Man of Letters, continued

    Brunot made two significant changes to the board, turning the center star into a double-word-score square and eliminating four double-letter-score squares near it. He also made some minor cosmetic changes, altering the colors and design of the premium squares, which became pastel pink (double-word), baby blue (double-letter), indigo (triple-letter), and bright red (triple-word); the starburst-ridged sides came later. Brunot also conceived the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles.
    And he changed the name. Brunot later said he never could remember where the word Scrabble came from, or whether he or his wife thought of it. “We made up a list of names we liked and we sent them to our lawyers in Washington, and when they wrote back that nobody had ever used Scrabble as a trademark, we used that,” Brunot said. The name wasn’t chosen so much for its sense as its sound. It means “to scrawl or scribble, or to scratch or grope around clumsily or frantically,” which can describe the act of searching for words on a rack, or grabbing tiles in the bag, but the aural link to scramble was what Brunot was after.
    In 1948, Brunot trademarked the name and obtained a copyright on the board design. Production started that summer. Brunot bought a supply of birch plywood that had been advertised as scrap lumber in The New York Times. He hired a few local woodworkers who sawed into tiles the long strips of wood onto which letters and point values had been silk-screened. Brunot wasn’t equipped to make boards, so he ordered a few hundred from the game-manufacturing firm of Selchow & Righter. After assembling the component parts in his kitchen, Brunot sent copies to Alfred’s former customers, including an order form in each set.
    Alfred had little to do with the game. “Thank you for the set of ’Scrabble,’” he wrote to Brunot in December 1948. “It looks pretty good to me, though I haven’t had time to do much more than glance at it. We are having a terrible rush of work, working nights until January 1. I would like to get two more sets to use as Christmas presents. Not knowing whether I can get it wholesale, I will wait until you let me know how big a check I should send you.” Brunot sent along the two sets, presumably at no charge.
    The newly christened game didn’t set the toy industry on fire. In 1949, Brunot sold 2,413 sets of Scrabble. Butts earned royalties of $149.27. In 1950, sales fell to 1,632 sets, and while Butts received royalties of $101.23, Scrabble lost $450. The next year was only marginally better: 4,853 sets and royalties of $135.43 for Butts. Brunot was still losing money.
    Brunot had named his venture Production & Marketing Company. At least the first part was appropriate. Unlike Butts, Brunot had the wherewithal, and capital, to produce the game in bulk; like Butts, though, he relied mostly on word of mouth to sell it. Promotion was limited to a few small ads in Saturday Review and in college publications like the Smith College Alumnae Quarterly.
    Nonetheless, by the summer of 1952, sales had increased to about 200 sets a week. Customers wrote asking for replacement tiles and complaining that their dogs were attracted to a chemical coating on the wood. But still Brunot considered folding the business if it didn’t do better soon. Then he and his wife went on vacation to Kentucky in search of a breeding ram for their sheep farm, expecting another 200 orders on their return. Instead, they found orders for 2,500 sets. The next week, they received another 3,000 orders. And more the week after that.
    What happened? One theory, suggested by Life magazine in a lengthy profile of Brunot and the game, held that distribution had reached a critical mass by that summer and hit a tipping point among the smart set, who came home from their vacations and tried to purchase the game in stores. A more plausible story was that Macy’s chairman Jack Straus played Scrabble during his vacation on Long Island and was irate when he returned to New York to discover that the store didn’t stock it. Macy’s placed a big order, which triggered orders from other retailers.
    For whatever reason, sales shot up to more than 500 sets a week in the third quarter of 1952 and 2,000 a week in the fourth quarter. By early 1953, Brunot had 35 employees working in two shifts producing 6,000 sets a week. Which was terrific, except that orders were arriving by the tens of thousands, so fast that “they couldn’t even add them up, much less fill them,” The New Yorker magazine reported. Brunot licensed a cheaper version of the game, with cardboard letters and a board that was part of the box, to be made by Cadaco-Ellis Co. in Chicago and renamed “Skip-a-Cross”; it sold for $2. Finally, in March, he licensed the production and marketing to Selchow & Righter. And he converted the machinery in his Connecticut factory to manufacture the first deluxe version of Scrabble, a $10 item in a red imitation-leather case with white plastic tiles and plastic racks that included a built-in scoring device.
