Each year, Terry Spak hosts friends and family at the Puzzle Slam. This year, she offered to move her group of 64 puzzlers to the cafeteria so that additional teams could compete in the gym. Spak, a midwestern native who has since settled in the center of Granby, invites dozens of friends, family, coworkers and other connections to join her in a team-of-teams in a very unique fusion of competition and reunion. “There is nothing we wouldn’t do for Terry,” a friend who had driven up from New Haven County said.
Her only ask of each puzzler she recruited was to bring with them a bottle of wine to add to the raffle prize she donates to the event— a wheelbarrow full of wine, mixed with a single can of Bud Light beer in honor of her late husband. Spak was quick to credit Vinnie Pagano at Beman Hardware for the wheelbarrow donation.
—by Brian Dawson