By PENELOPE MeMILLAN, Times Staff Writer

Published June 15th, 1982 – Los Angeles Times

When the new world champion at solving the Rubik’s cube returned to Eagle Rock High School last week, a special announcement was made over the public address system, a teacher made a cake shaped like a cube, and a television crew arrived for an interview.

By now, 17-year-old Minh Thai has become somewhat used to the hoopla over his ability to twist and shuffle the small multi-colored toy puzzle.

The refugee from Vietnam, who moved to Eagle Rock with his parents four years ago, has already won the U.S. championship before competing in the first Rubik’s Cube World Championship during the first week of June.

When Minh arrived at Los Angeles International Air-port, a group of reporters and television cameramen elbowed his parents, Song Thai and Ghet Tran Thai, out of the way to hear the champ say, “I feel good,” and offer the secret of his success:

“An ability to pick things up quick,” Minh pronounced. After school ended, he added, he would be traveling the country demonstrating the cube for Ideal Toy Corp., which says it has sold more than 30 million in Western Europe, the United States and Canada.

While Minh answered questions, his father watched his eldest son, looking both proud and perplexed, since he still speaks no English. A Chinese from Vietnam, he had once owned a grocery store in Saigon before leaving with his family in 1978. For him, the transition to American life was hard, and he said through an interpreter he now worked part-time, “at any job I can get.” His self-possessed son, however, spoke English quite well and said he planned to enter US next fall. He has a scholarship to study electrical engineering.

Recounting his own history with the cube, which was invented by a Hungarian professor in 1975, Minh said, “I had a friend who brought it to class, about a year ago. I picked it up right away, had it down to two minutes in two weeks.”

Soon he was practicing so often he was wearing out cubes at the rate of one a month, despite efforts to keep them greased with petroleum jelly. When he won the U.S. championship last fall, he earned $2,000 and plane-fare to the Budapest competition, organized by Hungary’s Foreign Trade Ministry.

Practicing during the past year, he sometimes had the help of Herbert Taylor, a research associate at USC who is co-author of one of innumerable books on how to solve the puzzle. Taylor accompanied him to Budapest.

“He won because of his training strategy,” Taylor said. “Id been clocking him and took him around to Glendale shopping centers so he’d get used to doing the cube having a lot of people around.”

Competing against representatives of I7 other nations, Minh won by solving the puzzle in 22.95 seconds.

Now back at school, Minh-for a few days at least prepared to face the same reality as any other high school student this time of year: final exams.