Alice H. Cook author page

Alice H. Cook had 26 known Times crosswords in the 1940s and 50s. She likely had more, since many Times crosswords from her era are by unknown constructors. Her 21 Sunday puzzles place her among the top 60 Sunday constructors all-time. Among woman, she ranks 11th in that category.*

A physician, she taught medicine in China for over four years in the 1920s. There she married a fellow doctor before returning to the U.S. The couple settled in New Haven, Connecticut, where they each worked at Yale University in various capacities.

Alice Harriet Cook was born in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania in 1886. Her father was a pastor and her mother was a homemaker. Her family's roots were in missionary work. Both her father and grandfather were Presbyterian ministers at a time when missions were a central focus of the church. To that end, her parents moved to the frontier in Montana Territory from 1877 to 1882, a few years before Alice was born. There her father led a church in Missoula. One of her brothers became a minister and spent years in Asia as a missionary.

Alice attended Mount Holyoke College, where her work in China was foretold in a yearbook description of her: "So industrious is she, so fond of truth and verity, that she shall sail across the sea, to teach … charity."

After graduating from Mount Holyoke in 1908, she enrolled at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, where she obtained an M.D. in 1913. In 1920, she traveled to China to teach at the Peking Union Medical College, a school dedicated to promoting western medical education in China.

In China, she married Otto Willner, a fellow physician at the school. Alice's brother, the minister, officiated the ceremony. Otto was born in Bohemia and joined the school after World War I. As a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he had been captured by the Russian Army in 1914 and spent the war in Siberia attending to fellow prisoners.

In China, the couple collaborated on research and were credited in a medical journal for their work on the impact of the drug ephedrine on nasal passages. They had their first child, a daughter, in China.

In 1924, they moved to the U.S., eventually settling in New Haven. In the U.S., they had two more children, a daughter and son. Alice worked as a physician at the Yale Department of Public Health. She passed away in 1973 at the age of 87.

*Rankings are best estimates based on available information. For Alice Cook, one of her crosswords appears to have been published under the pseudonym "Alice McKinley." In the 1940s, Dr. Cook lived on McKinley Avenue in New Haven. Margaret Farrar sometimes published crosswords using pseudonyms to avoid having the same constructor's name appear within a few weeks of each other. She often used street and city names in place of the constructor's real names. In this case, the crossword by Alice McKinley appeared two weeks after a crossword was published under Alice Cook's real name.