By Phebe Bridges

If you spend time around Golden Gate Park’s Conservatory of Flowers on sunny weekends, there is a good chance you might have met Sunset resident Sage Kitamorn. If his name does not ring a bell, you might identify him as the man in a crocheted bear hat handing out his puzzle sheets and “Cozy Cubs Puzzle Club” branded pens.

Kitamorn started Cozy Cubs Puzzle Club in January 2023. From miniature crosswords to word ladders, he develops workbook-like sheets filled with puzzles centered around a monthly theme.

Each issue takes anywhere from a few weeks to a month to create.

“I write Cozy Cubs Puzzle Club by myself,” Kitamorn said. “My wife is my number one test solver. She gets to do the puzzles when they’re really rough. But this is a passion project.”

Kitamorn has been making crossword puzzles since he was in third grade. While he maintains a website to host previous editions, Golden Gate Park serves as his primary locale for distribution of the free puzzles.

“(The puzzles) come out on the first day of the month. I’ll go to the park typically on weekend days if the weather is nice and conducive to people setting up picnic blankets. If you look outside and it feels like a day that you’d want to get a picnic blanket and go to Golden Gate Park, I’m looking at the sky too, like, ‘Does it feel like one of those days?’

“My intention is to make someone’s day go from good to better. I’m looking for people who are open and communicating their openness. That’s what I found at the lawn by the Conservatory of Flowers where people set up their picnics. I feel like the vibe of that place is something that attracts people who want to be out together.”

Kitamorn gives credit to the City as a source of inspiration.

“I think if you do my puzzles, you’ll find all kinds of ways in which San Francisco has influenced me and has become a part of me,” he said. “I love the public spaces of San Francisco and the spirit that people bring to share with each other in public. I challenge anyone who’s doing my puzzles to try to treat it like a scavenger hunt and see what you can find. I love San Francisco, I love the western neighborhoods, I love dim sum, local businesses and the park. Treat those as clues and the whole thing is a puzzle. The puzzles are a puzzle.”

To further reach his community, the puzzles are offered in more locations than just the park. Copies of Cozy Cubs Puzzle Club can be found at Sweet Glory, Yoma Cafe and Uncle Benny’s Donut & Bagel.

“There are a handful of local businesses in the Sunset who have a Cozy Cubs stand, and they are lovely businesses that I encourage people who like Cozy Cubs to frequent, or the other way around.”

Kitamorn distributes a few hundred pages of Cozy Cubs Puzzle Club monthly. As he frequently distributes in Golden Gate Park, Kitamorn has begun creating a community of his own.

“Increasingly people recognize me when I’m in the park, and sometimes they’ll say, ‘I was waiting for you to come up,’” he said.

“I think it’s fun for me to realize, ‘Oh, people have a relationship with Cozy Cubs Puzzle Club.’ They’ve done this at least once before, they had a positive experience with it and they want more. That’s validating. This is my art and I’m happy to share it with the world,” Kitamorn continued.

Prior to the puzzle club, his crossword creation had fallen by the wayside. It was his love for pottery that brought him back to puzzle creation.

“Turns out, working full-time really put a damper on the crossword writing,” he said. “What unfroze it was, around 2022 or so, I took a pottery class at the Wheelhouse Clay Studio. That led to me really falling in love with making ceramics. At some point it occurred to me that it would be fun to make a crossword puzzle about ceramics, just for the members in the studio, full of inside jokes about pottery.”

He started by creating a puzzle book for his fellow artists at the studio.

“I posed to the group, ‘Hey, I wrote this crossword puzzle, there it is, it’s in the studio if you want to do it,’” Kitamorn said. “I figured a few people would find it amusing. What I didn’t expect was the next message I got back was someone’s solve-time. It was like 26 minutes. So, I’ve found the crossword nerds among the pottery nerds.”

The name of the club originated from his Instagram account dedicated to his ceramics, “@CozyBearCeramics.”

Kitamorn said, “The name Cozy Cubs Puzzle Club owes a bit of its origin to being a cousin of the Cozy Bear Ceramics name, but it also embodies certain feelings I wanted to communicate about the puzzles and doing them. I wanted the name to be not about me and something that the people who might find affinity with this might find their own affiliation to and perhaps with each other more than being a banner with my name on it.”

Part of Kitamorn’s vision lies in the physical community that has been created around the puzzles.

“I didn’t make the website until deep into the second year,” Kitamorn said. “I really want this to be, primarily, an analog project.”

“Sometimes people will have a good experience with Cozy Cubs and almost reflectively say, ‘This is really fun. You know what you could do? You could turn this into an app.’ I don’t blame them for thinking that way, but I’m actually thinking quite the opposite.”

Before this project, Kitamorn worked in the tech industry full-time.

“I spent a good chunk of my life making apps, and too much of my life using apps,” he said. “Now, this is about analog fun.” After a successful career in technology, Kitamorn was able to retire early.

“This feels like a new phase. The traditional concept of retirement seems like a time to play golf or something. And for me, I don’t golf. But I will certainly use the aesthetic of golf or perhaps miniature golf as a background setting for a puzzle, which is what happened in an issue already.

“This is my weird little art project and I’m happy that people like it or that people can participate in it,” Kitamorn said.

Learn more and find prior monthly editions and answer sheets at cozycubs.club.