A Par Puzzle Isn’t Easy to Assemble Or Easy to Pay For
Frank Ware Handcarves Them For the Determined, the Rich – And, Sometimes, the Dumb
By Sonny Kleinfield
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

NEW YORK- Frank Ware is 68 years old now, but he still slaves away 66 hours a week in a tiny attic in mid-Manhattan carving out intricate, made-to-order jigsaw puzzles.

It sounds like a familiar tale- an old craftsman in a fading industry who is just barely hanging on. That is not, however, what it is. Mr. Ware is in fact an old craftsman in a fading industry who is doing just fine, thank you. He is a prosperous man, thanks to those handcarved puzzles and among his customers he is something of a celebrity. If you have never heard of him, it is probably because you are neither famous nor rich – and therefore not one of his customers.

Mr. Ware works for, and is, Par Company Ltd., a one-man puzzle factory. For 40 years, the biggest names of society, show biz, and politics have been snapping up Par puzzles, and paying up to $2,000 to do so. These days, jigsaw puzzles, once a favorite indoor sport in America, rank somewhere along with chasing greased pigs or wheelchair races on the list of things folks do to while away their leisure time. Thus, many former puzzle makers are not present puzzle makers. But Par keeps right rolling along.

Par rolls in the person of Mr. Ware, who is, aficionados agree, the best and the last of great puzzle makers. Mr. Ware’s hard core of customers say nothing beats battling a 750 to 2,000-piece Par puzzle. Part of the appeal is that every Par puzzle is one of a kind, hand carved by Mr. Ware and colossally intricate.

Mr. Ware carves the puzzles from mahogany-backed soft plywood on which he has glued reproduction pictures. He can make a puzzle to order, and he can take weeks to finish a devilishly elaborate jigsaw that will also take the buyer weeks to assemble. Often, his puzzles are oddly shaped –no straight edges to either the puzzle or to the individual pieces. Says Mr. Ware with relish, “I have no mercy.”

Mr. Ware’s wares, says Mrs. Caroline Dudley, a New York interior decorator and Par customer, are “fantastic. They’re magnificent, they’re just made so beautifully. And brother, they’re not easy.” Groans another Par customer, “I must have spent two months and too much of my sanity on one of those horrors. But I loved it.”

They loved it enough that the wiry Mr. Ware, who dresses in blue jeans and a work shirt, enjoys what he calls a “very comfortable” income –so comfortable that he has invested in a slew of Broadway shows and lives on Manhattan’s expensive Sutton Place.

”The average Par puzzle cost $175, though you can pay as little as $75, or as much as you want. One wealthy Californian, who calls himself “the Phantom of the West,” paid $2,000 for a Par puzzle of more than 2,500 pieces. He says he accepts only the most difficult and the most expensive puzzles Mr. Ware can dream up.

Mr. Ware, who still works 11 hours a day, six days a week in his tiny attic, but who plans to retire next year and retain only a few favorite customers, will make a puzzle of whatever scene a customer request. His preference is paintings, especially Matisses or Picassos rich in color and detail, but he has made puzzles of family pictures, of the odometer of a sports car, of naked women and a of a bevy of Playboy centerfolds.

Par puzzles are bought only from Par Co. “I don’t want to be told by stores what to do and when to do it,” says Mr. Ware, who dismisses machine-made cardboard as unimaginative and poorly constructed. Some regular customers order a puzzle or two a month, he says. At Par’s prices, that could fast drain a modest fortune, but Mr. Ware’s customers often have enormous fortunes –they have included Rockefellers, du Ponts, Vanderbilts, Fords, the late Duke of Windsor, the late Marilyn Monroe and one President, whom Mr. Ware refuses to name.

Mr. Ware got into the puzzle racket during the Depression when he and John Henriques, a close friend, both lost jobs in advertising and real estate respectively. The two men at first had a rough go of it; puzzles sell well during Depressions, when people have time on their hands, so, naturally, everyone who had a scroll saw was turning out jigsaw puzzles in the 1930s. But the two survived by renting puzzles out for 50 cents a week, and by 1936 the tiny firm was established in its little attic and doing well. (Mr. Henriques died in May.) The name derives from the “par time” it supposedly takes to assemble any given puzzle –on Par puzzles, that time is always stamped on the outside of the plain, blue box the puzzle comes in.

Mr. Ware confesses that, although he is used to creating puzzles for customers who want their brains exercised, he occasionally runs across a true lunkhead. One distraught wife wrote from Hawaii that her husband couldn’t assemble an elementary 10-piece Par puzzle if his life depended on it. Inspired by the movie “Five Easy Pieces,” Mr. Ware promptly chopped a bird scene into –you guessed it –five easy pieces. At last report, he says, the husband was nearly done.