:

Ann knew the rules of grammar forward and back. As a senior editor, she didn’t just point out an error; she explained why it was wrong so that editors could learn from mistakes and hone their skills, the hallmark of a good teacher.

In one of my favorite interactions with her, where we disagreed on the spelling of DeMille (Agnes de Mille uses two words, while Cecil B. DeMille uses one), she grew so exasperated with my spelling that she provided the incredible notation “SEE HIS TOMBSTONE.”

I looked up his tombstone and, lo and behold, it backed up my spelling, not hers. (I still have the “SEE HIS TOMBSTONE” note on my bulletin board.)

Of course, being such a stickler for grammar sometimes caused problems. Punny clues that played with language (and wandered outside traditional grammar) often got corrected by her in pretypes… until they were no longer punny OR effective. But with a stet and a chuckle, you moved on with your corrections, inevitably taking a LOT of Ann’s notes to heart.

One correction (regarding actor Emil Jannings) actually lead to a long friendship, as Annamarie Spero explains:

I met the cape-wearing, five-foot-tall powerhouse senior editor during my first year at Penny Press. She reviewed my blurbs for the Word Seek line of puzzle magazines. On one particular occasion, she and a long-time crossword editor were discussing a clue/answer that involved actor Emil Jannings, who co-starred with Marlene Dietrich in 1930’s “The Blue Angel.”

The editor was trying to think of his name and I said it, pronouncing it “AY-mill YAN-ings.” The editor corrected me, pronouncing it “EE-MEAL JAN-ings.” Ann then spoke up and said to the editor, “No, she’s [meaning me] right. It’s AY-mil YAN-ings. He was German.” (And that was the German pronunciation.) Ann was impressed and at that moment, I gained her respect, and we became friends.

Ann balanced her no-nonsense approach to pretypes with a love of learning and new experiences outside of work. In addition to her Latin studies, she shared Chinese cooking classes and jewelry making courses with crossword guru Eileen Saunders, and enjoyed sharing her vast knowledge of classical music with others.

She was also an early adopter of new technology! When e-books emerged into the market, Ann switched from a wholly physical reference library to a mostly digital one, and followed that by digitizing her CDs onto a music server.

Of course, this also led to a misunderstanding in one of my pretypes, when Ann couldn’t verify one of my clues… and turned to Urban Dictionary for explanation. Through tears of laughter, I explained why Urban Dictionary might not be the best resource for verification, and from that point on, Ann stuck to the more legitimate recommendations from Onelook.com.

Ann was uncompromising, fiercely opinionated, and keenly observant of the world around her. She made every puzzle magazine she touched better, and she educated a lot of solvers and editors alike along the way.

It’s so easy to imagine that she carried all the answers you’d ever need in her ubiquitous giant purse. Or, as Peter Kanter hoped, a copy of her favorite translation of Homer’s works.

There will truly never be another Ann Santoro. Ann, we’ll miss you.

Please forgive the delay in finalizing this post.

It took longer than usual to write, not only because I wanted to make sure I captured as much of Ann’s unique spirit as possible, but also because I wanted to reach out to friends and colleagues, both past and present, to share their thoughts about Ann.

Thank you to all the kind folks at Penny Press and beyond who shared their memories and anecdotes of Ann with me, and all of you, today.