The man who’s written the Washington Post’s Sunday crossword puzzle for decades can add “playing cupid” to his resume, given his assistance in one of the cutest marriage proposals we’ve recently heard of.
Corey Newman was hoping for a “unique” way to propose to his girlfriend, Marlowe Epstein. When he saw her working away at a crossword puzzle — one of her favorite pastime — on a regular afternoon, he realized the perfect way to ask for Marlowe’s hand in marriage. He then contacted The Washington Post, who put in him touch with Bob Klahn, the paper’s longtime-crossword creator.
The two worked together to create some personal clues for the puzzle, including the name of Marlowe’s hometown, her beau’s first name, and some more revealing clues like “Seek to form a union” (answer: “Pop the question”.) When she arrived at 51 across, “Words with a certain ring to them,” Newman got down on one knee and revealed the answer: “Will you marry me.”
The Washington Post sets up the day of the proposal in that storybook-romantic way:
Saturday morning, she said, “just seemed like business as usual to me.” When she woke up, there was a cup of coffee waiting for her. As rain whipped against the windows of the couple’s Alexandria apartment, she settled on the couch with Newman, who was working on a crossword. “I’m stuck,” he said, prompting her to help.
Newman had originally planned to propose Sunday, but a citywide scavenger hunt they’d planned to participate in was bumped to that day, so he made a last-minute decision to do it Saturday instead. For an hour that morning, he raced around Old Town, looking for an early Sunday edition that would have the puzzle, but none of the shops had received them yet. So he did what any desperate man would: swiped one from the front of an office building. No one’s there on the weekend anyway, he figured.
Hours after she solved the puzzle and looked at the ring, Epstein still couldn’t fully wrap her mind around what had happened. “I’m just amazed,” she said. “I did not see it coming at all.” That was the idea. “I’ve been telling her forever that she was special,” Newman said. “And I wanted to do something so she would know that I meant it.
