Three shifts at the Scrabble factory: The manager

For 20 years the wooden pieces for every Scrabble set in North America were manufactured in Fairfax, Vermont. This is Part 2 of a three-part series that explores the factory’s history through the stories of the people who shaped its fortunes. Read Part 1 here.

In 1979, Tom Fetters owned a failing hockey stick factory on Pine Street in Burlington, Vermont. He knew when he bought the business that he was taking a risk — they hadn’t been keeping up with their orders — but he was confident he could solve the problem. He had overseen the production of high-end furniture and Gibson’s Les Paul guitars. By comparison hockey sticks were simple: a laminate wood handle, an ash blade, formed to its curve, and the whole stick sealed in fiberglass. He would just organize the factory to be more productive. 

But he had no sooner signed the loan when the company’s largest client, a retail chain, stopped selling sporting goods. Now, with a surplus of hockey sticks and no experience in marketing, Fetters scrambled to survive.  

He packed hockey sticks into his car and drove around to high schools, persuading coaches to buy custom sticks with their teams’ colors. It wasn’t much, but he was able to sell off some of his back inventory. One night in Boston Garden he noticed the Bruins were selling miniature souvenir hockey sticks in their gift shop, and he secured the contract to produce thousands of them for the night Bobby Orr’s number was retired, printed with the 4 on one side and the Bruins’ logo on the other.  

These orders bought Fetters some time, but they weren’t enough. Across Pine Street a company was making broom bristles, and Fetters learned from the sales manager that their customers were having trouble finding wooden components. Along with his miniature hockey sticks, he started supplying the brush blocks for push brooms. 

Then one day the phone rang. The man on the line introduced himself as Frederick Huettner. To this day Fetters remembers the conversation: 

“You don’t know me, and you probably don’t know the name of my company, which is Selchow and Righter,” Huettner said, “but you know the name of our main product. We’re the manufacturers for Scrabble in North America.”  

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If a nation’s economy can be measured by its cultivation of talent, Tom Fetters represents America at its best. He was born on April 22, 1940, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in Pittsfield Village, a planned community of more than 400 single-story apartments built as housing for workers at Detroit’s Willow Run Airport, where Ford produced bomber planes during World War II. At the plant’s peak, in an oft-cited feat of productivity, a finished B-24 Liberator came off the line every 63 minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The grownups in Fetters’ world had defeated the Nazis, and the neighborhood hummed with energy and purpose.  

His father, Howard, was the first in his family to go to college, on a full scholarship, and worked in the ’50s as a civil engineer, designing concrete parking structures. His mother, Adine, worked the third shift as a nurse in the emergency room. They didn’t have much money — when TV arrived, his family was one of the last to buy a set, and he watched through the neighbors’ windows — but his boyhood was idyllic, building forts and playing Little League baseball.   

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The government gave him a fair deal. His grades earned him a ROTC scholarship, and an appointment to the Air Force Academy, but he didn’t pass the pilots’ physical because of his 20/40 distance vision. Instead, just months out of college, the military gave him real responsibility, organizing traffic and service for planes at an Air Force base in Hawaii. Later they asked him to go to Vietnam as a forward air controller, the guy who lies in the mud with the soldiers and calls in air strikes. As a reserve officer he was able to refuse and still have his graduate school paid for under the GI Bill.   

In 1979, when Frederick Huettner called his office on Pine Street, Fetters was ready to take a leap of faith. His country had always invested in his success, and his hard work had always paid off.  

When Fetters picked Huettner up at the airport, Huettner told him that Selchow and Righter had been importing all the wooden pieces for Scrabble from a factory in Germany. The factory’s owner had just sent a curt telegram announcing he had sold out to someone in London, and now Selchow and Righter was seeking a reliable domestic supplier. Vermont had the hard maple required for Scrabble tiles, and Fred Newhall, at Vermont’s Department of Economic Development, had given Fetters’ name among five contacts for companies that might tackle the job. 

After dinner Huettner took a wooden Scrabble rack from his pocket and handed it to Fetters. “Can you make one of these?”   

Fetters studied the rack in his hand. Yes, he said, but he couldn’t do it with the factory he had. There wasn’t the space, and he had none of the machines he would need. 

