Three shifts at the Scrabble factory: The inventor

For 20 years the wooden pieces for every Scrabble set in North America were manufactured in Fairfax, Vermont. This is Part 1 of a three-part series that explores the factory’s history through the stories of the people who shaped its fortunes.

On the morning of March 18, 1985, Alfred Mosher Butts, the inventor of Scrabble, boarded a private plane at the Dutchess County Airport outside of Poughkeepsie, New York, and flew to Burlington, Vermont. He was a month from his 86^th birthday, bald and bespectacled, and mounting a comeback in the board game business.

The plane belonged to Scrabble’s distributor, Selchow and Righter. They had never heard of Alfred Butts until a few years earlier, when, according to his grandnephew Robert Butts, he wrote them a letter. “You may not know who I am,” Robert recalls him writing, “but I invented the game you sell.” Selchow and Righter saw the marketing potential right away. Alfred Butts, with his creation story for Scrabble, as an unemployed architect during the Depression, was promotional gold. The trip to Vermont was part of a deal they made with the old man.

A few minutes from the airport the Vermont countryside opened up into dairy farms and frozen fields. The car passed through the village of Fairfax — old clapboard houses, with the gas station and church for a town of fewer than 2,000 — and soon after, along a flat stretch of pine woods, they turned off through a dirt parking lot and pulled up to a long, low metal building.  

In this unlikely spot, far from any center of commerce or manufacturing, about a hundred Vermonters produced the wooden pieces for every Scrabble set in North America. Butts’ visit came when the plant was near its peak, producing more than a million tiles a day. 

The factory’s manager, Tom Fetters, greeted Butts in the entry. The plan was to walk Butts through the whole manufacturing process, from start to finish. Reporters trailed along as Fetters led him behind the building to the lumberyard, where stacks of maple and beech stretched in rows to a distant tree line. 

A couple of forklifts carried loads across the vast yard. Fetters explained that the lumber arrived green, and each day the oldest stacks, gray from exposure, were loaded into the kilns at the back of the building to finish drying.  

Butts ran his hand over a board. “It looks so rough.”  

Fetters smiled.  “Just wait until you see the finished product.” 

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Butts was eager to learn how Scrabble was made, but he carried another game under his arm. It was in fact called “Alfred’s Other Game,” an elaboration of Scrabble, with more tiles, four boards for simultaneous play, more flexibility in forming words, and the option to play alone.  

He had developed the game a few years earlier, after his wife Nina died. She was older than Alfred, having once been his schoolteacher, and better at Scrabble, he liked to say. She once scored 284 points on a single word: Q-U-I-X-O-T-I-C.

By 1985 Butts had made a number of trips promoting Scrabble, appearing everywhere from Chicago to Long Island. Now Selchow and Righter held up their end of the bargain: “Alfred’s Other Game” arrived in stores for sale.

“If half the people that have a Scrabble set buy a copy,” Butts told a reporter in Fairfax, “it will be a popular game.”

But inside the factory, over the racket of the machines, the reporters mostly just asked him about Scrabble. As he watched the lumber transform — ripped to uniform widths, cut to uniform lengths, fed into machines to cut the tiles — Butts gave them his usual quotes for their stories: 

“I wanted a game for adults.” 

“The only game in those days was anagrams and I thought I could make an improvement …”  

He made it sound simple, but his “invention” had been a yearslong, painstaking process. The breakthrough came reading Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Gold Bug,” in which a coded message about a hidden treasure is deciphered by correlating the frequency of its symbols with the frequency of letters in English prose. The key to Scrabble was the right mix of letters for players to use building words, and he studied the front pages of newspapers until he arrived at the familiar distribution, with six N’s worth a single point, two H’s worth four, and one Z worth 10.

In Fairfax Butts witnessed this idea in its industrial expression: a row of eight machines stamped the blank tiles with their letters and values. Each drum-shaped stamping cylinder had 10 rows of five letters, each a different combination, rotating between strikes to produce 50 letters, and two presses ran in each machine, combining to make the 100 tiles in a Scrabble set. These machines ran around the clock, producing a million tiles a day.

