You are rattled awake to find yourself sat on a bus at night. Though when you see people leaning out the side and feel the vehicle struggle up a steep hill you realise it’s actually a San Francisco cable car! You notice quite a few butch-looking women in their finest dapper getup, and what’s more, several are furtively holding hands with their rather femme partners. You’re wondering where they could all be heading when the trolley shudders to a halt and the couples start to file out.

You hop off and follow the queer folk a couple of blocks to the entrance of a bar, the name “Tommy’s” hanging over the door. You slip inside and find the bar is packed full of lesbian couples drinking and dancing. You’ve just introduced yourself to a hot woman when someone bursts in and warns that a police raid is imminent! The hot woman grabs you by the hand and drags you into a side alley where you can lay low before the police arrive. She introduces herself as Rose and, despite no photographs of her in the public domain, you feel in your bones that this is Rose Bamberger, who founded the Daughters of Bilitis after getting sick of these kinds of raids! Unfortunately, the whole area is swarming with cops, and you’re going to have to work out how to avoid them and get both of you to safety.

Grace Miller tending bar (Photo from Grace Miller Papers(GLC 69), LGBTQIA Center, San Francisco Public Library)

Can you help Rose avoid the police so she can go on to found the Daughters of Bilitis?

There are a number of cops hidden in the city. You need to work out how many there are lurking. To help you work this out, Rose has friends positioned in various blocks around the city. Each one of them is keeping an eye on the surrounding blocks, and have signalled to Rose how many cops they can see.

The grid below contains empty squares and numbered squares representing the city blocks. The numbers indicate how many cops are located in adjacent empty squares, including diagonally adjacent. It will help to copy the grid so you can mark which squares are definitely empty, and which contain a cop.

Description: A grid of six by six squares.
In the first row there is a 1 in the 2nd square and a 2 in the 5th square.
In the 2nd row there is a 3 in the 2nd square and a 0 in the 4th square.
In the 3rd row there is a 2 in the 3rd square and a 3 in the 5th square.
In the 4th row there is a 3 in the 1st square, a 3 in the 3rd square and a 2 in the 6th square.
In the 5th row there is a 2 in the first square.
In the 6th row is a 1 in the 2nd square and a 2 in the 4th square

How many cops in total can Rose’s friends see?

Additional Tools:

Print out the quiz diagram!

Listen to Nicole read and describe the puzzle.

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