LETTERS

Miami Herald, The (FL)
December 6, 1998
Author:

The Tropic Hunt

A cocktail napkin, a chocolatey ball of silver foil, a small mound of breath mints and a very stale Cheerio: the items are familiar to anyone who participated in the Tropic Hunt. My souvenir pile, though, includes something most hunters didn't get: a postcard. It pictures the Hollywood Beach Community Center on one side and a cryptic, pencilled message on the other: #0.

This was the prize that my teammates (Roger Boone, Bill Cook, Chad Kaiser, Allen Taylor, Gary Reardon, Gary Roberts and Wilfredo Trujillo) and I received for being the first team to enter the building at 1940 Harrison St.

We were clandestinely hustled into a back office where former Tropic editor Gene Weingarten grilled us on how we got there. Honestly, we weren't quite sure ourselves, though we had our reasons:

Three 0's on the tic-tac-toe grid pointed at a building whose address was 1940, the same number on a Jacqueline Onassis button. The bar across the street had a speaker blaring music out its door from the radio station whose stickers were plastered all over the Mazda Protege parked on Polk Street where a big red X (X, tic-tac-toe- get it?) appeared on the Hunt map. The car had lime-green Hunt T-shirts stretched over the seats.

There was a keypad outside the door, so we typed in the telephone number we got in the final clue. So our number was off a digit -- the keypad didn't work anyway. The door was unlocked, so we walked right in.

Any Tropic Hunter knows that clues like these are not too far-fetched, especially after three hours of mind-numbing mental gymnastics.

Anyway, Mr. Weingarten felt that we were there for the wrong reasons. So, we got the postcard and an obscure reference in Monday's Herald: "Another team beat us, but they didn't have all the clues . . . and might have stumbled onto it." Stumbled my foot! With leaps of intuition and a little psychic guidance from Jackie O., we found clues even the puzzlemasters didn't know existed! And not even a T-shirt to show for it!

Just wait. We'll be back next year, and we won't use any of the "real" clues!

-- GARY A. BREMEN

Edition: Final
Section: Tropic
Page: 3
Copyright (c) 1998 The Miami Herald