“They say there are three things you can do that really keep your brain from aging,” Wasatch County Senior Center regular Dixie Baker said. “One is puzzles, one is learning a new musical instrument, and the other one is learning a new language.”
Puzzles are her favorite of the three options and, if she’s right, she and several other busy seniors who have been working since March to complete the world’s largest puzzle must have very young minds.
Their work is on display at the Wasatch County Fair.
The center’s activity director, Candie Bonner, said the 60,000-piece puzzle — which depicts a world map, global scenes and splashes of Utah throughout — was made by Lindon resident Eric Dowdle. He and the Dowdle puzzle company called it, “What a Wonderful World.”
They inherited it from the Springville Senior Center, which first took on the project.
“They said, ‘Well, if you want to come take it apart, you can have it,’” Bonner said. “That was a four-hour project with four people.”
The arrangement is really 60 puzzles, each with 1,000 pieces, that form their part of the massive whole.
To transport the work of art to the fair, she said the center had to slide each 60th of the puzzle onto slabs of cardboard before relocating and eventually assembling them.
Large portions of the map are composed primarily of a relatively monotonous shade or yellow, which required patient puzzlers to rely on little other than the edges of pieces and occasional names on countries to determine what went where.
“Some really brave people took on these very large yellow sections like Russia and Africa,” Baker said.
Laurel and Joe Rail were among those brave souls.
“My favorite thing was to get the animals, the flags, the people and the words and then I separated it by colors and did the sky or the water the yellow,” Laurel said.
She explained that the common start-with-the-edge method largely had to be abandoned.
Bonner said that once the group decided they wanted to finish the puzzle in time for the fair, they had to pick up their pace and finish four or five 1,000-piece portions a week.
“We were thinking, ‘Where could we display it and the community enjoy it?’” she said.
She the project took somewhere around 10,000 man-hours.
The seniors described their commitment as a labor of love, one that allowed them to learn more about one another and engage in a fun task throughout the summer.
Di Ann Duke Turner said the first time she met Betty Brandner was when she was working on the Midwest portion of the world map.
“I could read the name of this town. … I says, ‘I wonder where Eureka is.’”
Brandner — who just happens to be from Eureka, South Dakota — had no problem helping her.
“She says, ‘Oh, I was born there. It goes right there!’” Turner recalled, pointing her finger toward the map for emphasis. “That’s how I met her, was putting her hometown in.”
Baker said the senior center’s staff members were remarkably accommodating. She appreciated having a place to go during the day.
“It’s my escape from all my chores at home,” she said.
Turner said though she used to go to the senior center often, she’s gone less and less, as her husband thinks they’re too young. The puzzle gave her a chance to reconnect.
“I saw people during this four-month period of time that I hadn’t seen in years,” she said. “They’ve got to put a puzzle on so I can keep going.”