Amityville Rotarian Stan Newman has been Newsday’s Crossword Editor for 35 years, beginning in 1988. To commemorate the anniversary, on May 18th, Newsday reporter Joye Brown interviewed Stan during an hour-long Newsday Live Conversation series, a program which several of our members attended.
Stan’s 10,000th Newsday crossword appeared in 2019 and it is estimated that his Newsday Crosswords’ one millionth clue appeared last month in April 2023.
Since childhood Stan has been a crossword solver and his business was a result of his winning the first United States Open Crossword Championship in 1982. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brooklyn College where he majored in Mathematics and received a master’s degree in statistics from Rutgers University. Before his current career, he was a college teacher, consumer market researcher and Wall Street Bond analyst.
As a puzzle author, Stan has had his work appear regularly under his name and the pseudonyms Sally R. Stein, Anna Stiga and Lester Ruff. He holds the world’s record for the fastest verified completion of a New York Times crossword: 2 minutes, 14 seconds.
In 1990, Stan fulfilled his lifelong dream of appearing as a contestant on a TV game show. During his three weeks of appearances on “The Challengers,” hosted by Dick Clark, his cash winnings totaled $112,000. Stan is the author or editor of more than 200 of his own books and has organized and conducted scores or puzzle and trivia events nationwide, including seminars at the Smithsonian Institution and the first crossword tournament ever held at Yale University.
Stan and his wife Marlene live in Amityville and South Florida. They have three grown children.