THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (14 page)

But there were signs that the tide might be turning: a small stream of letters coming in to request replacement playing tiles. The chemical husk on each piece somehow turned out to be irresistible to canines, and Scrabble enthusiasts were losing their letters to their pets; one player wrote to suggest that Brunot simply print the letters on dog biscuits and sell them in grocery stores.

In addition, in the spring of 1952, one important buyer made a special unannounced trip to the factory to arrange for shipment of a quantity of Scrabble to his stores. But Brunot, a novice in marketing games, did not heed the storm warnings. In mid-June, he and his wife decided to take a short vacation. When they came back at the end of the week, Brunot anticipated a backlog of about two hundred orders. To his surprise and delight the mail held requisitions for 2500 sets of Scrabble!

The flabbergasted promoter was positive that the deluge of orders was a one-time anomaly. He was wrong. The following week, orders for 3000 more games came in. The demand grew until sales in the third quarter of 1952 reached 107 sets a day, then mounted to 411 a day by year’s end. Suddenly everyone was clamoring for Scrabble: toy stores, department stores, stationery and drug outlets. By the end of the year, Brunot’s firm had moved 58,752 sets, and by 1953 Toy Fair, an additional 84,000 sets were being demanded. In 1954, over 4.5 million games were produced by Production and Marketing Corp.

“It was like pumping them into a bottomless pit,” Brunot recalled. “We had to move into larger facilities near Bethel, Connecticut, and we expanded from three to thirty-four workers on day and night shifts. And still we were 60,000 orders behind!”

The quiet little business in the country was turning into a nightmare for Brunot, and he realized he could not stand the pace of mass production. Once more, the idea of taking Scrabble to a major game manufacturer was considered.

The logical choice for Scrabble’s manufacturer was Sel-chow & Righter, a Bayshore, New York, game producer whose origins dated back to shortly after the Civil War. S&R, manufacturers of the old staple game Parcheesi, had begun on John Street in downtown New York when Albert B. Swift opened a toy and game distributing company with an assistant, John Harris Righter. In 1870, Elisha G. Selchow, formerly in the paper-box industry, purchased Swift’s company and made Righter the business manager. Later, the two became partners.

Selchow & Righter was an especially happy choice for Brunot and Butts for two reasons. First, S&R is one of the last privately held, fiercely independent firms in the toy industry. It is an old-line paternalistic company which really values its employees (many members of its staff have been with S&R for forty to fifty years). Brunot, who always refused to take his business too seriously (“After all, gentlemen,” he would tell his associates, “it’s only a game”), was temperamentally suited to hit it off with the S&R management.

More important, Selchow & Righter was already involved in producing Scrabble boards when Brunot contacted them. Four years earlier, Brunot had realized that having each Scrabble component made by several different suppliers was not very efficient. He had approached S&R, because he’d heard it was reliable, and asked the firm to produce all Scrabble boards for him. When he returned in 1952 to suggest that S&R take on Scrabble marketing responsibilities, it didn’t take much to convince the company, because it already knew exactly how well Scrabble was selling.

The Selchow & Righter sales manager, however, had no idea his firm was making the Scrabble boards. Accustomed to thinking of the game as “the competition,” he was rather startled to learn his company had been associated with Scrabble for four years.

So S&R took on the game, but the demand was so furious that Brunot also continued to manufacture it. (At that time, Selchow & Righter was only on license, and did not receive full manufacturing rights until 1971.) Brunot and S&R labored to meet the demand. Brunot even licensed a close variant, Skip-a-Cross, to Cadaco-Ellis, but the clamor for Scrabble just wouldn’t stop. Industry pundits predicted the bottom would drop out of the market as quickly as any other fad. But they were wrong.

During the worst of the supply lag. Scrabble sets were allocated on a proportional basis over a year in advance of production. Many stores had no hope of stocking the word game for months. Brunot turned out deluxe sets for ten dollars, but they failed to assuage the demand for the inexpensive models.

