Constructor's Comments
Major Spoiler Alert: The main challenge here was working without circled letters—per the Puzzle Society's software. My original puzzle circled six trees: FIR, OAK, RUBBER, ELM, SPRUCE, and TEA. So I thought that without the circles the puzzle was fairly hard to solve. The next challenge was to find the "mini-meta" suggested by MYOPIC at 68-Across. Simply enough, it's the first letter of each tree—FOREST—but "hard to see" for all trees.I loved making this puzzle. But it happened so many months ago that I'd forgotten what the trick was and had to be rescued by my wife, Carla: "You've got FOREST buried in there," and, of course, my only response was a facepalm. How could I have been so myopic?
Fun puzzle which I didn't fully grasp until I read this note. 28A AIG is an insurance company. The guy who was hired to pull it out of the mess was Ed Kiddy, a former boss of mine in the early days (1980).
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