    In 1953, nearly 800,000 standard sets, 300,000 cardboard ones, and 30,000 deluxe versions of Scrabble were sold. In the span of two years, sales had increased more than 200 times. In the history of the toy industry, no game had ever taken off so rapidly and unexpectedly. And it didn’t slow down.
    As I pore through Butts’s papers, the story of the game as a game—not as an obsessive, strategic, mathematical exercise—begins to make cultural sense. The country’s shimmering, suburban, stay-at-home, postwar prosperity was fertile soil for the sudden rise of Scrabble. What better way to demonstrate the American know-how and ingenuity that had just saved the world than with a game that tested one’s knowledge and creativity? What better way to luxuriate in the greatest prosperity the nation had ever known than by relaxing over a board game that, unlike Monopoly (Depression-era wealth fantasies) or Life (turn-of-the-century moralism), had no intentional social overtones? Leisure time was a concept just taking root, and what could be more leisurely, if not decadent, than Scrabble? It was a game of the mind that often took hours to play. America finally could devote itself to trivial pastimes. The country was infused with prosperity and suddenly enamored of education. Scrabble fit.
    Saturday Review said “the new word game has practically routed canasta among the upper I.Q.’s of the nation.” Time reported that Scrabble clubs “have convened all over the country” and that “hostesses serve a Scrabble board with the after-dinner coffee, and shiny markers with A₁ and Z₁₀ inscribed are popping up on rural porches and in transcontinental trains.” The Life article said that “in intellectual circles the game is played in French or Latin; in Hollywood, games of dirty-word Scrabble are in constant progress; in New York, the Guys-and-Dolls set has converted Scrabble into the hottest gambling game since gin rummy.” The composer Igor Stravinsky and his wife, Vera, were photographed for The New York Times Magazine playing Scrabble at their Hollywood home.
    Shortages were epidemic. “Buying a Scrabble set in New York today is something akin to nabbing a prime-rib roast at ceiling price during World War II,” the World-Telegram reported. A New Yorker cartoon showed wedding guests rushing out of a church, leaving the bride to explain to the priest, “Somebody made an announcement that the store next door has Scrabble!” There were a half-dozen or more knockoffs, with names like Score-a-Word, Jaymar Crosswords, and Cabu, sending Brunot’s lawyers into action and prompting Selchow & Righter to take out ads urging customers to wait for the real thing.
    Time, Look, Business Week, Cue, Pageant, Reader’s Digest, Family Weekly. When major media called, Brunot fielded the calls and was profiled. And Butts achieved minor celebrity as the quirky out-of-work architect who invented the game as a way to scrape together a few bucks during the Depression. He appeared on NBC’s The Today Show, on WOR radio, on the Faye Emerson and Skitch Henderson TV talk show on NBC. When he was included in Current Biography for 1954, Butts was so delighted that he ordered 12 copies.
    Brunot didn’t appreciate, or understand, the depth or the passion Scrabble was inspiring. Disputes arose early over the use of words like MA and PA, and the musical notes RE, MI, FA, LA, and TI. “Brunot’s feeling is that if players want to use such words, they can,” Life wrote. “He personally does not give a damn.” Asked about players frustrated by the slow nature of the game, Brunot said, “Let them go out and buy an egg timer. It doesn’t have to have ’Scrabble’ printed on it.” Approached by publishers to endorse one dictionary or another, Brunot was miffed that Scrabble was being taken so seriously. “It’s only a game,” he said. “It’s something you’re supposed to enjoy.”
    If Butts was hurt by Brunot’s dismissive comments, he didn’t show it. He simply answered every question he received—about where to purchase sets and whether colloquial words were acceptable and what to do if an opponent is stuck with the Q and can’t make a play. And he counted his money.

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Reprinted from Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright©2001 by Stefan Fatsis. All rights reserved.

Copyright 2001 The Pennsylvania Gazette Last modified 8/24/01