Scrabble’s popularity knew no bounds. Intellectuals played it in foreign languages. Celebrities in all quarters became addicted to it: Darryl Zanuck, Stefan Schnabel, Dag-mar, Elia Kazan, Bennett Cerf, India’s Prime Minister Nehru, Oscar Hammerstein II. In some cities, it became a new kind of gambling contest. In Hollywood, dirty-word Scrabble was the latest hit, and enthusiasts complained that American swearing is so limited that archaic imprecations such as “zounds,” “slife,” and “sblood” must be permitted.

Accessory-makers began to plague Brunot to license Scrabble-related products such as turntables (so the board always faces the player whose turn it is), letter bags (to save turning all the letters face down before each game), and word books (with lists of unusual and high-score words to use). Eventually, Brunot agreed to put out the vocabulary book, while the turntable and letter bag ideas were incorporated in the deluxe sets. Simplified Scrabble for children and a Braille version of the game were also authorized.

Brunot always nixed the idea of endorsing any one dictionary as
the
authorized Scrabble lexicon. Such an endorsement would have earned him quite a fee, but the proposition never pleased him. “After all, gentlemen, it’s
only
a game!”

Although Selchow & Righter took on the bulk of Scrabble manufacture, the wooden letter tiles are still purchased from Brunot’s source, a German factory called Holzperlen und Spielwarenfabrik, which uses Bavarian maple from the Black Forest to fashion the tiles. Although the firm was originally located near Hitler’s hideaway at Berchtesgaden, Nazi persecution forced the owner to relocate and he now operates in West Germany.

There is a good reason to go all the way to the Black Forest for the wood. Some youngsters and professional gamblers can recognize high-scoring letters by the grain of the wood on backs of the pieces. Black Forest maple, which is unusually durable and has a very tight grain, makes detection more difficult. At the Selchow & Righter factory, the tiles are carefully sorted, and those with too obvious a pattern are discarded. Even so, Scrabble sharps have an uncanny way of committing the slightest variations in the wood to memory. Those afraid of being cheated are urged to use the deluxe sets, with letters made of plastic.

Selchow & Righter and James Brunot kept trying to catch up with the demand for their product, but it was an uphill struggle. As if the basic problems of mass production weren’t enough, a lumber strike, followed by a trucking strike, held up production for weeks.

And still the orders poured in, driving both firms nearly to distraction. Eventually, foreign editions were licensed, and the game spread to Australia, England, South Africa, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Holland, and Venezuela. Sets with Arabic and Japanese characters were produced. Knockoffs and imitative word games were cranked out by the competition. S&R itself added a Commuter Scrabble with magnetized pieces and playing board to the line and came up with Scrabble Crossword Cubes, RSVP (a completely different way of competing in a Scrabble mode), and, more recently, RPM, a suspense word game in which the letter pools are mounted on a turntable which revolves, giving players limited time to pick up and play letters.

Today, Scrabble is still the top-selling word game in the country and spearheads the growing interest in adult games. But the reason it took off so explosively after four unspectacular years remains a mystery. Neither Butts, Brunot, nor S&R officials have the answer, though there has been considerable speculation.

Word of mouth is evidently at the root of Scrabble’s success, but how it took hold is unknown. One theory is that one of the owners of Macy’s played it in the summer of 1952, enjoyed it, and talked it up to his friends. Returning to work, he told his toy department to send up a few sets. When he learned they didn’t stock it, according to this story, there was a corporate explosion.

Brunot himself speculates that the early buyers and players of Scrabble were chiefly well-to-do intellectuals articulate enough to talk up the game. In addition, many of them spent their summers at various resorts throughout the United States where they would play Scrabble. At the end of the summer of 1952, Brunot theorized, other summer colonists may have returned home and tried to buy Scrabble at their local stores, only to be turned down. Then, perhaps, retailers tried to “stock up.”

The timing of this theory makes sense, since it was in the early fall of the year that the boom really was felt. Yet why summer of 1952 should have established Scrabble rather than the previous year’s season is a puzzle that no one can satisfactorily solve.

