The Anniston Star from Anniston, Alabama • Page 14

Page 14A Sunday, December 1, 1996 7 AtLs a 7DAYB HOMETOWN SP'fST J11E1 I CC3.0 Ci-frj ri S7fff Fresh L( 1 Family Hero Charles Destlnon cradles man on a narrow ledge along the Milwaukee River In downtown Milwaukee after pulling him from the Icy water Friday. Destlnon, who was In his office nearby, heard the man screaming, climbed down to the river on a rope and pulled him to safety. Milwaukee firefighters pulled the pair from the ledge. The man, who allegedly Jumped, was taken to a hospital. No details about him were Immediately available.

Lb. Andy's Top 10 List of Whole 01 Make the Best Christmas Gifts (0 0 Poly-wool All-wool SUITS HUGE SALE GROUP BETTER SUITS SALE Regular, Big, Tall Hard-to-find sizes Cashmere Blend Clue game solves its final mystery By Robert M. Thomas Jr. A British law clerk who whiled Svay his time on World War II fire patrol in England dreaming up a board version of a popular parlor game died in such obscurity two' years ago, it was learned last week. I that not even Colonel Mustard or Miss Scarlet had a clue.

They, of course, along with Professor Plum, Mrs. Peacock, Mrs. White and Mr. Green, owe their very existence to the clerk, Anthony E. Pratt, who linked them together in a nine-room Victorian mansion as the perennial murder suspects in the classic game Que.

Pratt, who was 90 and had dropped out of sight decade ago, died in 1994 near Birmingham, England. But this did not become general knowledge until after Waddington's, the company that first published the game in 1948, issued a public appeal to find its creator. Ceremonies were being planned to commemorate the impending 150 millionth worldwide sale of the game, known in Britain as Clueflp. What the British press termed Clue's final mystery was solved when the company, which had set up a hot line, received a call from Gillian Lewis, the superintendent of the Bromsgrove Municipal Cemetery, 12 miles from Birmingham. He said Pratt had been buried there in April 1994.

The company, which knew that several men named Anthony Pratt had died in recent years but hoped that the inventor was still alive, accepted that it had traced the right one when Lewis reported that the marble headstone bore the inscription "Inventor of Cluedo." As Pratt once explained to a British newspaper, he was walking his beat as a fire warden in Leeds in 1943, musing on a pastime that had been popular a few years earlier, when he had a brainstorm. "Between the wars," he said, "all the bright young things would congregate in each other's homes for parties at weekends. We'd play a stupid game called Murder, where guests crept up on each other in corridors and the victim would shriek and fall on the floor." With the help of his wife, who designed the familiar nine-room layout of the murder house, Pratt obtained a provisional patent on the game. But it was not until 1948, when he made a deal with Waddington's, a major British game publisher, that Colonel Mustard and his associates became household names. Since then, the murder mystery that is at the heart of the game has been solved tens of millions of times.

Players, who are dealt cards -representing suspects, weapons and rooms, take turns rolling a die to move from room to room, sum- moning suspects and weapons to determine by process of elimina- tion which of the 324 possible combinations of 6 suspects, 6 weapons and 9 rooms figured in the murder. Still ranked among (he top 10 games in annual sales, Clue is marketed in the United States by Parker Brothers, now a Hasbro subsidiary. The game, which inspired a 1983 movie and has recently been introduced in a CD-ROM version, sells about 3 million copies a year in 73 countries. And if its cast of characters is not universally recognized, that is at least partly because Clue's nomenclature varies somewhat from country to country. The murder victim, for example, is Dr.

Black in England, Herr Kludo in Switzerland, Senor Lemon in Spain and, wincingly, Mr. Boddy in the United States. Mr. Green, originally the Rev. Green in Britain, is Dr.

Olive in France; Professor Plum is Professor Black in Brazil; MrsPeacock is Baronesse von Blauw in And, in a change that would make a proper British officer twirl his mustache in fury, the Swiss, who do after all have something of a pacifist tradition, call Colonel Mustard Madame Curry. Mr. Pratt, a Birmingham native, made enough from the game to give up his work as a law clerk and become a touring concert pianist One reason the company lost track of him was that in the mid-1950s, after originally receiving royalties amounting to 5 percent of British sales, he sold Waddington's his rights for a lump sum. In the end, the obscurity of his death might be attributed to the standards of headline violence his game helped establish. r- 2 SPORT COATS $12988 190 Value BIG TALL SIZES '1 49 Fox Deluxe Autumn Grain 20-oz.

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rrau, a wiuuwcr who is survived by a daughter, Marcia, was for example, bludgeoned to death by Mr. Green or Mrs. Peacock with the candlestick in the ballroom, billiard room or study. Instead, the man who made mayhem into a children's game died peacefully of natural causes in a nursing home. 01120 TUXEDO RENTALS 527 QUINTARD DRIVE, OXFORD 835-0054 jj.