Happy Scrabble Day

Today is the day Scrabble's inventor was born, his name was Mr. Butts.  Not really it was!

Alfred M. Butts, was an unemployed architect, when he invented Scrabble during the Depression.  He didn't know what to call it.  He tried Lexiko, then Criss Cross Words.  It really didn't matter because nobody wanted it.  It took 20 years for Scrabble to catch on with the general public.

In 1952, a vacationing Macy's executive saw Scrabble played at a resort, and the world's largest store began carrying it. Orders started pouring in. Thirty-five workers hired to churn out 6,000 sets a week could not meet the demand. Finally the operation was turned over to Selchow & Righter, which had rejected the game years before.

The Scrabble craze led to a deluxe set with revolving turntable, a pocket edition for travelers, a junior version for children, foreign-language versions, even a television program.

I forgot about the TV show.  Do you remember when Chuck Woolery hosted?

And now Scrabble is online and on your phone and there are a whole bunch of new words in the Scrabble dictionary, like hashtag and selfie.

Gamblers play it for money and  there are tournaments all over the world.  Look they even have referees at this one.

As for the inventor, for many years Mr. Butts earned royalties, which he said were about three cents a set. If you sell 100 million sets, (and they did), that's a lot of money, I think. You do the math!

Alfred M. Butts died in 1993 at the age of 93. But his game lives on.