Can You Solve this 30 Year Old Mystery?

About thirty years ago my mom brought home a puzzle that someone had given her at work. She worked for Montgomery Ward, the now defunct department store chain, and on her lunch hour she and her colleagues would work on these little brain twisters that people would bring in from time to time. She would then bring them home for us kids. Little did my mom know that I would keep all of those puzzles and use them with my junior high students over the years. I’m not really sure myself why I hung on to them, except that I am by nature a pack rat–a valuable trait in a teacher.

She was rarely given an answer key to these puzzles, and without the benefit of the internet, there was no way to verify our answers except for the “Aha!” moments that came when someone in the family finally hit on the solution. We solved every puzzle that she brought home.

Except one.

I’ve given this particular puzzle to every class I’ve ever taught, and as you’ll see below there are twenty-four solutions to find. I know the answers to twenty-two of them with almost total certainty, and the twenty-third I’m reasonably certain of. But one of them has never been solved to my satisfaction. Students over the years have tried, but none have been able to give that “Aha!” answer.

The internet has been no help either. I cannot find the same puzzle anywhere, much less a solution. Every few years I conduct a new internet search, but I always come up empty.

Which brings us to you. I figured heck, people are crowd-sourcing all kinds of things these days, so why not crowd-source a solution to this puzzle. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find its origin.

First, here is the puzzle my mom brought home, scanned from the original (you may need to click on it to bring up a larger image):

As you can see, these kinds of puzzles have become fairly common in the last thirty years. Here are some of the answers:

• The solution to number 5 is “It’s a small world after all.”
• Number 8 is “Seven Up.”
• Number 10 is “scrambled eggs.”

I don’t want to spoil your fun by giving all the answers, but now you know the kinds of puzzles these are. As I mentioned earlier, we figured out the answer to all but one (though number 24 is a little shaky; our best answer for that one is “The far corner.” If you have a better answer I’d love to hear it.).

The one that has plagued me for years, though, is number 21, the word Kalamazoo with an extra “O” on the end, and the word “HIS” in the upper right hand corner. The only answers that have even come close are these two:

• “On his Kalamazoo” from the song “Down on the Corner” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
• “I got a gal in Kalamazoo,” a song by the Glenn Miller Orchestra

But neither of those solutions makes much sense. Why the extra “O”? Why is HIS raised like an exponent? Perhaps the entire word needs to be scrambled into another word. Maybe it refers to a saying that’s not used anymore, kind of like number 15 above (“He is an exponent of capitalism.”)

What do you think? Can you solve puzzle number 21? Leave a comment with the answer. If not, please forward this to all your puzzle-loving friends. Someone out there must be able to solve it.