But there is little mystery about Scrabble’s continued appeal. Despite its relative slowness—some players use egg timers to limit each move—it is a game of constant challenge, forcing participants to study and restudy the layout on the board. Challenging of unfamiliar words is common in skilled Scrabble matches, and hard-core addicts keep a dictionary handy. The biggest fanatics even buy massive unabridged lexicons in order to have the last word on their opponents. There is no room in a serious Scrabble competition for lazy or ill-considered plays, yet, at the same time, mere intellec-tualization does not decide things. The pick of the letters is up to chance, so an element of luck counterbalances skill. It is this balance between the two that makes Scrabble’s formula especially successful.

A cryptographer once said Scrabble’s appeal lay in its combination of aspects of anagrams, dominoes, and crosswords. But more important, it calls on the player’s powers as a puzzle-maker, rather than a solver.

A typical Scrabble game will involve a combined score of anywhere from four hundred to six hundred points, depending on the cleverness of the participants. The highest score on record is just under fifteen hundred points, racked up by two elderly New Jersey women. Butts himself and the Brunots have been known to score between six hundred and eight hundred points at a sitting. “My wife,” Butts once said, “knows more words than I, but my architectural training helps me to plan a little better.”

With Selchow & Righter now in possession of the copyrights and U.S. rights to Scrabble, Butts and Brunot have decided to take it easy. Butts, who spends his leisure time painting in watercolors, indulging in amateur photography, and constructing fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzles (he cuts them so the color pattern is little help in solving them), today has retired comfortably on his Scrabble royalties. And Brunot is at last able to relax in the pastoral calm that he dreamed of for so many years.

“Once,” said Butts, “I had an idea for another game, but Jim Brunot talked me out of it. It was a kind of variation on dominoes, but Jim said he didn’t think we’d ever have another game like Scrabble. And you know? I think he’s right.”

Educational toys are nothing new in the trade. For years, Playskool, Creative Playthings, Fisher-Price, Kusan, H-G Toys, and other companies have been turning out preschool products with “mind-expanding” and physical coordination aspects. In addition, a small but growing number of games— Scrabble, Gettysburg, WFF ’N Proof, etc.—have emphasized the thinking side of skillful play.

But a special brand of didacticism is now being touted in the name of education. Reminiscent of the moralistic sermons packed with certain toys and games during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this particular philosophy holds that playthings must first and foremost be instructive in developing the child’s reflexes and imagination and providing him with “value packages” of information on numbers, objects, colors, shapes, etc.

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with these aims. But in the rush to satisfy consumers, a few toymakers have developed lines of impressive-looking toys with the eye of the parent in mind. Usually packing their products with lengthy booklets that rehash Dr. Spock, these manufacturers often search far and wide for the endorsements of psychologists, physicians, sociologists, and educational authorities. The wood mystique, part of the back-to-nature, get-away-from-cheap-plastic syndrome, is often linked with these well-sanded, shellac-coated hand-crafted
objets.

There is only one drawback to many of these handsome and expensive toys: children find them deadly dull to play with.

It is a pity that genuinely concerned parents and teachers are often hoodwinked by the overblown copy that accompanies such merchandise, but the truth is that a toy must first be enjoyable before it can teach a child anything. It seems to be ingrained in our national character that something must instruct or ennoble before it gains worth (“the
Sesame Street
syndrome,” as Remco chairman Saul Robbins calls it). Which brings us back to our original dictionary definition of a toy as an instrument of frivolity and triviality.

It must be stressed that there are a number of new educational playthings which, though they capitalize on the new didactic cliche, have genuine value as toys. For instance, Child Guidance’s Keys of Learning is a set of varishaped blocks which comes with a booklet explaining the value of the toy in terms of shape recognition, pattern building, direction discovery, and matching of color and direction. Another item in the Child Guidance line is a set of two cords and thirty-six big wooden beads that, according to its booklet, enable the child to “practice eye-hand coordination and flearn] about shape, color, and number.”

The basic concepts of these toys are sound, and anyone who has a preschool child will see the play value of a set of large beads or odd-shaped blocks. But the thing to note is that these toys—despite the puffed-up copy, which, I suppose, makes the parent feel virtuous for buying the item—are just variations on standard playthings. They would be worthwhile, with or without the “educational toy” label. But consumer advocates have evidently made enough parents feel guilty about their toy-shopping habits that it has become good business to attach the “educational” label whenever possible.