“That’s OK,” Huettner said. “We’ll put up the capital. If you could set up a factory, and you could calculate the price for this, what would it be?”  

Fetters asked for a few days. He knew he needed a six-headed molder for cutting the racks, and he called around to friends in the business to look into other machines. He already had a good source for the wood, Andy Johnson in Bristol, who was eager to move “number two common” lumber off his lot and would sell it cheap if Fetters would take it green. Fetters would need drying kilns. He sat with a notebook, working out the numbers, calculating the overhead costs, feed rates, every detail.

Finally he called Huettner. “If I had the proper equipment, and the right location and space,” he said, “I could probably make Scrabble racks for a nickel apiece.”  

There was a pause on the phone, then Huettner’s voice. “Mr. Selchow and I will be up to see you.”

At the hockey stick factory, Fetters had been looking for a lifeline, something to string him along. Now he had hooked a whale. 

Finding a location was the easiest part. Fred Newhall suggested a site in the small town of Fairfax, north of Burlington, and the townspeople seized the opportunity.  They voted to approve a measure giving the Scrabble factory a tax break, maintaining the same rate once paid by the abandoned sawmill on the site. The Fairfax post office helped Fetters distribute hundreds of job applications to local families. 

But even as the building was being erected, Fetters wrestled with fundamental design problems. Huettner had used the Scrabble rack to test Fetters on price, but the factory would also need to produce Scrabble tiles.The Germans had never let Selchow and Righter into their facility — no one in the company knew how the tiles were made.  Fetters had to build his operation from scratch.

In the military he had learned to rely on other people. It was a sergeant, lower ranking than Fetters, who taught him how to organize and service planes on the flight line.   At the furniture factory, straight out of graduate school, he had been put in charge of people who had worked there for decades. He had learned to listen. He built the Scrabble factory through a continual process of trial and error, solving problems alongside his workers.

Technical problems ran in his mind at all hours. The pure white sand used in hotel ashtrays turned out to be perfect for tumbling the tiles smooth without changing their color.  Carnauba wax, the same used on M&M’s, gave them the best finish. On the third try, he finally found a way to cut the tiles that was fast enough, “hopper feeding” 22-inch pieces down a chute, where they would hit on a stop and clamp in place while a horizontal saw passed down the row, cutting rough tiles 10 at a time, like slices from a long row of bread loaves. At the factory’s peak, 10 of these machines ran 24 hours a day. One worker sharpened saw blades full time. 

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He was loyal to his employees, but efficiency was his overriding concern. The bottleneck in the process was quality control — too slow, too much labor. For a while he had a dozen workers inspecting the tiles at a glass table, built with a mirror underneath, set at a 45 degree angle, so they could see the backsides of tiles without flipping them over.  It worked, but the workers told Fetters about carpal tunnel issues, and problems with their eyes from shifting focus all day.  

Fetters and his technicians kept tinkering and finally discovered that a Scrabble tile could be reliably flipped over if it dropped the perfect distance from one conveyor belt to another. This was Adam Smith’s “division of labor” in motion, refining processes, replacing human labor with machines. Where 12 workers once inspected the tiles at the glass table, four workers now watched the tiles pass by, first on one side, then on the other. 

Demand soared. Fetters doubled the size of the building, taking down the wall to combine the spaces on a weekend so the workers never missed a shift. For years he employed as many as 150 people, many of them farmers’ wives seeking health insurance for their families. They started at minimum wage, but coming from the farm the work was easy: for people who had never had a break, a paid holiday was unimaginable. Most of the workers stayed on. Their families spent time together.    

Outside the factory, however, the corporate world was changing. Selchow had no heir, and a few years before he died he sold the family business to Coleco, flush with money from the Cabbage Patch Kids craze. But as fast as Coleco expanded, it collapsed.  

In those days Mike Cain, who came to the factory straight from high school in Fairfax, worked in the lumberyard. He loved being outdoors in all seasons, counting flocks of geese in the fall, pulling icicles from his moustache in the winter. He came to know the wood, setting aside the occasional piece of birdseye maple for Tom Fetters, who knew its value for guitar making. But now, in the Coleco era, Cain’s job suddenly felt less secure.  

