The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen Read Online Free PDF Page A

came across a commercial for Simon’s Potato Chips. He knew it was unlikely to contain any clues for today’s event, but he still had to stop and watch it. The commercial showed a bunch of young people, supposedly at a party, except that everybody was standing around, bored and glum. Suddenly a guy with a wide smile showed up holding a bag of (new!) Simon’s Potato Squares, and the party was transformed: The music began thumping, and guest after guest grabbed handfuls of chips, which were indeed perfectly square. Fueled by this magical new snack food, everyone began dancing and chatting and having fun. “Think square!” said the guy who had brought the chips, his teeth flashing white as he held up the bag for the camera.
    Winston turned off the television, amused. Did people really believe this? That a bag of potato chips could turn a boring party into New Year’s Eve? Winston guessed that commercials like this must work at least sometimes, since it seemed like every other ad followed the same script.
    The commercial gave him an idea, though. He went back to his room and went online to look up information about Dmitri Simon, the founder of Simon’s Snack Foods and the guy whose voice they had heard on the answering machine.
    The company Web site had most of what he wanted to know. A page marked “History” showed a big picture of Dmitri Simon’s pudgy, smiling, bearded face. Simon had started his company after being fired from five jobs in a row. He made the first batches of his now-famous potato chips in a pizzeria’s kitchen. He started off by selling them to delis and other stores out of the back of his car. People loved them, and he soon had more requests for his chips than he could handle. He borrowed money from everyone he knew and opened a small factory. Now he was one of the richest men in the state.
    He was also one of the oddest men in the state, as Winston learned while searching the Net for more information. Simon had more money than he knew what to do with, and he gave a lot of it away. Rather than merely writing a check, however, Simon enjoyed attaching the money to crazy stunts. He funded a local museum for a full year but insisted on an exhibit of “potato chip art,” whatever that was. He built a playground for a children’s hospital . . . but only after the doctors at various hospitals had competed in some kind of nutty Doctor Olympics, with track-and-field events. The winning team of physicians got the playground. And Dmitri Simon got tons of coverage in the newspapers and on television.
    Would any of this help today? Winston didn’t know. But he doubted he and his friends would be handed a bunch of word searches and pencil puzzles. Dmitri Simon enjoyed stunts that were big and goofy. Winston would try to remember not to be surprised by anything: With this guy’s money and wacky ideas, anything was possible.
    Winston looked at the clock again and sighed—6:05 A.M. He’d killed twenty minutes. He had another full hour before he even needed to get dressed.
    He wandered the house a while more and then finally grabbed a puzzle magazine and stretched out on the sofa. It was going to be a long wait, but at least he had a puzzle to solve in the meanwhile.
    You can take a three-letter puzzle piece from each of the three columns, and read across to make a series of nine-letter words. If you write these words in the order shown below, you’ll find an extra phrase reading down in two places.
    (Answer, page 239.)

    Jake and Mal were dropped off shortly after eight o’clock. Winston’s mother had already left for work. His dad worked at home in the summer—soon he would go edit magazine articles, but right now he was cleaning up breakfast. And Winston’s little sister, Katie, was sitting on the sofa, her arms crossed in an exaggerated mope. Her school wasn’t participating in the big contest. Perhaps her principal never figured out the code, or elementary schools weren’t sent the code in the