Roy Leban experienced a bit of good luck when he started to create today's Daily News crossword: It so happened that two theme answers were eight-letter words, two were 11-letter words and one was a 15-letter name which perfectly fit the center row. Each clue was a year and the answers were "the five most recent members of a particular category":
1948: CITATION
1973: SECRETARIAT
1977: SEATTLESLEW
1978: AFFIRMED
2015: AMERICANPHAROAH
Those are the most recent winners of the Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing, a title awarded to a three-year-old thoroughbred horse who wins the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stake in a single year. Twelve horses have done so. The first was Sir Barton in 1919. And yes, the name of American Pharoah is misspelled. I do not know why.
Greg Johnson's Los Angeles Times crossword includes the motorist's question NEEDALIFT. The last word of each theme answer can be combined with "lift": TUNINGFORK, LAWNCHAIR, POKERFACE and SHRIMPBOAT.
The Universal crossword includes PETRIFIEDFOREST, PAINTERSBRUSH and EUCALYPTUSTREES. If there is a theme, I can't figure it out. I guess you could say I can't see the forest for the trees.....so I'll just give it the old brush-off.
Finally, we have the 13x13 NEA crossword which includes the archaic words EBON and THOU, the foreign words EINE, ESA, ISLA and LES and the over-used words ABET, AIM, ASH, EGO and ELAN. It also includes OHO, an exclamation which appears quite frequently in puzzles, along with AHA and AAH. We often say those words but we almost never write them.....unless, of course, we're filling in a crossword grid.
