By MARIA LA GANGA, Times Staff Writer

Published October 31st, 1981 – Los Angeles Times

They crouched in readiness like sprinters at a starting line, faces set in grim determination, fingers splayed before them, bodies tense.

Concentration and the single-minded will to win were etched into the knit brows and pursed lips of the 550 contestants.

The buzzer sounded. They were off, fingers flying over the infamous multi-colored cubes.

The first Rubik’s Cube-A-Thon was not a playground for gamesmanship dilletantes and certainly was not a relaxing way to spend a Saturday afternoon. To the contestants, solving the plastic puzzle was serious business.

The first round of eliminations at Magic Mountain in Valencia separated the pros from the amateurs-if contenders could not correctly align the colors on the cubes they did not even get a commemorative T-shirt, let alone a crack at the $500 first prize.

James Zaldua, a 10-year-old Elysian Heights Elementary School student, has solved the Rubik’s cube in_

“a minute 38.”

He has achieved that time after puzzling for about two years, completing the cube about 30 times a day, he said. Zaldua was one of the large crowd of competitors who survived the first round of eliminations. And he finished without an outward crack in his cool, practiced professionalism.

But the pressure was on, and even a practiced professional such as Zaldua was affected.

“I got mixed up,” he said. “I was on the last pattern, and I was supposed to move it once, and I moved it twice.

“I was kind of nervous. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. I only barely made it,” he sighed.

Burt Quackenbush, a Torrance tool salesman who teaches Rubik’s Cube strategy in his spare time, was not as lucky as Zaldua.

Quackenbush and his entire family came to the competition and only his 13-year-old son, Dennis made it through the first round.

Although the teacher’s dignity suffered from his failure, he snapped back in less time than it took him to solve the puzzle.

For he had another claim to fame —his 3-year-old son, Glenn, the Cube-A-Thon’s youngest contestant.

“We didn’t even teach him how to do it. He learned from watching his brother,” Quackenbush said, displaying his precocious son’s prowess.

And Glenn learned well.

Although his fingers barely spanned the colored cube, he deftly worked the puzzle.

Glenn Quackenbush had a system. First, he worked the cube until each side had a center cube of one color ringed by eight cubes of another. Once he reached that point, he was home free.

Tiny tongue clenched between baby teeth, a drop of saliva sliding from the corner of his mouth, Glenn concentrated. His fingers flew. And then stopped.

Nonchalantly, he held the cube out to his father. Perfection.

That was his demonstration before the contest. His aplomb cracked a bit in competition. Flanked by siblings Burt, Dennis and Mary, converged upon by photographers and cameramen, Glenn barely worked the puzzle at all. The end buzzer rang, and he was dropped from elimination.

But his father was philosophical. After all, Glenn was still young and he had come so far, so fast.

“He can barely talk, but he can work a cube,” Quackenbush said.

Steve Munt, a 24-year-old systems engineer from Northridge, had a game plan far more sophisticated than Glenn’s.

For, to Munt, the cube is not a toy, but a mathematical problem which he plans to have solved by the second annual Rubik’s Cube-A-Thon.

“This is a problem, and this problem has a solution.

Any problem that has a solution, has an optimum solution, and I want to find that optimum solution,” he said analytically.

“And that’s going to be fun.”

All mathematical systems aside, Munt did not make it past the first round of eliminations.

Several rounds and several hours later, Minh Thai, a 16-year-old Vietnamese refugee, won the Western region Rubik’s Cube-A-Thon. He solved the puzzle in 39.4 seconds and was as calm in his victory as he was throughout the entire contest.

“It doesn’t matter how you mix it up.” he said. “I fix it.”