Mobile Junction

Cecil Smith holds one of his favorite Rubik's Cube designs in his downtown Grand Junction home. The empty shelves behind him once held thousands of cubes. Photo by Richie Ann Ashcraft.

The shelves that once displayed thousands of Rubik’s Cubes are now empty in Cecil Smith’s downtown Grand Junction home. But the passion for the puzzle of squares still lives within the 80-year-old Smith.

He’s looking online for a rebirth of the cube and has self-published his book, “Cubeology’s Pretty Patterns,” for all puzzle enthusiasts to enjoy at www.rubikscube2.com.

The online book features a thousand hand-drawn three-dimensional cube designs. There are 43 quintillion — that’s 43 followed by 18 zeros — ways to pattern a Rubik’s Cube, Smith said. “I used to have about 6,000 drawings but I threw them all away. I wish I hadn’t done that,” he said. The book represents the decades of study Smith devoted to the Rubik’s Cube.

Smith opened the first and only Cube Museum in the world, right in the heart of Grand Junction in the 1980s. Between 1988 and the close of the museum in 1991, Smith received worldwide notoriety and visits from famous Rubik’s enthusiasts such as Anneke Treep from the Netherlands. Treep started the first cubing club in the world called “Cubing For Fun.” Treep visted Smith in 1989 and 1998 with her 5-year-old son Falco.

The museum included all kinds of novelty cubes and cubes turned into clever patterns, some spelling words such as JULY and HO HO.

Smith was a speed solver but “I could only get it done in 66 seconds. I don’t know why, but I never got any faster than that,” he said.

As the popularity for the cube waned, Smith finally closed his museum and stopped solving the puzzle for 14 years. But, the passion for the multicolored cube was always in the back of his mind.

He gave most of cubes to the History Museum in Delta. Smith, a third-generation Coloradan, was born and raised in Delta.

Some of his collection was given for display in the mathematics department of the Smithsonian.

Smith concentrated on his other passions such as poetry, photography and oil painting. The idea for a cubing book never left his mind, however. He was unable to find a publisher.

“Do you know what it feels like to find out your name is in the Internet and you didn’t even know it was there?” he said of the awe he felt when first experiencing the World Wide Web.

With the help of a neighbor, Smith decided to publish his book to the Internet.

“If I can solve the cube, you can do it too. Go for it, give it a try,” Smith writes.

The book is just one more item to cross off his bucket list, Smith said.

He’s led a long and interesting life so far. Smith met President Eisenhower, was a snake handler in the circus, and starred as the undertaker in “Raintree County,” a Civil War romance movie filmed in 1957 starring Elizabeth Taylor. “I had a choice and I picked the undertaker because it was a quieter job,” he laughed.

Smith visited with his favorite actor, Roddy McDowall in 1950 and attended both of the Kennedy funerals in Washington, D.C.

“I’m 80 years old and I’m not just going to sit and watch TV and die,” he laughed. The online book is his way of immortalizing his work with the Rubik’s Cube for future puzzlers to enjoy, he said.