Truck drivers told the lumberyard workers that they were filling up warehouses with the Scrabble pieces — no one was taking them to be packaged. There were rumors that Tom Fetters had found the Coleco offices empty on his last visit. After almost 10 years at the factory, Cain was making $5.70 an hour. It was more than the minimum wage he started at, $2.90, but when he was offered a few cents more to work as a custodian at the elementary school, he took the job.  

Soon afterward, in July of 1988, Coleco filed for bankruptcy. Fetters thought the end was at hand, but somehow the Fairfax plant was left out of the initial filing — an apparent oversight. Fetters scrambled to work out a deal with Scrabble’s new owner, Milton Bradley. The next years turned out to be the factory’s busiest. He kept chiseling away, making the operation more efficient. He took on new product lines, like Jenga.

Then Milton Bradley ‘s parent corporation, Hasbro, decided to follow its rival Mattel in outsourcing all of its manufacturing to focus on marketing and retail. Scrabble had once been 80% of Selchow and Righter’s business; Hasbro’s bread and butter were toys: G.I. Joe, Transformers, My Little Pony. Scrabble was an afterthought. 

By 1998 Hasbro had closed 50 of its 52 plants in the U.S.  Aside from Fetters’ factory in Fairfax, only Milton Bradley’s plant in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, was still standing, mostly because it produced cardboard products. Puzzles make little sense to ship from China: they’re all volume and no weight.

Everyone in Fairfax knew the end was coming. Fetters cut the factory back from three shifts to two. Finally the day came.  

Fetters called the workers onto the factory floor. They crowded around a large round sorting table. He told them he regretted what he had to say, that they had all done everything that had been asked of them. It was through no fault of their own — it was an economic decision made in Rhode Island, by Hasbro — but they would all be losing their jobs.    

Over the next few weeks the factory slowly closed. First the lumberyard emptied out, and the forklift operators went home. The last loads of maple made their way through the production line, and finally the last tiles were shipped away. 

In the last days Milton Bradley invited the workers to its plant in East Longmeadow for an honorary dinner. Fetters’ chief molder technician, Stephen Bessette, remembers eating in the “Executive Lounge,” with an indoor waterfall.  But once the factory was closed Hasbro also wanted to come to Fairfax and change the locks, out of concern the workers would come back to steal tools. Fetters refused. He persuaded them to keep his maintenance supervisor, Reg Pouliot, on at the facility, to help decommission the machines and watch over the facility until it sold. Nothing was ever stolen.  

Mike Cain, who had left the factory years before, still felt a little bitter when he saw Jay Leno one night, in his monologue, joking about the Fairfax plant closing. Over Leno’s shoulder a picture showed the “notice” the workers had received, written in Scrabble tiles: Y-O-U-R-E  F-I-R-E-D.  

The town of Fairfax struggled to adjust — the plant was its largest employer — but it was already changing, from a rural farm town to a more affluent bedroom community for Burlington. Most of the factory’s workers were able to transition. Some retired. A few went to work at Perrigo’s baby formula factory in Georgia, Vermont. One went to work on a golf course; another took a job with Vermont State Parks.   

Fetters, at 58 years old, was given early retirement from Milton Bradley, but he wasn’t home more than a few days before the phone rang.  

 It was John Lavallee, owner of a machine tool manufacturer in Burlington. He asked if Fetters was available to work for his company. 

“John, why in the hell did you call me?” Fetters remembers saying. “I don’t know you from Adam.”  

“I live in Fairfax,” Lavallee said. “The other night my wife and I went to dinner, and at the table next to us were six of your employees. They had just lost their jobs, and they didn’t have anything but nice things to say about you. I want you to run my factory.” 

Not long afterward, Fetters saw a video of Scrabble tiles being made in China. Today’s Chinese factories are high tech and often automated, but Fetters remembers a worker in the video cutting each tile by hand at what looked like a table saw. The flood of cheap labor had overturned the board game industry, like so many others.  And yet somehow the town of Fairfax — and Fetters and his workers — moved on, survived, and even prospered, just as Scrabble has enjoyed a second heyday, even in the age of the internet.  

As for the factory itself, it stumbled through the next 20 years. A couple of high-end woodworking outfits came and went, then it sat empty for a time. Finally, in 2018, it changed hands again, in a distressed sale. The market had found it another use.  

Dedication: For my father, Nick Heintz

Part 3 will appear Sunday.