The entire process, now occupying 55,000 square feet in Fairfax, had once taken place in the small living room of Butts’ apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. Out of work in the depths of the Depression, he found another use for his architect’s training and tools. He laid out the grid for the Scrabble board with india ink on shiny, linen-based blueprint paper, drawing the letters in negative — white against a blue background — so the copies would show blue letters against white. He glued the printed letter sheets onto thin plywood, cutting them out with a fine jigsaw. He glued the grids to old checkerboards, and cut the racks from molding he found in a lumberyard. These were the sets he tested out with Nina in the 1930s, working out the kinks in the game.

Butts wasn’t so methodical managing his copyrights. He sold the rights to Scrabble early on, and over the decades since his invention, while he was back at work as an architect, 90 million Scrabble sets had sold. When the reporters in Fairfax asked how much he had profited, he didn’t want to discuss it, but finally he told them: he wasn’t a millionaire, but he had done fine. For a time at least, his royalty for each game sold was a nickel.  

Board games were big business in the 1980s. Selchow and Righter’s blockbuster was Trivial Pursuit: in 1984 alone they sold 20 million copies. When Butts toured their factory in Bay Shore, Long Island, where the pieces from Fairfax were packed with playing boards into boxes for sale, he noticed there was just one packing line for Scrabble while Trivial Pursuit had four. 

Butts’ grandnephew Robert remembers Richard Selchow standing beside Alfred, seeking to reassure the older man. “Trivial Pursuit is going great guns now,” Selchow said, “but the Scrabble line will be going long after Trivial Pursuit is gone.”

Selchow was right, of course, but he was also aware of the creeping pressure from electronic games, and some of the profits from Trivial Pursuit went to prop up Scrabble.  They organized the first official Scrabble tournaments — Tom Fetters, the Fairfax plant’s manager, remembers attending one and marveling that the champion won on a bluff, a fake word. They licensed a Scrabble game show that ran on NBC. The marketing effort ran in many directions: even today one can find Scrabble Junior Cheez-Its in stores.

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The Fairfax factory also produced oversized tiles for a Scrabble kids’ toy, “Scrabble People,” in which letters snapped into flat plastic figurines that could be lined up to form words. On the day Butts visited, Lisa Kuhns was working to sort these larger tiles for shipping. Kuhns was typical of the factory’s workers. She grew up in Fairfax and married straight out of high school. When her father died, she joined her mother, already employed at the factory, and stayed for several years. She was 20 years old when Alfred Butts came to her station that day and took a turn in her place, trying his hand for a moment in a job he had helped to create. 

The oversized tiles gave someone an idea, and photographers started piling them in the corner of the room. They dumped bin after bin, until finally there was a great mound of letters. Then they had Alfred sit on the pile and they poured some more tiles on and around him.  They snapped shots with him grabbing up handfuls of tiles: “A Man of Letters,” as one headline would put it.

In all the Scrabble talk, he had hardly gotten in a word about “Alfred’s Other Game,” and now, sitting in the tiles, he took his copy in hand for a few more photos. Its marketing was less than inspired: the image on the box suggested something closer to the game of Clue. It reminded Alfred’s grandnephew Robert of a George Burns movie. Alfred, in a tuxedo and bowtie, sits in an elegant leather chair, a beautiful woman in a low-cut dress perched on one arm. He believed in his new game, but holding the box that day in Fairfax, sitting atop a pile of Scrabble tiles, he didn’t look so sure of its chances.

By all accounts Alfred Butts was never bitter that he didn’t profit more from Scrabble, and according to his grandnephew Robert he enjoyed the trips he took with Selchow & Righter. But by the end of this March day in Vermont he may have been weary.

The factory’s chief molder technician, Stephen Bessette, was working overtime that afternoon, into the second shift.   He remembers Butts coming back to the factory floor alone, after the media had gone.

Bessette put aside his work and turned to the old man.  “Can I help you, Mr. Butts?” 

“Well, I would just like to look around at my own pace,” Alfred said. “It was a lot of to-do today for nothing.” 

He may have been right, at least as far as “Alfred’s Other Game” was concerned. It never caught on. In a larger sense, though, he’d seen the profits from his creation firsthand, spread to a humble corner of the world. As sometimes happens in Scrabble, when the right players put down the right words in the right order, a single square on the grid will explode with value. So it was in Fairfax, Vermont, for a time.

Dedication: For my father, Nick Heintz

Part 2 will appear tomorrow.